Literary celebration to mark poet Itzik Manger’s 120th birthday

By Forverts Staff May 25, 2021

Read this article in Yiddish

On Sunday, May 30, a number of renowned singers and actors will perform songs by the great Yiddish poet, Itzik Manger, during an online literary event celebrating 120 years since his birth.

The program, “Itzik Manger and the Golden Peacock”, will be in Yiddish with English subtitles and will be streamed via Zoom at 2:00 PM EDT. The celebration is sponsored by the League for Yiddish, the Congress for Jewish Culture, Yung Yiddish, Ot Azoy, and the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language.

The golden peacock mentioned in the event’s title refers to an image which appears frequently in Manger’s work and has come to serve as a symbol for Yiddish literary creativity in general.

In addition to singing the songs, the performers will explain how Manger’s poems harken back to older folk traditions while simultaneously expanding upon them. Participants will include singer and actor Mike Burstyn, who appeared as a young man in a landmark Israeli production of a musical based on Manger’s poetic reimagining of the Megillah; actor and director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, Shane Baker; actor, singer and founder of “Yung Yiddish”, Mendy Cahan; singer Shura Lipowsky; singer and writer Ruth Levin; composer and conductor of the Yiddish Philharmonic Orchestra, Binyumen Schaechter, and the poet, editor and lexicographer, Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath.

Rukhl Schaechter and Zach Golden are the staff of the Forverts, the Yiddish Forward.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rukhl Schaechter, Yiddish Editor