Dr. Kenneth Libo

Residence : New York, NY

Biographical information
Dr. Kenneth Libo is co-author of World of Our Fathers, for which he shared a National Book Award with Irving Howe. He is also author of We Lived There Too, a history of Jews in the American West, All in a Lifetime, an oral memoir of John L. and Frances Lehman Loeb, and The Seixas-Kursheedts and the Rise of Early American Jewry. In addition, Dr. Libo co-edited with Howe on How We Lived, a history of immigrant Jews in America. Dr. Libo has written scripts for TV documentaries. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, American Jewish History, and the weekly Jewish press. Formerly English editor of the Jewish Forward, he has served as curator of American Jewish History at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, and Beth Hatefutsoh in Tel Aviv. Awarded a B.A. cum laude from Dartmouth College and a doctorate in English literature from the City University of New York, Dr. Libo is a Professor of History at Hunter College and a regular contributor to the Jewish Forward.

Discussion topics

• From Bialystok to Broadway to Beyond:
  The Influence of Yiddish Humor on American Popular Culture:
  It would be hard to imagine America's entertainment industry without Jews: Yiddish as a language and a culture had a lot to do with it. Focusing on five major areas of the entertainment industry -- motion pictures, popular music, radio/tv, the legitimate threatre, comedy -- Libo provides examples of how, often as punchlines, Jews left their mark on American English by adding hundreds of Yiddish words and expressions.
  
• Westward Oy: Pioneer Jews in America:
  When we think of the American West we don't think Jewish, even though thousands of Jews were intrinsically a part of America's frontier experience. It should therefore come as no surprise that countless pioneer Jewish mothers traveled with their husbands and children by buckboard through Indian country to new settlements further and further west. Choice quotations from first person accounts help to evoke this important chapter in American Jewish history.
  
• World of Our Mothers and Fathers:
  Life on the Lower East Side:
  The Lower East Side in its heyday was a halfway house for a half million Jews sharing a common language and culture that mirrored the dreams, hopes and anxieties of a transitional people. With Abraham Cahan, editor of the Forverts and originator of the Bintl Brief, as our guide into its tenements, theaters, shuls and landsmanshaftn, the Lower East side is revealed in all its glory and despair.
  
• The Hollywood Moguls:
  In barely over a decade a dozen or so tough-minded Yiddish-speaking Jews created an entertainment capital that has never been equaled. I trace the story of these individuals -- Louis B. Mayer, Sam Goldwyn, the Warner Brothers, Harry Cohn, et al-- from their impoverished origins to their positions as undisputed arbiters of popular styles, tastes, and fashions.
  
• Law and Order:
  Jewish Lawmakers and Lawbreakers:
  Only in America have Jews occupied leadership positions on both sides of the law. As much as Louis D. Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter number among America's great lawmakers, so do Arnold Rothstein and Meyer Lansky number among this country's most powerful underworld organizers. This lecture will show how each in his own way fulfilled the Jewish ideal of Tikkun, which is a Jew's responsibility to repair or make better whichever world he happens to live in.

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