Speaker: Miriam Borden
Shaarei Shomayim Congregation
470 Glencairn Avenue
Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 8:00 p.m.
Doors open at 7:30 p.m.

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded in Vilna, Lithuania in 1925. Its rise during the interwar period and rescue during the war, as well as its current digitization projects, are part of an incredible story of the beginnings of Jewish European historical consciousness: the understanding that Jews had their own unique national history in the Diaspora — that they weren’t simply a downtrodden, wandering, stateless minority in Europe — and that their history was worth telling. It’s a story of the earliest modern attempts to systematically collect, quantify, and analyze the folklore, history, sociology, and linguistics of Jewish Europeans. And the digitization project at YIVO today, including the online educational series, is the next great chapter of this amazing institution.
Miriam Borden has worked as a researcher, Yiddish translator and tour guide of Kensington Market with the Ontario Jewish Archives. She has written about 20th century Jewish Torontonian culture in the Canadian Yiddish press, and curated two exhibitions on Yiddish at the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library. She is a doctoral student in Yiddish at the University of Toronto.