Ellen Cassedy was a founder of 9 to 5, the national association of working women. She is the author of Working 9 to 5: A women’s movement, a labor union, and the iconic movie (Chicago Review Press, foreword by Jane Fonda) and of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust. She’s also a translator from Yiddish. Listen to her Yiddish version of Dolly Parton’s “Working 9 to 5,” sung by Lea Kalisch. Visit her website at ellencassedy.com or follow her on Twitter @ellencassedy.
Before working women's activism was a movement, Yiddish-speaking women led the charge for worker's rights
The professor loitered on park benches in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and accosted people she overheard speaking Russian. She took out ads in Russian-language newspapers. She traveled to seven cities to hang out hung out in Jewish community centers, charity kitchens, and synagogues. To explore the roots of Russian Jewish identity, Anna Shternshis, professor of Jewish…
The scene: a bright red porch in the northeast corner of Poland, close to the borders of Lithuania, Belarus, and Russian Kaliningrad. I’m holding a steaming cup of tea, brewed from local herbs and sweetened with local honey. I’m talking with a cultural activist named Krzysztof Czyzewski (k-SHISH-toff chi-ZEF-ski). Our topic: the agora. Agora is…
The nation’s top honor for folk art went to a Yiddish singer, songwriter and poet from the Bronx last week. Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman was one of 12 honorees to receive a National Heritage Fellowship at a September 22 ceremony on Capitol Hill. “She is a master of Yiddish song and poetry,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of…
Chatzkel Lemchen died in 2001, but the legendary Jewish lexicographer has been given a new lease on life in Lithuania’s schools. Starting this month, children across Lithuania will begin watching and discussing “Uncle Chatzkel,” a film about Lemchen’s life story that serves as the centerpiece of a new curriculum about the country’s rich Jewish heritage….
Earlier this month, a curious “Park of Quiet” opened in the heart of Lithuania’s capital city. Despite its soothing name, the site is boiling with controversy. At issue is this Baltic country’s struggle to face an extraordinarily tumultuous past. Ten years ago, archaeologists exhumed some 700 bodies from beneath the green lawn of an old…
VILNIUS, Lithuania — Rachel Kostanian recalls hearing Lithuanian guides leading tourists through the streets of this city: “They would be speaking with such pride: Here is the palace, here is the castle, and here is the museum of this and that,” said Kostanian, a longtime Jewish resident of this Baltic capital. “And I would think,…
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