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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

Reading. A sweeping, unique graphic memoir about an artist’s year abroad in Paris and how it gave way to an all-encompassing love affair and crushing heartbreak as he wrestled with trauma, masculinity, and the real possibility of hope.

Sarah Morgenthau interviews Andrew Meier about his book, Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty, a New York Times Editors’ Choice which follows the epic and intimate portrait of four generations of the Morgenthau family, a dynasty of power brokers and public officials with an outsize—and previously unmapped—influence shaping the American Century […]

New conversation series between fiction and non-fiction writers, in which writers discuss the ways in which they grapple with similar subject matter through different lenses, and with different perspectives. The stories and essays in this volume—a follow-up to his debut in English, Rock, Paper, Scissors—tackle major questions of modern life in and beyond Russia with […]

Examine the work of photographers who are lending their voices to defining what it means to be Indigenous today. Photojournalists Donovan Quintero (Navajo), Tailyr Irvine (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes), and Russel Albert Daniels (Diné descent and Ho-Chunk descent)—whose works are featured in the museum’s Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field exhibition in New […]

Black History Month lecture.

A witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, power, and fame in these complex and fascinating relationships. RSVP required.

Encanto tells the tale of an extraordinary family, the Madrigals, who live hidden in the mountains of Colombia in a magical house, in a vibrant town, in a wondrous, charmed place called an Encanto. The magic of the Encanto has blessed every child in the family with a unique gift—from super strength to the power […]

Black History Month lecture.

On an August night in 1923, Zhu Ziqing and Yu Pingbo, two prominent Chinese writers, took a boat ride along the famed Qinhuai River in Nanjing and each wrote an essay under the same title of “Splashing Oars and Lantern Light on the Qinhuai River.” Both pieces subsequently becamme classics in the history of modern […]

David Wiener was born on May 30, 1926, in Lodz, Poland, one of Moshe Chaim and Hannah Sur Wiener’s nine children. When he was thirteen, David escaped alone from Lodz, which had been turned into a ghetto in February 1940. During the war, David survived slave labor camps, prison, and Auschwitz. His parents and all […]

Two of the greatest Jewish voices of the past half-century appear on stage together for the first time in what promises to be a significant public intellectual event. French philosopher, essayist, playwright, and filmmaker Bernard-Henri Lévy joins heroic former Soviet prisoner of conscience Natan Sharansky to address and debate the most urgent questions of our […]

Louis Greenstein, Sufija Abdur-Rahman, and Sara Lippman read from their work during this month's virtual salon.

An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one woman’s final semester at an elite New England college into controversy and chaos—and into an ill-advised affair with a married professor. RSVP required.

An intimate and empowering anthology of essays that explore the changing face of female desire in whip-smart, sensuous prose, with pieces by Tara Conklin, Camille Dungy, Melissa Febos, Lisa Taddeo, and others

Romance novels have historically been written by women, for women and about women. The genre has gone through many iterations over time, from the early romances of Jane Austen to the rise of the bodice-ripper to today’s increasingly diverse array of protagonists and plotlines. A panel of romance authors, editors and experts =will discuss the […]

Family lore had it that author Bonnie Siegler’s grandfather Jules crossed paths with Marilyn Monroe in Midtown Manhattan late one night in 1954, her white dress flying up around her as she filmed a scene for The Seven Year Itch. Siegler wasn’t sure she quite believed her grandfather’s story…until, cleaning out his apartment, she found […]

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.

Why are queer communities often found at geographic peripheries like the waterfront? What is the connection between drag and the seaport? Join the Seaport Museum for a conversation with drag legend, Linda Simpson, who will answer these questions while illuminating the “herstory” of drag and sharing her first-hand account of the rise and evolution of […]

Black History Month lecture.

Many in the second generation have chosen to write about their experiences as the children of Holocaust survivors. The products of these efforts take many different forms, from personal recollections to nonfiction and academic books. This program will explore the different processes 2G writers take to create their works. Dr. Irit Felsen, a clinical psychologist […]

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 celebration of Black History Month, join Cornelius Eady, renowned poet, musician, co-founder of Cave Canem, and former Interim Director of Poets House for a reading and talk. Recently he launched Poets House’s Open House, a weekly radio program on WBAI, with co-host Patricia Spears Jones. He is the author of several celebrated collections of […]

Reading and discussion. The untold story of climate migration in the United States—the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future.

Black History Month lecture.

The Rosenstrasse Protest of 1943 was held against the incarceration and potential deportation of roughly 2,000 people who were arrested by the Gestapo on February 27, 1943. With their loved ones held at Rosenstraße 2-4 in Berlin, family members, many of whom were women, kept their protest going for a week until Nazi leader Joseph […]

Innovations rarely come from “experts.” When it comes to improbable innovations, a legendary tech VC told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. It is the nature of the venture-capital game that most attempts at discovery fail, but a very few succeed at such a scale that they more than […]

YA launch with Lizzy Mason. In a world that feels distorted by celebrity and the manipulations of social media and public opinion, Natalie and Carter need something real to hold onto. Remind Me to Hate You Later is a moving account of grief, depression, complex relationships, love, and the search for truth.

Join historian and author Claire Bellerjeau as she introduces Elizabeth, or Liss. Enslaved on Long Island, Liss showed great agency when she risked everything to escape with a British commander during the Revolutionary War. Despite her bravery, within weeks of her escape Liss was re-enslaved in British-held Manhattan, where she interacted with Washington’s lead spy, […]

Set in Civil Rights–era Harlem, this novel features shady cops and local gangsters in an entertaining and spellbinding way. Join NYPL staff for a moderated discussion.

Reading. A Bustle, LitHub, Debutiful, and NYLON Most Anticipated Book of 2023. A magnetic and unforgettable story of desire and its complexities, and a powerful reckoning with memory, loss, and longing, Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel, Thirst for Salt, reveals with stunning, sensual immediacy the way the past can hold us in its thrall, shaping who […]

Géraldine Schwarz’s riveting account of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II is an urgent warning against forgetting the lessons of history in the dangerous rise of far-right nationalism in Europe, the UK, and the U.S. In her book, Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe, Schwarz weaves together the […]

In this special Saturday afternoon lecture, Julie Flavell will present her book The Howe Dynasty, the first biography of a British "First Family." The Howe family had as much at stake as the Washingtons and Adamses in the conflict that created the United States. Meet the men and women of the aristocratic Howe dynasty and […]

Women's History Month lecture.

Lecture.