About

Roberta Newman is an independent scholar, writer, researcher, and translator in Brooklyn, New York. She specializes in Jewish history and culture and has served as a consultant to many documentary film, exhibition, and book projects.

 

From 2013-2019, she was Director of Digital Initiatives at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where she played a leading role in launching an international digitization project, the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project. In addition, her grant proposals raised over $1 million for the initiative. From 2005-2010, she served as Illustrations Editor and Director of Archival Research of both the print and online editions of The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.

 

Newman is also the author of award-winning audio-tour scripts for exhibitions at the Jewish Museum (New York), the Museum of Modern Art, and other museums in the U.S. and Canada. She was the curator for several online exhibitions for the Center for Jewish History and YIVO.

 

In 2014, Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America (co-authored with Alice Nakhimovsky) was published by Indiana University Press and won a National Jewish Book Award.

 

Newman has also published fiction. In 2012, her short story, Girl of the Comet, was awarded 3rd place in the MOMENT Magazine-Karma Foundation Fiction Contest.

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She is currently at work on an anthology of translations of Yiddish poems by Leyzer Wolf.

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