About
Highlights:
Kalman Weiser discusses the history of the YIVO Institute, founded in Vilna in 1925, and his new book Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America: The YIVO Institute at 100 (Wayne State University Press, 2026). Professor Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto. He is also the author of Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland, which won a Canadian Jewish Book Award. The interviewer, Sholem Beinfeld, is co-editor-in-chief of the Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (Indiana University Press, 2013) and Professor of History, Emeritus, at Washington University in St. Louis. He translated The Rudashevski Diary from Yiddish into English. The translation was published as the November 2024 issue of The Jewish Quarterly. Professors Weiser and Beinfeld spoke on Zoom on October 19, 2026, from their homes in Toronto and Cambridge, MA, respectively.
Related links:
Kalman Weiser’s faculty page at York University
Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America at Wayne State University Press
YIVO Institute website
Music:
Instrumental music: Dem Helfands Tants, from Jeff Warschauer’s CD The Singing Waltz.
Air date: October 28, 2026