Global British Jewish History: YIVO in Britain, 1937–71

Abstract: The Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO) established a British section which operated from 1937–71. It collected materials for YIVO's headquarters, first in Vilna, and then in New York, and publicized YIVO activities. YIVO's British section also pursued its own aims, recording the history of Jews in Britain and centering the experience of working-class Yiddish-speaking immigrant Jews. Among other things, it organized an exhibition and an autobiography competition and it published a volume of Yiddish historical research about Jews in Britain. However, British YIVO later sent the archive it had built to the headquarters in New York, thereby dispossessing the British Jewish community of its historical record. YIVO's struggles to maintain itself in Britain reflect the institutional and ideological challenges of global history making. In this article, I use the case of YIVO to contribute to a growing critical literature on the "global" in modern Jewish history and archival construction.