{"id":4062,"date":"2022-10-28T16:48:02","date_gmt":"2022-10-28T16:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/?p=4062"},"modified":"2022-10-28T16:48:48","modified_gmt":"2022-10-28T16:48:48","slug":"exploring-yivos-bund-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/arts\/exploring-yivos-bund-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring YIVO’s Bund Archives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My time as an Irene Kronhill Pletka Fellow informed not only my study of Yiddish, but my study of history and Jewish thought, and even my own personal academic development. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being able to come into the YIVO office and work in archive processing under Hallel Yadin\u2019s supervision was an experience unlike any other. My hours spent working in YIVO\u2019s archivist space both informed me about the nature of archive processing and granted me the ability to learn from YIVO\u2019s incredible community of genius, dedicated librarians and archivists. During my hours engaging in translation and finding aid processing for Hallel, I was able to work in the YIVO archivist offices. Here, I learned not only about the Yiddish library science field but gained a deeper understanding of YIVO’s archivist organizational structure. Helping to build, translate, and finalize finding aids, like with the Bina Applebaum archive finding aid, allowed me to contribute to YIVO in ways that actively push the institute forward. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Throughout my time as a Pletka fellow, the independent research hours I had in the YIVO archives eventually contributed towards what became my undergraduate thesis, entitled \u201cThe Jewish Labor Bund\u2019s National Cultural Autonomy Program: A Judeo-Marxist Exploration of Jewish Identity Futures in Times of Revolution.\u201d My independent project explored the Bund\u2019s understanding of Jewish identity and peoplehood from its founding and up until its schism with the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP, Rossiyskaya sotsial-demokraticheskaya rabochaya partiya) in 1903. The Bund\u2019s articulation of a National Cultural Autonomy program is a model for how minority groups can retain and celebrate their ethno-cultural traditions while creating the forward arch of Russia\u2019s Marxist revolution. I went on to argue, through a Judeo-Marxist lens, that the Bund\u2019s national cultural autonomy platform opens up the possibility for revisiting forgotten visions of Jewish futures oriented towards sustaining minority tradition, language, and cultural practices while resisting the oppressive systems of capitalism and assimilationism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Of course, the Bund Archives were central in my ability to formulate and arrive at such a project. I was able to explore the Bund\u2019s papers on Vladimir Medem and the Unzer Tsayt<\/em> archives. I was able to personally look through the Bund\u2019s internal history as an organization and trace the internal development of the party\u2019s stance on Jewish national cultural autonomy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ultimately, the Irene Kronhill Pletka fellowship granted me the opportunity of a lifetime where I could explore the trove of YIVO\u2019s archive and delve into the Bund\u2019s archive right before the beginning of its exciting seven year digitization process. The development afforded to me by the Pletka fellowship as a Yiddish historian is insurmountable, and I would like to thank Hallel, Stephanie, Yaakov, Professor Agi Legutko, and CJH reading room librarians in helping me arrive at such a point in my independent research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My time as an Irene Kronhill Pletka Fellow informed not only my study of Yiddish, but my study of history and Jewish thought, and even my own personal academic development.  Being able to come into the YIVO office and work in archive processing under Hallel Yadin\u2019s supervision was an experience unlike any other. My hours […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","has-post-thumbnail"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9teox-13w","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4062"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4074,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4062\/revisions\/4074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}