"Plenty of Courage" takes the audience on Anne's journey of discovering herself, her ambitions, and her drive to live fully and bravely. Delving into some of her lesser known entries, this performance reveals the more vulnerable side of the young diarist.
While in hiding from the Nazis, writing to her dear diary, Kitty, brings Anne enormous comfort. But through it all there is another war silently raging, and it is the one Anne is fighting with herself.
"Plenty of Courage" is a transformative experience that invites audiences to step into the shoes of one of the most important voices of the 20th century and grapple with the harder questions of what it means to be human.
The New York Jewish Book Festival celebrates literature focused on Jewish culture, heritage, and modern life across a variety of genres for all ages. The festival features panel discussions with groups of authors and a moderator, as well as individual book talks by featured authors. Visitors can also shop for holiday gifts at the Hanukkah Bazaar.
The Peter and Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center offers free genealogy services during the book festival to help visitors explore their family history, discover new research resources, and learn how to take the next steps in their genealogical research.
Center Hours for the Jewish Book Festival
10:00 AM–5:00 PM, Sunday, November 15
Please reserve one ticket per appointment. Additional guests need a program registrant ticket.
Visitors are encouraged to complete this optional form to help us better prepare for their visit.
Contact: 646.437.4202 or kalikow@jewishgen.org for additional questions.
Museum Members
Visitors have access to all exhibitions at the Museum at any time during opening hours. Click here to see all exhibitions on view.
To reserve free admission, please select your ticket type below and Add to Cart. You may visit at any time between 4-8PM on the day of your reservation.
COVID-19 Safety Guidelines: Please review our Health and Safety page before planning your visit for more information on COVID safety requirements and our visitation guidelines.
Sign in at the top right corner of this page. If you do not already have an online account with us, please create an account using your member email. Your Member discounts will be reflected in your cart at checkout.
Not a member? Join today or email membership@mjhnyc.org for assistance.
We provide free admission to Holocaust Survivors, active members of the military, first responders, and NYC DOE K-12 students. If this applies to you, please contact us at 646-437-4202 to schedule your visit.
We also accept the Sightseeing Pass and the Go City Pass, please bring your pass to the Museum for free admission.
Groups of 15 or more must book through the Group Tours page.
Bessarabia has a unique history within the Pale of Settlement, shaped by its time under the Ottoman and Russian Empires and a Jewish presence dating back to the 15th–16th centuries. Most genealogical records, such as vital records, revision lists, and burial records, begin in the 19th century, with additional 20th-century materials including deportation records and memorial sources. Many of these have been translated and made available through JewishGen, along with Yizkor books and personal memoirs. In this webinar, Yefim Kogan will share how to research Jewish history and genealogy in Bessarabia.
About the Speaker:
Yefim Abram Kogan is the Leader and Coordinator of the JewishGen Bessarabia Division. Born in Kishinev, Moldova, he emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1989 and has since conducted extensive genealogical and historical research. He holds a Master of Jewish Liberal Studies from Hebrew College in Boston, focusing on Eastern European Jewish history. In 2011, he founded the JewishGen Bessarabia SIG and developed its website, along with several KehilaLinks sites. His major projects include the Bessarabia Revision List, with over 300,000 records, and the Bessarabia Cemetery Project, documenting more than 90 cemeteries and 75,000 burial records. He is a frequent speaker at Jewish genealogical societies and IAJGS conferences and, in 2025, published Jewish Families in Shtetl Kaushany, Bessarabia with JewishGen Press.
Kalikow Center Genealogy Appointment
Research Assistance at the Peter and Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center.
Meet one-on-one with a genealogy professional for a 45-minute in-person appointment. Get help exploring your family history, answering research questions, and planning your next steps.
Center Hours
Wednesdays: 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Thursdays: 12:00 – 4:00 pm & 4:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Sunday: 10:00 am – 12:30 pm & 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Appointments are encouraged. Walk-ins are welcome on a first-come, first-served basis.
Price includes Museum Admission
First visit: $18. Free for Members
Returning visit: $72. $54 for Members
Sign in to receive the member discount at checkout.
Free Admission Thursday, 4–8 PM. Contact: 646.437.4202 or kalikow@jewishgen.org.
One ticket per appointment. For additional guests, please book the museum general admission here or visit the Museum Admissions Desk.
Please complete this optional form to help us better prepare for your visit.
The Kalikow Center will offer free genealogy services at the New York Jewish Book Festival on Sunday, November 15. To book an appointment, please click here.
The New York Jewish Book Festival celebrates literature focused on Jewish culture, heritage, and modern life in various genres for all ages. The festival features panel discussions between groups of authors and a moderator, with some individual book talks for featured authors. In addition, visitors can stock up on holiday gifts at the Hanukkah Bazaar.
Discover the remarkable Jewish heritage of Vlorë, a coastal Albanian city with a powerful story of community, courage, and survival. As we explore the city, we’ll trace the history of Jewish life in Vlorë and learn how Albania became a place of refuge for Jews during World War II. We’ll hear stories of local families who risked their lives to protect Jewish neighbors and refugees, guided by Besa, the Albanian tradition of honor, hospitality, and keeping one’s word.
Along the way, we’ll also touch on the story of Dr. Anna Kohen, author of Flower of Vlora: Growing Up Jewish in Communist Albania. Born into a Jewish family in Vlorë, Kohen’s story offers a personal glimpse into Jewish life in Albania after the war and her family’s eventual journey from Albania to a new life abroad. Through stories like hers, historic sites, and the streets of Vlorë today, we’ll uncover a lesser-known chapter of Jewish history and the enduring connections between Albania’s Jewish and Muslim communities. Co-presented with
Wowzitude.
The Holocaust radically altered the way its victims spoke and communicated—especially for Yiddish speakers. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. This lecture from Hannah Pollin-Galay, Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies at the University of Massachusetts, will focus on the experience of language in the Warsaw ghetto, looking at the new Yiddish words invented, how people debated their meanings and why they felt it was so important to remember them.
Heroines of the Holocaust brings together international scholars to examine and share new approaches in the history of women's rescue and resistance during the Holocaust and the Armenian and Rwandan genocides. Editor Lori R. Weintrob will be interviewed about this groundbreaking work by lawyer and historian Jonathan Goldberg, K.C. Their discussion will explore cultural and armed resistance, and examine new approaches to teaching the Holocaust to students in order to fight antisemitism and build bridges against hate.
Join the Grünbaum Fischer Foundation (GFF) and the Museum for GFF’s Fifth Annual Gala and Awards Ceremony, featuring the World Premier of Dead City III, an original jazz composition by Domo Branch, as well as musical and other performances by 2026 GFF Scholars. The Gala and Awards ceremony honor the life and legacy of “Fritz” Grünbaum, a legendary cabaret artist who dominated the stages of Berlin and Vienna, also bringing his virtuosity to radio and numerous films that he wrote, directed, and acted in. When Hitler arrived in Vienna in March 1938, Fritz was at the top of the Nazis’ target list of cultural enemies and was immediately deported to the Dachau Concentration Camp. There, he continued to give performances until two weeks before his death in January 1941. Funding for the GFF comes from restitution and sales of Fritz’s art collection, which included Egon Schiele’s Dead City III, the inspiration for Branch’s jazz composition. GFF is honored to celebrate this important occasion at the Museum, which will also serve to remember and honor the work of MJH Co-Founder Robert M. Morgenthau, whose own work in support of Holocaust era restitution, including Dead City III, was monumental.
In Jewish Women at Home in the World, Melissa R. Klapper documents the remarkable number of American Jewish women who traveled abroad in the mid-19th to mid-20th century. These women went to school overseas, visited relatives and hometowns, worked abroad, attended international activist meetings, and took sightseeing trips alone, with family members or friends, or with organized tour groups. The volume looks specifically at the role that gender and Jewish identity, as well as their American background, played in the women’s choices of where to go, what to do, whom to see, and how to behave.
This highly readable book charts how spending time abroad enhanced American Jewish women' s status and often challenged conventional gender roles by expanding their autonomy. Moreover, it explores how going abroad reinforced their Jewish identity, particularly in the face of unsettling encounters with antisemitism. Drawing on a treasure trove of previously unexamined diaries, memoirs, letters, reports, periodicals, scrapbooks, and photographs, Jewish Woman at Home in the World provides an engaging analysis of travel as a crucial mechanism for solidifying a diasporic identity, allowing American Jewish women to create and maintain connections with Jews worldwide.
Klapper will be in discussion about the book with Kirsten Fermaglich, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Michigan State University.
Vladka Meed, born Feigele Peltel, was just a teenager when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Increasingly devastated by the deportation and murder of 300,000 Jews—including her mother, brother, and sister—who were sent from Warsaw to the death camp of Treblinka, she heeded the call for armed resistance, joining the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), established in Warsaw in July 1942.
With her typically “Aryan” looks and fluency in Polish, Vladka could pose as a Gentile, so the ZOB asked her to live on the Aryan side of the wall and serve as a courier. In this role, she smuggled weapons across the wall, helped Jewish children escape from the Ghetto, assisted Jews hiding in the city, and established contact with both Jews in the labor camps and the partisans in the forest.
Her book, On Both Sides of the Wall, first published in Yiddish in 1948, was based on a series of 27 articles Vladka wrote in the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) in 1946–47. In 2026, Vladka's son, Dr. Steven D. Meed, released a revised translation of the book.
Dr. Meed will discuss his mother's life and writings with his wife Dr. Rita Meed and Dr. Avinoam Patt, the Maurice and Corinne Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University.