Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Forverts in English

VIDEO: Yiddish songs for the 4th of July

Like most immigrant groups, Jews who settled in the U.S. were eager to assimilate, while still holding on to their cultural roots.

Like most immigrant groups, Jews who settled in the goldene medine (the golden land) were eager to assimilate, while still holding on to their cultural roots.

One way to do this was to translate American songs into Yiddish. During the years of mass immigration, between 1881 and 1924, a number of patriotic American songs appeared in the mame-loshn.

As a tribute to these Jewish immigrants, here are four songs, performed by the Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus, that you can listen to as a way of celebrating the Fourth of July.

The first song is “America the Beautiful”, written by Katharine Lee Bates, melody by Samuel Ward. The Yiddish translation by the late Yiddish poet Berl Lapin is as magnificent as the original.

Lapin also translated the American national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner, into Yiddish. The original lyrics are by Francis Scott Key; melody by John Stafford Smith.

Not all patriotic American songs in Yiddish are translations from English, though. The Yiddish poet Zishe Weinper (1893-1957) wrote the poem, “America” (performed below) while visiting the Grand Canyon. However, as Weinper wrote in the introduction to his poetry collection, “Baym Grend Kenyon” (“At the Grand Canyon”, 1947): “One shouldn’t look for descriptions of the Grand Canyon in these poems … They are variations on the emotions and reflexions from my trip to that magical wonder.”

Finally, here is a song written and composed by Elyokum Zunser, “Zman matn kheyruseynu” (The Time of the Giving of Our Freedom). Musicologist Samantha Zerin has pointed out that after Zunser had experienced the persecution of and hatred towards the Jews in Europe,  he viewed his immigration to America as “a second Exodus from Egypt,” a Biblical analogy one can clearly see in the text to this song.

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.

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

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.