The program in Jewish studies at Smith College explores the history, literature, arts, politics, philosophy, culture, religion and languages of the Jewish people from its origins in ancient Israel ...

Evolution is a process that can take many millennia, if not longer. For a scholarly organization like the Yiddish archive and cultural institution YIVO, the process only took a century. YIVO (the ...

The closure, which follows semester after years of financial troubles, won’t affect the Yiddish Book Center, which operates ...

Journalists I know joke that the only Jewish historian they ever need to call is Jonathan Sarna. Jews and the Civil War? Sarna knows where the bodies are buried. Need a quote about Jews and bagels?

When Jewish prisoners were interned during the Holocaust, the Yiddish language went through a metamorphosis — changing and expanding to include new words about their brutal everyday existence. What ...

"Yiddish: A Nation of Words" (Steerforth, 303 pages, $26) by Miriam Weinstein. For all its warmth and joy, and now nostalgia, Yiddish remains a fairly curious language. Its words are culled from a ...

A highly abridged monthly version of Dust & Stars.

When Ben Kaplan and Alex Weiser started working at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, they heard one of its essential legends in the form of a joke. The 100-year-old library and archive, whose ...

In the tsunami of cuts the federal government has been making to everything from food banks to public health, it may be tough to find time to mourn the humanities. But if you have ever searched for ...