How Things Were Done [Empathically] in Odessa: A Conversation with Jonathan Brent, Executive Director, YIVO

A Rumor of Empathy with Lou Agosta

Join Lou for a conversation with Jonathan Brent, Executive Director of Yivo about how things were done in Odessa. This refers to a celebrated story by Isaac Babel. In 1925, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded in Vilna (Wilno, Poland; now Vilnius, Lithuania), by key European intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, to record the history and pioneer in the critical study of the language, literature and culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe. From its inception, YIVO was deeply concerned that the language and culture of East European Jewry were undergoing radical change in a rapidly modernizing world. YIVO's founders were tireless in collecting the documents and archival records of Jewish communities across Eastern Europe, years before anyone could have predicted the devastation that would befall them. Join Lou and Jonathan as they bring forth empathy and make it present in an amazing conversation about the work being done at Yivo and about Jon's penetrating and incisive commentary on a the world of the Jewish People of Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century, a world as different from our own as that of Moses before and after he encountered the burning bush.

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