This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. About two years ago Gella Fishman, the Yiddish teacher and archivist who passed away last month, called me one evening and asked indignantly: “How could it be that YIVO is now sending all its letters out without a single word in Yiddish?” Although I had been receiving…
Thanks to a million dollar grant from the Leon Levy Foundation, the Brooklyn Academy of Music has been able to digitize their archive. According to the new archive website “The Archives contain approximately 3,000 linear feet of materials dating from 1857 to the present, including newspaper clippings, photographs, books, playbills, promotional material, video, architectural plans,…
First published in the Forverts on May 8, 1923 To mark this publication’s 120th anniversary, The Forward hunted through its archives for journalistic treasures. Here we present excerpts of an interview with W.E.B. Du Bois, the sociologist, writer and co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) first published in 1923….
Whether you're looking for information Yiddish or English, here's what the Forward archive can help with
Perhaps this is another old saw, like the one about Jews not drinking alcohol. But when Forward archivist Chana Pollack sent me the article below, which appeared in an English supplement to the Jewish Daily Forward in 1924, I was intrigued. I believe 1924 was the year my grandmother and her family arrived in New…
Lou Reed was many things – loud, transgressive, mean (at least, on record), brash, innovative. One thing he was not, however, was quiet (though he had his moments). That’s why the recent announcement that Reed’s archives (previously held by Artist and Reed’s Widow, Laurie Anderson) will be housed in the New York Public Library is, in…
Yesterday, we wrote about the incredible resource that is ubu.com – an internet archive of all things avant-garde. It’s a tremendous place to get lost, but, although it may be the finest, there are other such archival rabbit-holes on the internet (isn’t the entire internet really just one archival rabbit hole anyways?). There’s Monoskop, Memory of…
You can see Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” as a Broadway musical, as a film, and now, as a stop-motion gif. Well, sort of. The New York Public Library (NYPL) just digitized over 1300 photographs of the original production of “West Side Story” in 1957. The photographs, taken by Martha Swope, Friedman Abeles, Florence Vandamm,…
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