The Shmooze, The Yiddish Book Center's Podcast

Steiner Summer Yiddish Program students Dory Fox and Jamie Nadel reflect on how the program provided them with a new understanding of Jewish culture. Episode 0036 August 1, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Los Angeles Times and NPR film critic Kenneth Turan talks with us about "Lost Embrace" (Argentina's 2004 Academy Award entry/Best Foreign Film), the eccentric and sweet story of a young man working at a mall in the Jewish neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Episode 0035 July 25, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Noah Gardenswartz is a stand-up comedian performing three shows of “global Jewish comedy” on the East Coast next week. Listen in as he talks about the common humor Jewish communities share and how he’s trying to break out of the Jewish comedy format. Episode 0034 July 13, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Peter Manseau won the National Jewish Book Award for "Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter," a semi-autobiographical and semi-historical novel about Yiddish literature and preservation. In this conversation with Josh Lambert, Manseau reflects on his time as an intern at the Yiddish Book Center and the obsession with Yiddish he can't seem to shake. Episode 0033 July 10, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst...

The Lemon Bucket Orkestra went viral this spring with a video of an impromptu klezmer performance on a delayed flight from Toronto to Frankfurt. Emma Morgenstern catches up with Mark Marczyk, the band's fiddler, about their captive audience and other wacky venues the band has graced with song. Episode 0032 July 3, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, MA

Dan Okrent, co-creator of "Old Jews Telling Jokes Onstage," talks somewhat seriously about the comedic off-Broadway production, or as he refers to it, his first project "specifically designed to make people happy." Episode 0030 June 26, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Fourteen-year-old Emma Lezberg, the Yiddish Book Center's youngest zamler (volunteer book collector), talks about about why she started collecting Yiddish books, her plans to study Yiddish, and the one book she had to have for her personal library. Episode 0031 June 26, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Erik Greenberg Anjou, director of the acclaimed documentary "The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground," talks about the making of the film and the upbeat message he hopes to spread to his audiences. Episode 0029 June 19, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

There’s no shortage of news from the Yiddish Book Center these days: classes have begun for the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program students, we’re gearing up for our Yidstock music festival and the 2012 alumni reunion, and Asya Vaisman, head of the Center’s Yiddish Language Institute, arrives in the fall. Emma Morgenstern visits with Aaron Lansky to hear it all firsthand. Episode 0028 June 19, 2012 Yi...

The Fugs, a 1960s garage band, made frequent use of bongos, curse words, and protest poetry. They also used Yiddish songs and other Jewish source material. Music critic Seth Rogovoy, in conversation with Emma Morgenstern, plays clips from The Fugs' first album and ponders what makes their music Jewish. Episode 0027 June 12, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Aaron Lansky visits with Chana Mlotek. The ninety-year-old Mlotek works three days a week as the music archivist at YIVO, where she began working as Max Weinreich's assistant in 1944. She shares stories, reflects on Yiddish music and musicians, and ends the visit with a verse of her favorite song. The National Folksbiene Theater's gala, honoring Chana Mlotek, Neil Sedaka, and Jay Wisnicki, will ta...

Seth Rogovoy talks with Yiddish vocalist Eleanor Reissa about her upcoming performance at Yidstock. Reissa will be singing with Frank London's Klezmer Brass Allstars at Yidstock on Sunday, July 15th, 2012. Episode 0025 June 5, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Yidstock will bring some of the top names in klezmer to the stage at the Yiddish Book Center. Seth Rogovoy, Yidstock's program organizer, explains how the bands, which include the Klezmatics and Socalled, represent the many incarnations of klezmer. Episode 0024 May 30, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Jewish educator Fradle Pomerantz Freidenreich talks with Aaron Lansky about her work documenting every Yiddish school in North America. These schools, whose reach and influence were greater than Freidenreich imagined, are chronicled in her book, "Passionate Pioneers: The Story of Yiddish Secular Education in North America, 1910-1960." Episode 0023 May 22, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachu...

When asked what's new at the Yiddish Book Center, Aaron Lansky had plenty to report: the opening of a new interactive exhibit, a recap of the recent Chaim Grade weekend program, new initiatives to jumpstart Yiddish translation, arriving students, and, believe it or not, there's more. Episode 0022 May 16, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Two years and four thousand pounds of Cor-Ten steel in the making, Simon Kogan's sculpture "Yiddish" has been installed on the grounds at the Yiddish Book Center. Kogan and Lee Hutt, the head of the Center's sculpture committee, talk with Aaron Lansky about what the sculpture represents and the massive effort - artistic and physical - of creating it. Episode 0021 May 9, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Am...

Fellow Josh Price reads an excerpt from Chaim Grade's poem "Ikh veyn af aykh mit ale oysyes fun dem alef-beys" ("I weep for you with all the letters of the alphabet") and discusses the context of this elegy for the Soviet Yiddish writers executed under Stalin's regime. Episode 0020 April 24, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Ilan Stavans sits down with Josh Lambert to answer questions about the concept behind his documentary-style fotonovela, Once@9:53am, a fictional meditation of the two hours before the 1994 terrorist attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Once@9:53am, a collaboration between Ilan Stavans and photographer Marcelo Brodsky, is on exhibit at the Yiddish Book Center through October 2012....

Aaron Lansky visits with Hankus Netsky, curator of the Lee and Alfred Hutt Discovery Gallery, to learn about the people, stories, artifacts, and interviews that have shaped this new interactive exhibit. The Gallery will open on April 29th, 2012 - the opening is one of the many scheduled events that will take place during the Center's 2012 Community Open House. Episode 0018 April 11, 2012 Yiddish B...

Aaron Lansky and designer Alex Isley (of Alexander Isley Inc.) share the story of how and why the Yiddish Book Center's new logo evolved to include a tsigele - a little goat. Episode 0016 April 3, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Rick Brown and his team at Handshouse Studio are constructing an 85 percent scale model of a wooden synagogue inside the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Aaron Lansky visits with Rick to learn about the project and the history of these magnificent structures. Episode 0017 April 3, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Nora Feinstein, the woman behind the Maxwell House Haggadah Project, tells us how the coffee company's haggadah came to be a staple at the American seder and about her project to capture photos and memories related to the haggadah. Episode 0015 March 27, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

South African native Claudia Braude visits with Aaron Lansky to discuss the rich - and largely untold - history of South African Jewish culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Episode 0014 March 20, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

Naftali Ejdelman, co-founder of Yiddish Farm, talks with Emma Morgenstern about the resurgence of interest in Yiddish and the popularity of the "back-to-the-land" movement. Against this backdrop, Naftali has managed to create a place where students can speak Yiddish while toiling in the fields. Episode 0013 March 13, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

In a conversation with writer Sana Krasikov, Josh Lambert learns which books influenced Krasikov in high school and how literature came alive once she started reading outside the classroom. Then the two discuss some of the books they'll be co-teaching at this summer's Great Jewish Books program. Episode 0012 March 13, 2012 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts