15 May 2025

Lecture by William Pimlott „Yiddish Science Across the World: YIVO’s foreign branches, 1925-1994”

The Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania invites you to a lecture „Yiddish Science Across the World: YIVO’s foreign branches, 1925-1994” by Dr. William Pimlott. This event is dedicated in celebration of the 100th anniversary of YIVO – the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut – which was founded in Vilnius in 1925.

William Pimlott is the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Associate at the NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Dr Pimlott is a historian whose work explores the development of modern Jewish politics and culture within Britain and across the world in the period of mass Jewish migration, particularly as expressed in the new Yiddish institutions of the late 19th and 20th centuries. He recently completed his PhD on the Yiddish press in Britain, 1896-1910, at UCL, and has subsequently held two research fellowships at the University of London: at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, respectively. 

Dr Pimlott has published articles on Yiddish history-making in Britain,  on the South African Yiddish press and Yiddish art history in Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Historical Studies and Shofar, and has also written for the London Review of Books, Tribune and Jewish Currents.  Dr Pimlott will also be the Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow at the YIVO institute New York (2024-2025), where he will further develop his scholarship on global Yiddish politics and culture.

Yiddish Science Across the World: YIVO’s foreign branches, 1925-1994

“Hoops are rolling, one after the other,

From the East, from the North, from the South,

They all come together in YIVO

In the treasury of books and sforim [holy books].”

Daniel Charney, “Hoops are Rolling” (Also known as the “YIVO March”). 

YIVO was the central institution of scholarship in Yiddish, founded in Vilna (Vilnius) in 1925 and then due to Nazi terror headquartered in New York from 1940 – it was an archive, a university and a museum. From its inception it was a global organisation. Yiddish speaking communities, inspired by the diaspora nationalism and Yiddishism of YIVO, created local branches across the world, what came to be known as YIVO’s foreign sections. The “YIVO March”, cited above, rang out in Havana, Cuba, in 1953, for example; YIVO branches flourished across North and South America, in South Africa and even in Australia and China. During and after the Holocaust these branches, swelled by recent refugees from Nazism, felt a historic duty to preserve a Yiddish culture that had been greatly damaged and to preserve YIVO’s mission now that it was in mortal danger in Eastern Europe. To do so they turned to the methods of scholarship that YIVO had pioneered: surveys, autobiography competitions, material collection and Yiddish historical writing and exhibition curation. These foreign sections wrote new histories of immigration and the ongoing adaptation of Yiddish culture across the world, as well as commemorating the victims of Nazism. This lecture tells the story of how YIVO became a global institution, and the new and different stories of 20th Century Jewish culture that it tells.

Briefly about the event

Date

May 28th, 2025

Time

6 PM

Place

National Library’s Statehood Space, 2nd floor

Attendance

free

Duration

1,5 hours

Important

the event may be photographed and / or filmed
the event will be held in English

More information

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