NEW YORK — Several college students browsed a satirical Yiddish magazine written for tenement-dwellers working in sweatshops in the early 20th century. Their classmates looked through historical matchbooks advertising kosher restaurants, while two Jewish students searched for photos of their ancestors in an interactive display that linked images of pre-Holocaust Jewish life to cities in Eastern Europe.

A guide for Manhattan’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research told the visiting students from the City University of New York’s Hunter College about the varieties of Yiddish theater. Some of the performances were “dramatically important and avant-garde,” he said, while others were “these mushy love stories.”

“It was basically reality TV for people before the age of television,” he said.

The trip provided a window into how one Jewish organization is navigating education in the post-October 7 environment, as Jewish communities grapple with the perceived failings of campaigns against antisemitism and the realization that, while Israel may have won on the battlefields, the Jewish nation lost the global war of public opinion.

The bloody massacre led by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023, saw the slaughter of some 1,200 people in southern Israel and the abduction of 251 to the Gaza Strip amid widespread acts of horror and brutality.

The invasion sparked a two-year war against Hamas in the Strip, but also had global ramifications as antisemitism and anti-Israel advocacy surged alongside the brutal conflict. The onslaught put many Diaspora Jews in a bind as they struggled to cope with the trauma inflicted by the tragedy while suffering discrimination and even attacks due to their support for Israel — long seen by the mainstream community as an integral part of Jewish identity.

YIVO was founded in 1925 in today’s Vilnius, Lithuania, to study and document Jewish life. World War II and Nazi persecution forced the institute to relocate to New York City in 1940. YIVO nowadays is dedicated to preserving and studying the history of Eastern European Jews. It houses more than 24 million original documents and objects that are available to researchers in person and online.

Today, YIVO’s executive director and CEO Jonathan Brent seeks to head off some of the increasingly overt antisemitism plaguing the United States by offering a broader view.

“What we show is that there is not one way of being Jewish. Therefore, one can’t do what has so often happened since October 7 and say, ‘The Jews are this, the Jews are that,'” said Brent.

We don’t need no education?

The students’ recent visit came as the mainstream US Jewish community reckons with a historic surge in antisemitism, despite the vast resources Jewish groups have poured into education to combat anti-Jewish discrimination. Questions about the efficacy of education, especially Holocaust education, have circulated for years, but the issue has gained urgency in the fallout from the Gaza war.

The writer and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens summed up one side of the argument in a speech this month that caused a stir. Stephens argued that antisemitism is largely impervious to appeals to tolerance, reminders of Jewish and Israeli accomplishments, or mandatory Holocaust education. Instead, he called for large-scale investment in Jewish day schools, cultural institutions, philanthropy, media, publishing and religious leadership.

“Does anyone think the fight against antisemitism is working?” Stephens asked.

Brent argued that, despite the surge in antisemitism, it could be worse without education and that instead of changing course, YIVO has sought to double down on its mission since October 7.

“Nobody is able to judge where antisemitism would be right now if there weren’t all of these educational programs,” he said.

YIVO does not have a political agenda and its goal is historical education, not opposing antisemitism, but Brent believes that introducing complexity to the Jewish story will rein in prejudice among non-Jews.

That view puts him in line with some Jewish community reformers, who argue that campaigns by some Jewish groups seeking to “convert” their opponents to their point of view through education and outreach is ineffective. The more effective strategy would be to muddy the waters by introducing the complicated realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jewish history, said Toba Hellerstein, the head of Attune Now, a consulting group that has studied communications related to Israel and Jews.

“Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are often fueled by black-and-white thinking that reduces Jews and Israel to one-dimensional symbols onto which society projects its grievances,” she said. “Research shows the most effective way to disrupt this isn’t reflexive rebuttal, but complexity. Nuance, humanization, and lived experience introduce gray into rigid narratives, and when the story becomes messy, mobilization weakens.”

Brent said educational efforts also need to move past the Holocaust to cover leftist antisemitism, particularly in the Soviet Union. The position echoes other Jewish thinkers who argue that the focus on the Holocaust has left Americans able to identify right-wing, fascist antisemitism, while leaving a blind spot on the left.

“What we don’t have right now is a full-throated historical understanding of how socialism was poisoned by antisemitism,” Brent said.

YIVO is not a prominent legacy communal group that gets entangled in political disputes, like the Anti-Defamation League, giving it a more open lane to focus on education. The group is not immune to political disputes, though. A 2024 webinar series on Hamas’s ideological links to Soviet and Nazi propaganda drew some pushback from leftists in the Yiddish world, who accused the program of propagating pro-Israel propaganda.

Focus on Jewish life before the Holocaust

Last year, marking YIVO’s centennial, the organization opened its Learning and Media Center to host groups of students. YIVO is mostly used by scholars, Yiddish enthusiasts and adult learners, but the learning center caters to groups that have less of a background in the field.

The goal is to pique participants’ curiosity with the organization’s focus on Jewish life before the Holocaust, said Alex Weiser, YIVO’s director of public programs.

Most Jewish educational programs focus on the Holocaust, Israel and religious topics, leaving a gap about “the way Jews lived before the Holocaust,” such as Yiddish literature and theater, he said.

The Hunter College students visited this month as part of a course on the history of Jews in New York City. Around 20 students, a mix of Jews and non-Jews, heard about Jewish emancipation in Europe in the 1800s, Yiddish theater and publishing, and persecution by the Nazis and Soviets. The center has ephemera from the early 1900s, such as charity boxes, posters advertising gymnastics sports clubs and photos of the sweatshops where many immigrants worked. Boxes contain old antisemitic cartoons, mostly replicas, and copies of diaries written by Jewish teenagers in prewar Europe.

Susannah Trubman, an educator at the media center, showed the students publications from landsmannschaften, benevolent groups that helped new arrivals to the US. She explained how the publications’ use of language highlighted the immigrants’ assimilation, with some of the pamphlets phonetically spelling out English words with Hebrew letters, and others gradually switching from Yiddish to English as the first generation died out.

The students were engaged throughout the lesson. Trubman pointed to a Yiddish typewriter used by a Jewish journalist on the Lower East Side in the 1930s, asking how Yiddish and Hebrew typewriters differed. A student answered correctly that the vowels were different. The students asked how impoverished immigrants could afford to attend the theater — they could buy the equivalent of distant “nosebleed” seats, the guide said — and lined up to stamp their notebooks with heavy, metal hand seal presses that aid groups used to mark their papers.

Trubman said visiting students are interested in viewing materials in person, and that the hands-on materials helped students “get a greater historical empathy” by moving past stereotypes. One student told her that viewing Yiddish posters in person, hanging on a wall, “makes it much more real for me” than seeing a digital copy online, she said.

Despite the focus on Yiddish culture, the lessons “don’t shy away from talking about the history of difficult topics,” Trubman said.

“We talk about pogroms, we talk about the Holocaust. We show students material in our archive that shows the antisemitism that was in Eastern Europe in the 1930s, the boycott, the stories in the newspapers,” she said.

With its focus on pre-Holocaust life, the center does not deal directly with Israeli history or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Jewish state is still present, though, in exhibits such as historical advertisements for Zionist youth movements.

Trubman said that, after guiding more than 1,000 participants through the learning center, she has yet to encounter any hostility.

YIVO’s learning and media center hosted 850 visitors during a two-year pilot phase, starting in 2023. Since it officially opened in June 2025, more than 350 visitors have come to the center, with 450 more expected to attend through the spring of 2026. The groups have come from Jewish schools and synagogues, as well as from non-Jewish institutions such as Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University and several CUNY colleges.

Before the Hunter College group left, YIVO staff instructed the students on how to navigate the center’s massive online repository. Several students asked Trubman how they could come back to the center for further research.

“The function of YIVO’s education is to show the ways in which Jews are actually human,” Brent said. “We do it by showing how they ate, how they put on their shoes in the morning, how they took care of their kids, how they evaluated their lives, how they made love, how they sang, how they created art.”

Brent acknowledged that attempting to portray Jews as human was “a low bar.” But, he said, “we’re very low right now.”

“This is, to me, the most important thing to instill in the minds of young people — that we share with them humanity, and by the way, they share it with us,” Brent said.

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