The Shmooze, The Yiddish Book Center's Podcast

The Shmooze visits with curator Sam Sackeroff to talk about Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art, currently on exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York. The exhibit of paintings, drawings, and Judaica focuses on the seizure and movement of artworks as they traveled through distribution centers, sites of recovery, and networks of collectors before, during, and after World War II. E...

Alex Weiser and Ben Kaplan sit down with The Shmooze to talk about their forthcoming collaboration, "The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language." The new full-length opera is based on the true story of Yiddish linguist Yudel Mark, who in 1950s postwar New York City set out to write the world’s first fully comprehensive Yiddish dictionary—an effort of linguistic preservation, and a memorial to th...

This week "The Shmooze" goes transatlantic for a conversation with London-based Vivi Lachs, a social and cultural historian, Yiddishist, and postdoc research fellow at Queen Mary University of London. The author of several books including "White Chapel Noise," Vivi translated the newly released "London Yiddishtown: East End Jewish Life in Yiddish Sketch and Story, 1930–1950," a collection of previ...

Cameron Bernstein, a 2021/2022 Yiddish Book Center Fellow, joined The Shmooze to talk about her early interest in Yiddish and how she’s taken Yiddish language, culture, and history to platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Episode 308 October 14, 2021 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, MA

Ruth Zuckerbrod and Elliott Isban join The Shmooze to talk about their father Samuel Isban, a Yiddish writer and journalist and author of the newly translated “Illegal” Jews Part the Seas. Veteran newspaperman Samuel Isban accepts an assignment from the New York newspaper Der Morgn Zhurnal to report on Aliya Bet, the clandestine mission to smuggle Jewish refugees past the British blockade into Pal...

The Shmooze caught up with Rachelle Grossman, the Yiddish Book Center’s Bibliography and Collections Manager, to speak about her new role at the Center. Rachelle is a specialist in Yiddish print culture and is completing a doctorate in comparative literature at Harvard University. Prior to joining the Center, she lived in Warsaw, where she researched postwar Yiddish publishing. Rachelle shared som...

Translator and author Curt Leviant visits with The Shmooze to talk about this first English translation of Sholom Aleichem’s rediscovered novel "Moshkeleh the Thief". The novel has a riveting plot, an unusual love story, and a keenly observed portrayal of an underclass Jew, replete with characters never before seen in Yiddish literature. Episode 305 August 19, 2021 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Mas...

"On The Shmooze this week: Sebastian Schulman, executive director of KlezKanada, previews what’s in store for KlezKanada 2021 (August 23–29). KlezKanada was founded in 1996 to teach, nurture, and present to a broad public the best of Jewish traditional arts and Yiddish culture. In our conversation, we talk about how KlezKanada’s programs foster Jewish cultural and artistic creativity worldwide as...

"Mindl Cohen speaks with The Shmooze about the 2021 Pakn Treger Digital Translation Issue. As she writes in the introduction to the anthology, “Yiddish literature is full of depictions of natural landscapes—though this is probably not the first thing most people expect of it.” Our conversation touches on the work of some of the many writers included in the issue from Mendele Mocher Sforim, Itzik M...

The Shmooze speaks with author and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans about his latest book, "Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction". As Ilan explains, “In this volume is modern Jewish literature in the broadest sense. I am interested in the ways it mutates while remaining the same.” Episode 302 July 14, 2021 Yiddish Book Center Amherst, Massachusetts

"This week on The Shmooze Seth Rogovoy talks about the upcoming (July 11) virtual YIDSTOCK: The Festival of New Yiddish Music. The 75-minute virtual event features Frank London, Lorin Sklamberg, Eleanor Reissa, Daniel Kahn, Cilla Owens, Sarah Gordon & Michael Winograd, Polina and Merlin Shepherd, and as Seth tell us “tons more groovy wonderful musicians.” Episode 301 July 8, 2021 Yiddish Book Cent...

From his Lower East Side studio, artist Steve Marcus joins The Shmooze to talk about his early work as an Underground cartoonist - and his latest work which is currently on exhibit at the Yiddish Book Center. Through the Hat, weaves together Steve’s childhood memories of bagels and bialys, pickles and green tomatoes from the barrel, and paper-wrapped whitefish chubs with his personal journey and p...

Episode 0299: Javier Sinay on Argentinian Journalist Pinie Katz and the Murders of Moises Ville by Yiddish Book Center

Aaron Bendich is the twenty-seven-year-old behind “Borscht Beat,” a new Yiddish music show on WJFF Radio Catskill, the public radio station for the Catskills and Northeast Pennsylvania. He tells us how his latest radio show was inspired by his grandfather Max Bendich, who was the son of Jewish immigrants from present-day Ukraine and had a lifelong interest in Yiddish and American folk music. Aaron...

Translator, actor, and producer Caraid O’Brien joins us from her editing room where she’s putting the finishing touches on her radio drama production of Sholem Asch's play "The Dead Man", which she translated from the Yiddish. The haunting WWI drama takes place in the rubble of a decimated synagogue in Poland directly after the war. Dealing with dislocation, madness, and death, the surviving Jewis...

Motl Didner, associate art director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF), and NYTF literary manager Sabina Brukner talk with The Shmooze about their upcoming Yiddish Women Playwrights Festival, which gives women playwrights center stage at the NYTF. The festival kicks off with Chava Rosenfarb’s The Bird of the Ghetto, which chronicles the attempted Vilna Ghetto uprising and the tragic...

Judy Batalion is the author of the recently released The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, which illuminates the extraordinary history and accomplishments of brave Jewish women who became resistance fighters—a group of unknown heroes whose exploits have never been chronicled in full until now. She joins The Shmooze to talk about the amazing story beh...

The Shmooze visits with the multitalented Eleanor Reissa, a Tony-nominated director, Broadway actress, prize-winning playwright, soon-to-be published author, artistic director of the world’s oldest Yiddish theater company, and a singer who has performed in nearly every major venue around the world. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Eleanor is a captivating storyteller in both English and Yiddis...

On the phone with "The Shmooze" this week, Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Seigel talks with us about her work as a Yiddish singer, songwriter, actor, recording artist, and research librarian specializing in Yiddish language and culture at the New York Public Library. Among other things, Amanda tells us about how she came to Yiddish and about "Yidforsh," the Yiddish research Facebook group she launched to h...

Rabbi Avram Mlotek joins "The Shmooze" to talk about the history of the Third Seder, a long-standing Yiddish cultural tradition. Avram lets us in on what's on the bill for this year's virtual Third Seder--from Yiddish day school students from Melbourne, Australia, who will sing the Four Questions to performances by Michael Alpert, Sarah Gordon, Daniel Kahn, Steve Skybell, and many more. The event,...

This week's guest, Henry Sapoznik, is an award-winning producer, musicologist and performer, and writer in the fields of traditional and popular Yiddish and American music and culture. His latest project is the ongoing research about the so-called "shvartze khazonim," the African American cantors of the 1920s and '30s. We speak with Henry about Black Jewish cantor Thomas LaRue Jones, a much-belove...

We invited Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow Matthew Johnson onto "The Shmooze" to tell us about his recent discovery of the Yiddish writer Moyshe-Leyb Halpern's unfinished poetry. While doing research for his dissertation on the relationship between German- and Yiddish-language literature, Matthew uncovered a surprising find in YIVO's Halpern collection. He shares what's to be gleaned by the...

This week we visit with Esther Cohen, a longtime leader of labor culture in New York City and one of the organizers of a March 25 memorial to the women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that took place on March 25, 1911, after a fire broke out on the 8th floor of the factory, causing the death of 146 garment workers, many of them young Italian and Jewish immigrant women. Esther tell...

Performance and Jewish studies scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett joins us for a lively and informative conversation about her work as the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. As part of this work, she will be moderating "Meet the Family," an upcoming series of virtual conversations with the descendants of distinguished Polish Jews...

Writer and Yiddish translator Ellen Cassedy talks with The Shmooze about the new documentary "9to5: The Story of a Movement" and her role in the feminist labor movement at the center of this story. In conversation, she tells us about being inspired to activism by her Jewish immigrant grandfather's story of hearing the feminist labor union leader Rose Schneiderman--who is credited with coining the...