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YIVO Archives and Library, "100 Objects from the Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research" (YIVO, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Stephanie Halpern
Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [00:08]
Eddie Portnoy
Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts.
- [00:14]
Stephanie Halpern
Oh, my gosh, they're so fast.
- [00:16]
Eddie Portnoy
And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw.
- [00:20]
Stephanie Halpern
The discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry.
- [00:24]
Eddie Portnoy
Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [00:28]
Matthew Miller
1-800-Contacts.
- [00:31]
Eddie Portnoy
This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and old number seven are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.
- [00:58]
And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating.
- [01:10]
Matthew Miller
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [01:13]
Eddie Portnoy
Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings Fairy. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:31]
Matthew Miller
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books and Jewish Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Matthew Miller, the host of the channel. Today, we'll be speaking to Stephanie Halpern and Eddie Portnoy about The new book, 100 Objects from the Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Published in 2025. This gorgeously illustrated coffee table book highlights unique manuscripts, photographs, objects and other ephemera with accompanying essays by 57 scholars. The book traces Yivo's role in documenting key moments in modern Jewish history and culture through its 100 years of collecting. Stefan and Eddie, welcome to the show.
- [02:02]
Stephanie Halpern
Thanks for having us.
- [02:03]
Matthew Miller
Of course. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about yourselves.
- [02:07]
Stephanie Halpern
I am the Director of Collections here at yivo, which means that I am in charge of taking care of the 24 million documents, objects, photographs, sound recordings, and 400,000 volumes of books that we have here. I've been at Yivo for about 10 years and came to YIVO years before that as a researcher.
- [02:28]
Eddie Portnoy
And I am evo's academic advisor, which means I handle our fellowship program. And I'm also the director of Exhibitions, which means I curate the exhibitions here. And I've been at YIVO for 13 years, since my Bar Mitzvah year. At Yivo, there will be apparently no celebration, but such is life.
- [02:52]
Matthew Miller
Mazel tov on bar Mitzvah. Thank you. It's beautiful here. So why don't I get to the book? First of all, it's difficult because this is an audio podcast, so people can't see it, but the book is very nicely done. Very heavy. I could use that as a weight or as a doorstep. I always use it as a doorstep. That's not nice.
- [03:09]
Eddie Portnoy
I always judge my books by weight.
- [03:11]
Matthew Miller
Yeah, it's a good paper. So how did this book come about? Whose idea was it? What was the impetus for putting this book together?
- [03:20]
Stephanie Halpern
Well, I've been thinking about ways that we can bring our collection to a broader audience for a long time, and we came up with the idea of 100 objects years ago, and we didn't know really at the time what form it would take. We thought, oh, maybe it'd be a class or a series of videos. But as the 100th anniversary approached, which we are in now, we felt that we were really comfortable in the book world, and it made sense to highlight these objects, you know, through a book and through. Through having these very beautiful photographs accompanied by short essays by the scholars who have made meaning of our collections.
- [04:02]
Matthew Miller
Very nice. And. And so it's. It's. It's a hundred objects, but of course, EVO has many more than a hundred objects. How was it decided? And who decided which objects made the cut and which ones did not?
- [04:12]
Eddie Portnoy
Well, we. We had a group of us who work at evo, you know, consider what we have. And obviously, Stephanie knows the collection better than anyone else, but we all have our interests and the things that we. We like about the collection. And so we. We all made. I think there were four or five of us, made lists of things that we thought might be included, and we all came together and, you know, picked apart each other's lists. You said yay or nay to. To whatever. And actually, I. I think that that was probably the most difficult aspect of. Of deciding what would go into the book, because, you know, Evo has, as Stephanie said, something like 24 million documents and artifacts. And that's a. That's quite a lot. And to, you know, just use aund of that is. Is pretty minimal. And to also try to, you know, create something representative of what Yivo's collections include and what they mean, it makes that even more difficult. But. But I Think we managed to do a pretty good job. You know, the book has 10. 10 different sections all relating to different aspects of. Of Jewish life. And, you know, that we, we chose representative objects and documents for each one.
- [05:35]
Stephanie Halpern
Yeah. And the section sort of came about, you know, we had these hundreds of objects on a list and we said, we can't just throw a hundred objects in a book with no rhyme or reason. And so the sections kind of, kind of came about organically. And we thought at first, oh, they're going to be 10 big moments of Jewish history and culture. And we realized as we were tweaking the list that if we did it in the right way, we could really tell the history of Yivos collecting initiatives. So each of these 10 categories really aligns with, with active collecting that Yivo did over the past 100 years.
- [06:10]
Matthew Miller
Beautiful. And of course, we'll get into the actual objects that did make the cut. Were there any ones that you would like to discuss which were, you know, maybe 101 or somewhere that. But it didn't quite make the list. And anything to highlight there, I have to.
- [06:23]
Eddie Portnoy
I mean, you know, look, I mean, one of my favorite things in evo's collection is its periodicals collection. And there are periodicals that represent every aspect of Jewish life. Occupational periodicals, theater periodicals, humor periodicals.
- [06:44]
You know, for every. There are periodicals for every single occupation, from hat makers to landlords to, you know, butchers and, you know, farmers. It's, it's, it's a whole, you know, that, that one aspect, just periodicals, is a whole universe. And, you know, there's really a lot in that that I, I would have liked to have included. But, you know, you, you, you have to fight with other people to, to, to, to get what you want. And, you know, maybe there are a couple or. There's one.
- [07:20]
Stephanie Halpern
Yeah. And I think actually an object I don't even know if I made on the list, but now in retrospect, I wish it had is an outfit that, you know, a boy wore for his bris that we have in the collection. It's kind of unique and, you know, could have fit really nicely in the, in the beliefs and customs section. But, you know, that's for the next book.
- [07:44]
Matthew Miller
Yeah, that's for the next. The 200 year edition. We'll see it there.
- [07:49]
Eddie Portnoy
Not sure we'll be around.
- [07:51]
Matthew Miller
Stephanie, at the beginning of the book, there's a picture of the archives, I should say one summer years back, I worked a bit in the Evil Archive. So it was very nice, nice to see this picture. And it brought Me back a little bit. I wonder if we can discuss before we get into specific objects and some of the sections, what was the process like to actually do the photographing? So you have different items in different places. How do you. What's the sort of the technology, the process? How do you go from object to a picture in a book?
- [08:20]
Stephanie Halpern
Well, we did, we did all of this in house.
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So we worked with our very, very talented graphic designer, Alex Brandwein, who did the entire lay of the book and took most of the photos. Some of the photos were taken in our in house digital lab, which we have here, and we photographed most of the objects in a light box. It's actually, you know, it was a pretty low tech way for us to do this and, you know, it was important for us to really let the object speak for itself. And so to have, you know, sort of these full page spreads of these, of these materials. And Alex Brandwein took the photos and, you know, and laid them out and everything is, you know, was only pretty minimally photoshopped. And, you know, it's. We thought it was important to have a really good representation of the object. So if something's ripped or if there's an edge missing or if something has, you know, some, some schmutz on it, we wanted to leave that. Right. Because it, it gives you sort of this tactile feel, you know, gives the book this feel as if you really encountering the object in real life.
- [09:28]
Eddie Portnoy
Yeah. And I mean, also, you know, that aspect of it, you know, is indicative of the fact that, you know, these objects had lives of their own. You know, some of them were buried in the vilna ghetto. You know, you have, you know, you know, each object existed in its own world before it got to Evo. And so every little, you know, paper fold, every stamp in a book, you know, every, you know, piece of food in a Haggadah or whatever, you know, whatever document is, is part of the life of that, of that artifact. And we, you know, we, we maintain that as part of the, you know, the conservation, maybe not the food aspect, but we, we maintain that as part of the conservation of the, of. Of. Of the artifacts.
- [10:12]
Stephanie Halpern
Yeah, and, and the artifacts are also still used. Right. We bring all of these materials to the reading room for researchers to look at and interact with. And so, you know, what Eddie said is true. Like, we want to make sure that everyone knows that these objects are alive.
- [10:30]
Matthew Miller
And I'd say as well, one of the things that was going on when I was at Evo is there's a digitalization process and project going on. To what degree does this relate to it? To what degree? 1 see these objects in digital form. What's the connection there?
- [10:45]
Stephanie Halpern
Yeah, so Yivo, for the past 10 years or so has been engaged in a series of large scale digitization projects. The first was the Ed Blank Yivo Vilna Online Collections project, which reunited the 1 million materials that we have here that had been looted by the Nazis, recovered after the war and restituted in 1947, and about a half a million pages of documents that were found after the fall of the Soviet Union, still in Lithuania. And after that, we digitized Holocaust collections and we're now digitizing our Jewish, labor and political archives. It's about a three and a half million page project. So we have about five and a half million pages digitized at this point, and by 2030 we'll have about nine million digitized. And so some of those materials are represented in this book and you can, you know, you can go see them online within the context of their, of their wider collection and some aren't and, you know, they'll hopefully be digitized in the next 10, 15, 20 years.
- [11:52]
Matthew Miller
Very nice. We mentioned briefly that the book is organized by different sections. I'll just say them quickly. We won't necessarily get into all of them, but we've got, of course, introduction, then there's beliefs and customs, there's a history section, there's the written word, performing arts, visual arts, labor, youth, the Holocaust and its aftermath, Immigration, evil history, and then acknowledgements and et cetera. I want to maybe dig in a little bit and go into some of these sections. Maybe best if we can start with some of your favorites. There's something that you wrote, Eddie, or something Stephanie, you want to highlight just to go into some, to make sure we've got those ones. And then we can go into different sections as we, as we progress the conversation.
- [12:29]
Eddie Portnoy
I mean, I could talk a bit about Yossel Cutler's puppets, which, you know, those are somewhat unusual. I mean, obviously we can't see them, but they're, they're, they're somewhat unusual. Looking at their three puppets, two of which are puppets of Jews. One is, another is of a sort of a Russian peasant. And they're all caricatures. Yossel Kudler himself was a cartoonist and, you know, frequently did caricatures. So the puppets look like that as well. And they were part of a puppet troupe that he.
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Founded together with the artist Zuni Maud. And it was created in 1925 in New York, it was enormously popular. They did a lot of work, folkloric work, and then it quickly went into politics and it became the sort of left wing political puppet theater. And, and they tried, they went to Poland, they went to the Soviet Union. You know, one of the funny reviews that they got in Poland was that, you know, these, these, these puppets are so Jewish. These, they're like the most Jewish puppets I've ever seen. Every crech that comes out of them, you know, comes from an authentic Jewish source. And so, you know, we, you know, typically you don't find things like this in Jewish institutions, but because Yivo collects everything, we, we wound up with these, with these really fascinating looking puppets. And, you know, one of, I guess my. And your misfortune is that I could talk about these all day, so I'll stop. But that's, that's one of the objects that I was, you know, sort of insisted be in the book, you know, one, because they're, they're, you know, it was sort of a fascinating historical phenomenon, the first Yiddish puppet theater in America. And also.
- [14:30]
Their actual artistic value, they're really unique looking artifacts.
- [14:36]
Stephanie Halpern
Yeah. And I'll just add, for anyone who is in New York or will be coming to New York in the next month, we have these puppets on display as part of our centennial exhibition. And they are very fragile. And I keep saying it's the last time we'll be taking them out for just right.
- [14:58]
Eddie Portnoy
Maybe your last chance to see them. So if you are in New York, come to the Evo and have a look.
- [15:05]
Stephanie Halpern
Yeah, I'll just talk about one also strange object we have that appears in the book in the beliefs and customs section. So that section sort of follows Yivo's ethnographic collecting that was done as, as in its earliest years. Yivo really gathered tens of thousands of pieces of folklore and folk medicine and folk music through a network of volunteer collectors, Zamlers in Yiddish, who went out armed with questionnaires, asking what to do in Pesach, what do you do in Purim, you know, what lies and.
- [15:46]
Do, you know, what, you know, folk tales, you know, can you tell us? And they hand wrote all of these.
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The Zommlers handwrote all of the answers. But you've encouraged, you know, collectors to look in places where folk life, you know, was alive. So in the kitchen, in the school, and in the shul. And so we have in our collection something called bankas. They're these little.
- [16:15]
Glass, you know, sort of bulbs. Bulbs, yeah. And they're, they're used for, for cupping, you know, and, and it's a pot was, it was a popular form of folk medicine. Right. The idea is you heat the. Heat the, the, the, the, the, the cup up and you stick it on your skin and it's meant to like, suck out the talking toxins. And it's, it's popular now for those who, I don't know, Michael Phelps in the Olympics had lots of marks from cupping glasses. Anyway, we have, I don't know, half a dozen, a dozen sets, something like that in the archives. And the one that's featured in the book is my favorite because the bonkers. The set is probably from the turn of the century, but some of them are wrapped in newspaper from the 1960s. And so this is really. Which is when we would have received the, you know, received the donation.
- [17:12]
Matthew Miller
So very interesting.
- [17:16]
Stephanie Halpern
At New Balance, we believe if you.
- [17:18]
Eddie Portnoy
Run, you're a runner.
- [17:24]
Stephanie Halpern
However you choose to do it.
- [17:28]
Eddie Portnoy
Because when you're not worried about doing.
- [17:30]
Stephanie Halpern
Things the right way.
- [17:33]
You'Re free to, to discover your way. And that's what running is all about.
- [17:39]
Eddie Portnoy
Run your way.
- [17:40]
Stephanie Halpern
@Newbalance.Com Running.
- [17:44]
Eddie Portnoy
This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan.
- [17:47]
Stephanie Halpern
Real United Airlines customers.
- [17:49]
Eddie Portnoy
We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet captain Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat.
- [17:57]
Matthew Miller
I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
- [18:02]
Eddie Portnoy
That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future.
- [18:07]
Stephanie Halpern
It felt like I was the captain.
- [18:09]
Eddie Portnoy
Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.
- [18:12]
Matthew Miller
That's how good leads the way.
- [18:14]
Stephanie Halpern
Hablas espanol spries to droi. If you used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation based techniques teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com Spotify spelled B-A B-B-E-L.com Spotify rules and restrictions may apply.
- [18:44]
Matthew Miller
I think maybe this should have or could have been a question at the beginning. But as we're speaking about different puppets and cups, we mentioned some different books and fragments. What exactly? How are we Defining an object here, because it could be, of course, it could be one book, could be one fragment, it could be a collection of books. What exactly is an object when we're thinking about this book and how objects were included in it?
- [19:03]
Eddie Portnoy
I mean, you know, for the purposes of the book of the entries, you know, an object, you know, an quote unquote object could be, you know, multiple things. For instance, the Puppets is three.
- [19:16]
You.
- [19:16]
Stephanie Halpern
Know, to say it's a set.
- [19:18]
Eddie Portnoy
Yeah, it's a set. Okay. A set. I think we called it a trio.
- [19:21]
Stephanie Halpern
Yeah.
- [19:23]
Eddie Portnoy
You know, you have other things like the Rashi manuscript, which is a single page of, of manuscript, page Rashi Bloss on near meahu from the 14th century that was bound in some, you know, in, in some other book. And that's how it was discovered. But that's, you know, a single object, a photograph, objects, you know, single document.
- [19:48]
Stephanie Halpern
Yeah, it's wide. It's wide. A book is object. You know, we. Basically, anything was, was fair game except for recorded sound. But we do have, you know, a reel, a reel to reel tape, you know, as, as sort of the, the. As an object.
- [20:09]
Eddie Portnoy
Right, right. Just to, you know, you know, anything.
- [20:12]
Stephanie Halpern
You can touch and, and pick up and, you know.
- [20:15]
Matthew Miller
Right.
- [20:15]
Eddie Portnoy
I mean, Evo has a huge sound archive. But, you know, unfortunately, we couldn't include the actual sound in the book. I guess we could have had QR codes.
- [20:25]
Stephanie Halpern
QR code. That's, that's for, you know, that's for a down the line book or the, the anniversary of the founding of the sound archives. We'll. Okay, we'll work on that. Yeah, yeah.
- [20:35]
Matthew Miller
As we're thinking about the process of finding the right objects, was there anything that was surprising? Anything as you started to dig in to understand that that really stood out to be a great discovery?
- [20:47]
Eddie Portnoy
I mean, I would say on the face of that question, no, because we're all familiar with this. We work with these materials all the time. So, you know, occasionally something will pop up in the archives that, you know, is interesting and new and surprising. Like the one example I'll give is. And it didn't come up for this book, but we did include it in. The book is Chaim Grata's typewriter. So Chaim Grata was a very well known Yiddish writer from Vilna. He just had his most recent book published, Sons and Daughters, that just came out. And when I was doing an exhibit about five years ago on Yiddish typewriters and typewriting typewritten manuscripts, I asked the woman who was cataloging the Grata archive, which was at the time being cataloged. If I could have a. The first page of Tsemach Atlas, which was one of Grata's books, for the exhibit. And she said yes, and gave it to me. And she said, well, you know, Chaim Grata had. Had. We have his typewriters as well. And I had no idea because they weren't in the stacks with the rest of the Yiddish typewriters that we have, which are all in the same place in the stacks. So she brought me up to the Grata archive, showed me this shelf that had this big plastic bag on it, this black plastic, I guess, trash bag. And inside of it was a faux leather case with a typewriter in it. We popped it open, and this was probably the first time it had been opened since he died. And in it was a. An unfinished typewritten page with one sentence in Yiddish on it. And I can only imagine that this was the last sentence he ever wrote. And I don't know if he died while he. You know, when he wrote it, I don't know if he got up. And who knows? But it was. It's this. It's just one sentence on a page. It was still in the typewriter. And I thought, wow, this is really kind of an amazing thing. We're gonna have to leave this as it is. And so we left the page in the carriage of the typewriter, and. And that's how it appears in the book. It's currently on display with the rest of the centennial exhibit materials. And you can. You can see that if you. If you come to Yivo before the end of the year.
- [23:14]
Stephanie Halpern
And I'll just add, you know, I think that part of what was surprising to us as we were negotiating where the objects could fit, and. And that will also be surprising for readers is that there. There are objects you think belong in a certain category, but they actually appear somewhere else. And, you know, it sort of shows how these objects can tell multiple stories.
- [23:39]
And so just as an example, we have this beautiful sort of tray that's made out of butterfly wings. And you would think that something like that might appear in, like, the art section, but we placed it in the written word section, and it. It had been donated to us by, you know, by a longtime board member and Yiddish activists and good friend of Yivo, who said that it was made by. It was made by the writer. Hey, Levick. She. You know, and so we. While he was convalescing in a Denver sanatorium, he had tuberculosis. And so we asked a scholar who works on this to write about it. And through her research, she came to realize that most likely Levig didn't make this tray. Right. And so this is the story that had always been attached to it, because the sanatorium, the records indicate no kind of butterfly making tray activity. You know, that happened while Levick was there. And the butterfly wings themselves are from South America. And so the tray probably was purchased by him while he was on a tour. And so that was to change the narrative of an object that I had loved for so long, I think was very surprising. And you'll find a lot of these things throughout the book. Interesting provenance and in a category you might not expect.
- [25:14]
Eddie Portnoy
Also in the book is the same writer. Hey, Levi. We have his death mask, which is a pla. Is a plaster mask that was made after his death, which seems really not to be a very Jewish thing to do, but we have it and it's really kind of an unusual and odd object to. To have in a collection.
- [25:38]
Matthew Miller
One of the other interesting objects want to highlight that you wrote about, Eddie, is the Hanukkah bong. I know you've done work and exhibitions on marijuana within the Jewish thought and et cetera. I think that was really an interesting one because it's putting together things that one. I mean, fire, of course, is a common thread between. Between these two things, but one wouldn't necessarily make that connection. What is that object and what can you tell us about it?
- [26:00]
Eddie Portnoy
Right, so this object is a. It's called a menorah bong. It's not actually a menorah, but it is a. It is a. It's actually a beautifully rendered.
- [26:14]
Like, piece of glass art with eight bowls, you know, for the eight days of Hanukkah and a space for a shamus.
- [26:24]
Which is actually for a candle. And it is a functional bong to smoke cannabis out of. I saw this in, I want to say 2018, 2019, and I thought this is really an incredible object. I would bet that Jewish institutions aren't collecting things like this. And since I thought Yivo, you know, has been collecting odd and unusual artifacts from Jewish life for its entire existence, that this could easily fit in into Yivo's collections. And so I contacted the company that makes it there, called Grav Gr A V. And they, you know, typically they make. They're a bong company. They make pipes, they make all sorts of smoking paraphernalia for. For cannabis. And it turned out that their owner happens to be Jewish, and he asked one of his glass blowers to make a glass menorah for his family. And, you know, I guess along the way, what happened was that, you know, because apparently everyone there smoking cannabis, they said, oh, we should make a menorah bong. And so they did, and it went through a variety of iterations, and then they started to sell it. And, you know, I don't know how popular it is. It's. I would say it's not the most functional thing, but it's. It's beautiful to look at. It's a very unusual Jewish artifact. And I will say that initially I didn't want to include it in the book because I didn't feel. My initial reaction was that I didn't feel that it, you know, fit into.
- [28:11]
You know, sort of. It wasn't very representative, let's say, of the greater mass of evo's collections. But I eventually changed my mind, or I was sort of forced to change my mind.
- [28:26]
Because the reality is that it is, it does fit in to the framework of evo's collecting policies, because anything that is Jewish is, you know, within YIVO's mandate. And since this object, you know, is clearly of, you know, a menorah bong is very Jewish object, I don't know who else would use or want such a thing. You know, that's why we. That. That's why we decided to. To include it.
- [28:58]
And it, you know, it's also indicative of the fact that, you know, Yivo continues to collect, and that is also part of our mandate that we, you know, we get things in every week.
- [29:10]
It's, you know, it's really an ongoing process. So. So that. So in that respect, I think it was useful to. To include.
- [29:18]
Stephanie Halpern
Yeah. And I think also it. It fits into the whole framework of using traditional Jewish life and Jewish culture in the creation of something new, which is a very yivo thing to do and way of thinking.
- [29:33]
Matthew Miller
Definitely. We've covered only a small handful of items out of the hundred. I think maybe we've talked about less than 10. So it's 10%, a lot more to dig into. And we want to make sure people get the book. So we won't go into every object, of course. Are there, Stephanie, any other ones you want to highlight before we sign off?
- [29:52]
Stephanie Halpern
Sure. I'll highlight something from the performing arts section. We have this beautiful pair of red shoes with rhinestone studded heels that were worn by a Yiddish vaudeville actress named Mae Simon, who would eventually come to star in the first Yiddish Taaki. And, you know, Mae Simon's name sort of is not well known today, but she, in her heyday, she was, you know, she was considered one of the great Yiddish stars. And, you know, these shoes, along with sort of some of her other ephemera, are really like the remnants of her theatrical career. And just another, you know, beautiful and interesting example of the strange kind of stuff we have in the archives.
- [30:44]
Matthew Miller
Fascinating. I've taken up a lot of your time. What are you guys working on next?
- [30:48]
Eddie Portnoy
I am working on an exhibit on Jews and magic in the occult. You know, this is Yivo has a prettiest collection of amulets and.
- [31:02]
Lot casting books and books on Sayad or, you know, palm reading.
- [31:09]
And, you know, things of that nature. So that, that'll, that, that'll go up in May. May 2026.
- [31:17]
Stephanie Halpern
Yeah. And the archives, we're chugging along with our big Jewish labor and political archives project, and we're planning our next one that will start in 2027, which is genealogy and family history collections, some of our most heavily used materials, and we'll be making those available widely online.
- [31:37]
Matthew Miller
Fascinating. This is a great conversation. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much for your time.
- [31:42]
Eddie Portnoy
Thank you.
- [31:42]
Stephanie Halpern
Thank you.
- [31:43]
Matthew Miller
We've been speaking to Eddie Portnoy and Stephanie Halperin about The new book 100 Objects from the collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Happy reading, my friends.
- [31:59]
Stephanie Halpern
Foreign.
- [32:06]
Eddie Portnoy
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