Online lecture in Chinese. On August 11, 1872, a group of 30 Chinese government-sponsored students departed from Shanghai and embarked on a transpacific journey to study in the United States. They were led by Yung Wing, presumably the first Chinese student to have studied in the U.S. from 1847-1854. This history-making journey has since been […]

New, maritime-themed book club. Literary selections are announced one month in advance, and Seaport Museum staff and special guests will stir up lively discussions, informed by a shared love of literature, history, and preservation. 'Saved at the Seawall' is the definitive history of the largest ever waterborne evacuation. Jessica DuLong reveals the dramatic story of […]

New York City, arguably the world’s Art Deco capital, is well known for its iconic towers. In a new book, New York Art Deco: Birds, Beasts & Blooms, photographer ANDREW GARN and writer ERIC P. NASH illustrate the myriad ways that Art Deco is drawn in steel, stone, terra cotta, brass, and bronze upon the […]

This LGBTQ+ History Month, the Museum is celebrating the release of Dr. Jake Newsome’s new book Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust. In it, Newsome tells the dynamic and inspiring history of the community’s original pride symbol by tracing the transformation of the pink triangle from a Nazi concentration camp […]

From celebrity heartthrob, esteemed host of The Viall Files podcast, and adored member of Bachelor Nation Nick Viall comes Don’t Text Your Ex Happy Birthday—a no-holds-barred dating advice book. Custom cocktails, an interactive Q&A, and more! RSVP required.

Reading. An explosive, deeply reported exposé of McKinsey & Company, the international consulting firm that advises corporations and governments, that highlights the often drastic impact of its work on employees and citizens around the world. RSVP required.

In this lecture, Nancy Rubin Stuart reveals the long-neglected voices of the women Ben loved and lost during his lifelong struggle between passion and prudence. Weaving detailed historical research with emotional intensity and personal testimony, Nancy Rubin Stuart traces the life of Deborah Reed Franklin—Ben’s common-law wife and partner of 44 years— and those of […]

Poet Sharon Olds in conversation with Sarah Ruhl.

Before 2001, homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder and needed to be treated in China. In 2009, Shanghai Pride became the first and largest LGBT event in China that drew attention from national and international audience. During that time, gay clubs and community groups began to flourish in big cities. But it didn’t last long […]

Bob Pisani has spent the past 25 years on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He has been on the front line of finance for all the major events of the last quarter century, including the Asian Financial Crisis, the dot-com bubble and collapse, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the Great Financial […]

Ami Sands Brodoff, Jennifer Steil and Alice Kaltman read from their work during this month's virtual salon. The theme: sexuality.

Novelist Jennifer Egan in conversation with Melissa Maxwell

Featuring new work from Mieko Kawakami, Martín Espada, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Arthur Sze, Camonghne Felix, and more, the latest installment of the acclaimed literary journal Freeman’s explores the irrevocably intertwined lives of animals and the humans that exist alongside them. RSVP required.

Judith Koeppel Steel was born in Berlin, Germany at the beginning of World War II. Her family escaped Germany in 1939 aboard the MS St. Louis, only to be turned away by both Cuba and the United States and sent back to Europe. Her family disembarked in Belgium, and were later imprisoned in Gurs concentration […]

Fifteen years after the release of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award winner, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million is now being reissued. The updated book contains new material developed in conjunction with Ken Burns’s new 3-part documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, which features Daniel […]

Lunchtime talk. Entrepreneurs are among the primary shapers of our culture, yet their role in driving progress and influencing society has often been overlooked. As far back as we can trace human history, there have been entrepreneurs. Almost five millennia ago, copper tool manufacturers set up a factory in what today is southwest Spain, profiting […]

New York City, arguably the world’s Art Deco capital, is well known for its iconic towers. In a new book, New York Art Deco: Birds, Beasts & Blooms, photographer ANDREW GARN and writer ERIC P. NASH illustrate the myriad ways that Art Deco is drawn in steel, stone, terra cotta, brass, and bronze upon the […]

Reading. In Dani Shapiro’s first work of fiction in fifteen years, she returns to the form that launched her career, with a riveting, deeply felt novel that examines the ties that bind families together—and the secrets that can break them apart. Signal Fires is a work of haunting beauty by a masterly storyteller. RSVP required.

In a blend of history, fiction, and magical realism, The Vanishing, is a new novel from David Michael Slater. The book traces how one girl, as a result of witnessing a brutal murder, turns invisible to save her best friend from the horror of Nazi Germany. Slater will be joined in conversation by Jay Lender, […]

In this lecture, Keith Beutler will discuss how surviving reported locks of George Washington’s hair in the holdings of more than 100 public archives and historical museums, including Fraunces Tavern Museum, offer clues about influential, but often forgotten performances of patriotic memory in the early United States.

In the wake of the reunification of China, the Nationalist government initiated a comprehensive planning proposal, referred to as “the Capital Plan”, to reconstruct the war-torn city of Nanjing into a modern capital. With the participation of many first-generation architects returning from Europe, the US and Japan, this monumental project brought a brand-new landscape to […]

The global economy is at a crossroads. Can finance fix it? Proponents of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing say yes. They claim that new financial strategies that consider all stakeholders are essential tools for addressing runaway carbon emissions and stark income inequality, among other ills. ESG-integrated investments already encompass more than $120 trillion in […]

Book presentation. Bits and pieces of the lives led long before the age of skyscrapers are scattered throughout New York City, found in backyards, construction sites, street beds, and parks. Indigenous tools used thousands of years ago; wine jugs from a seventeenth-century tavern; a teapot from Seneca Village, the nineteenth-century Black settlement displaced by Central […]

An explosive and deeply reported look at the systemic racism inside the American financial services industry, from acclaimed New York Times finance reporter Emily Flitter.

Journalist Helen Epstein is the daughter of Holocaust survivor and Olympic Swimmer Kurt Epstein. Helen has created a photography exhibit that will be on view at the Terezin Memorial from September 8 through November 30, 2022. Join the Museum and Helen Epstein for an illustrated talk about the process of designing this documentary exhibit, starting […]

Join Sara Softness, the Museum’s Curator of Special Projects and Elizabeth Miseo, Collections Manager at the Boris Lurie Foundation for a special tour of Boris Lurie: Nothing To Do But To Try before it closes on November 6, 2022.

Reading. An unexpected, poignant, and personal account of loving and losing pets, exploring the singular bonds we have with our companion animals, and how to grieve them once they’ve passed. RSVP required.

As one of the “Four Great Masters of Tsinghua University” and a versatile genius in many fields, Prof. Yuen Ren Chao is known for having unparalleled enthusiasm and achievements in modern Chinese linguistics, along with a rare talent for music and scholarly wit. His life was like ‘a work of art’ (Mary Hass) and his […]

Yaffa Eliach (née Sonenson) was born on May 31, 1935 in Eišiškès, Lithuania. She was just six years old when German soldiers invaded her hometown and massacred the Jewish population. Yaffa and her family survived in hiding, and after WWII Yaffa moved to Israel, where she spent the rest of her childhood and met her […]

Patrick Radden Keefe Presents Empire of Pain in conversation with Ginia Bellafante. The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has […]

Lunchtime talk. In The Business of Personal Finance: How to Improve Financial Wellness, Joseph Calandro, Jr. and co-author John Hoffmire present, in a highly accessible way, how to effectively understand and manage personal finances, avoiding debt and building for the future, and using straightforward tools and techniques developed in conjunction with business economics.

Marriage is the foundation of a Chinese family. As the Chinese saying goes: a harmonious family prospers everything (家和万事兴). It used to be the norm that once people marry, they should never divorce – they should try everything possible to maintain the marriage and make the family “harmonious.” However, as the Chinese society evolves rapidly […]

Diane Zinnia, Anna Malaika Tubbs, Jessica Dulong and Richard Jeffrey Newman read from their work during this month's virtual salon. The theme: trauma.

In this lecture, Adam Van Doren explores well-known and lesser-known historic sites in the 13 original North American colonies, accompanied by his paintings.

Drama and myth frame the life and death of Maya Deren. Born in Kiev in 1917, at the start of the Russian Revolution, she died forty-four years later in New York City. In her brief life, she established herself as a pioneering experimental filmmaker, prolific writer, accomplished photographer, and crusader for a personal and poetic […]

For three decades Josef Mengele, the doctor who performed horrific experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, floated through South America until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979. In his new novel, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, Olivier Guez traces Mengele’s travels during those years in hiding, as he kept two steps ahead of […]

Join the Seaport Museum as we welcome author Jonathan H. Rees for the release of his new book, Fulton Fish Market: A History. Together, we will hear some of the research that Rees conducted with the help of the South Street Seaport Museum for this comprehensive publication. Slides and stories shared in this presentation will […]

An empowering picture book that invites us to explore and embrace our emotions from Karamo, talk show host and culture expert of Netflix's hit series Queer Eye, and Jason Brown, featuring illustrations by Diobelle Cerna, and expert-vetted resources.

Online lecture.

Book presentation. Cities are central to prosperity: they are hubs of innovation and growth. Yet the economic vitality of wealthy cities is marred by persistent and pervasive inequality. In his new book Unequal Cities, economist Richard McGahey argues that deeply entrenched anti-urban policies and politics limit cities' options to address inequality. Many factors – structural […]

Throughout history, Jews have been accused of using the blood of non-Jews for “rituals.” This accusation, which as come to be called “blood libel,” dates to the second century BCE and continued to grow with the spread of Christianity. In the Middle Ages, the motif made its way into art and literature like Chaucer’s Canterbury […]

Rita Kaplan Lowenstein was born in Warsaw, Poland to Jewish parents Bernard and Rachel Kaplan. Her father owned chemical manufacturing plants around Warsaw, and her mother was a pianist and piano teacher. After the Nazis invaded Poland, the family was forced into the Warsaw ghetto. In August 1942, Rita and her parents escaped the ghetto […]

Reading. As It Turns Out is a family story. Alice Sedgwick Wohl is writing to her brother Bobby, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1965, just before their sister Edie Sedgwick met Andy Warhol. After unexpectedly coming across Edie’s image in a clip from Warhol’s extraordinary film Outer and Inner Space, Wohl was moved […]

Skateboarding isn’t just a recreational activity, but a professional sport, lifestyle, art form, and cultural phenomenon. The striking book Four Wheels and a Board: The Smithsonian History of Skateboarding captures its spirited history, iconic skateboarders, diverse community, and the palpable passion of the people who love it. Betsy Gordon, one of the authors of Four […]

Online lecture.

Commemorate Washington’s emotional farewell to his Officers that took place in the Long Room on December 4, 1783 with $1 admission to the Museum! Witness a reenactment of the Farewell in the room where it happened and explore the Museum’s newest exhibition, Cloaked Crusader: George Washington in Comics and Pop Culture.

Lauren Young’s new book, Hitler’s Girl, is a groundbreaking history that reveals how authoritarianism nearly took hold in Great Britain in the 1930s. Young details the pervasiveness of Nazi sympathies among the British aristocracy, as significant factions of the upper class methodically pursued an actively pro-German agenda. They formed a murky so-called Fifth Column to […]

Judith Thurman, a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, has gathered a selection of her essays and profiles in A Left-Handed Woman. They consider our culture in all its guises: literature, history, politics, gender, fashion, and art, though their paramount subject is the human condition.

Since the nineteenth century Jews have been involved in organized crime all over the U.S. Some of the most famous mafiosos including Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and Mickey Cohen were all Jewish boys who grew into some of the most influential underground figures we know. These activities flourished during Prohibition, as many became deeply entrenched […]

Famed marine biologist, photographer, and USCG-licensed captain, Gaelin Rosenwaks, will join in conversation with historian and journalist, Jessica DuLong, for this riveting evening on the heels of the release of Rosewak’s new book Sperm Whales: The Gentle Goliaths of the Oceans. Join the Seaport Museum when Rosenwaks shares insights and stories from her magical moments […]

Reading. Well before COVID-19 swept across the United States and the chairman of Tyson Foods infamously declared that the food supply chain was dangerously vulnerable, America’s meat industry was reaching a breaking point. Years of consolidation, price-fixing, and power grabs by elite industry insiders have harmed consumers and caused environmental destruction. Americans have no idea […]

In 1786, Charles Wilson Peale created the most important—and most famous—museum in Revolutionary era America. A fusion of natural history and art, Peale’s Philadelphia Museum was meant to be an embodiment of the Enlightenment. In this lecture, Lee Dugatkin will explore science, art, and the Enlightenment in early America and how these fed the appetite […]

The New York Jewish Book Festival opens with a screening of the first episode of Fleishman Is in Trouble followed by a conversation with Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of Fleishman Is in Trouble and the creator, writer, and showrunner of the FX series on Hulu, and A.O. Scott, film critic at The New York Times. Brodesser-Akner […]

The daylong event will touch on themes of Jewish heritage including culture and history, modern life and literature, the Holocaust, food and cookbooks, and books for kids and families. Featuring talks, panels, and author signings.

Cleyvis Natera, Lan Samantha Chang and Jacquelyn Mitchard read from their work during this month's virtual salon. The theme: trauma.

Join China Institute online to have a conversation with Paul Salopek, who is now walking through China as part of his ambitious 24,000-mile Out of Eden Walk journey. Started in 2013 in Ethiopia, “Out of Eden Walk” is a unique “slow journalism” project to walk the pathways of the first humans who migrated out of […]

In the new book Arthur Miller: American Witness from Yale’s Jewish Lives series, distinguished theater critic John Lahr brings a unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller, the playwright who almost singlehandedly brought twentieth century American theater to a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller’s life and concentrating […]

In their presentation “Gentleman’s Agreement: Hollywood’s Stand Against Anti-Semitism,” documentary director Cecilia Peck and film historian Claudine Stevens will bring to life the struggles and achievements of creating the groundbreaking Oscar-winning film. Seventy-five years ago, Gentleman’s Agreement bravely crossed a line to become a critically acclaimed, top-grossing film that exposed antisemitism in New York and […]

Today, the once bustling, fragrant fish market in lower Manhattan's South Street Seaport is a rebuilt retail destination with a new kind of marketing – but from its founding in 1822, through its move to the Bronx in 2005, the Fulton Fish Market was an iconic New York institution. At first a neighborhood market for […]

Launch of a new editor and author conversation series with Stephen Markley, the bestselling author of Ohio, to celebrate the launch of his new book, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.

When Nazi plans were learned and promptly ignored by local and federal authorities in Los Angeles, a number of Jews working in Hollywood secretly funded a spy ring that operated from August 1933 until the end of WWII. These spies uncovered a series of plots aimed at attracting international attention to the Nazi cause and […]

Nathanael O’Reilly, Caitlin McDonnell, Rio Cortez, Catherine Woodard and JP Howard! read from their work during this month's virtual salon.

History was made on Oct. 24, 2022 when for the first time the image of an Asian American appeared on United States currency. This distinct honor goes to Anna May Wong (黄柳霜), a groundbreaking actress in the 20th century during the rise of the film industry and a champion for Asian American representation in film. […]

Budapest, 1944: Vice Consul Carl Lutz and the Swiss Legation of Budapest started the largest diplomatic operation to rescue Jews during WWII. Thanks to an ingenious system of safe-conduct papers and residential buildings put under consular protection, Carl Lutz, who had acted as a protective power representing interests of the U.S. and UK in Hungary, […]

During Deeper Lectures Sahar Damoni shares the context and journey that has shaped her life and work as a Palestinian artist in Israel/Palestine, sharing key, life-changing moments that led her to choose dance and choreography as tools of expression.

Two multi-hyphenate artists share excerpts from their new book projects—Daniel Alexander Jones’ Love as Light and jaamil olawale kosoko’s Black Body Amnesia–discussing the process for creating as a source of healing self and community. Their “duet” conversation will also address themes of friendship, grace, and loving as a gesture of self-sovereignty.

The Neiger family was living a peaceful life in the Jewish community of Krakow when the arrival of World War II changed their lives forever. When Nazis forced the family into harsh Ghetto life, they made a vow to escape as a family. But when circumstances forced the family to separate from older brother Ben, […]

Annelies and Marianne Bernstein were among the 1,700 German Jews in Berlin who survived the Holocaust by posing as non-Jews. Known as “U-boats” in the slang of their time, the sisters hid in plain sight with the help of ingenuity, grit, and luck. Join us to find out how “the Steins” used their new names […]

A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum. Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, […]