The most famous photographs of Eastern European Jewry before the Holocaust are likely those taken by Roman Vishniac in the late 1930s on behalf of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and eventually published in his 1983 book A Vanished World. But Vishniac was not the only photographer trying to document that swiftly changing society, nor was he the most prominent at the time. In the early 1920s, Yiddish writer and photographer Alter Kacyzne was commissioned by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and later by the Forverts newspaper to take pictures of Eastern European Jews, and his work was published in the Forverts and other Yiddish publications around the world. This week, let’s take a look at this foundational documentarian of Yiddish-speaking Jews.

—Ezra Glinter, Senior Staff Writer and Editor

Josh (Yoshke) Horowitz is the 2025–2026 Bibliography and Yiddish Language Institute Fellow. He holds a degree from New York University, where his focuses were performance studies and Jewish studies, and has studied Yiddish at NYU, the University of Toronto, and with the Workers Circle, YIVO, and the Yiddish Book Center. He was the inaugural Yiddish Cultural Activism Fellow at the Workers Circle and has worked as a TA at YIVO. He originated the role of Gabe Tsvayg in Di psure loyt khayim with New Yiddish Rep.

Karen Mengden and her siblings, Amy and Jeremy Roschelle, created an endowed fund to honor the legacy of their father, Dr. Ira A. Roschelle.