This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Although the sheer brutality of the pogroms has been largely overshadowed by the Holocaust, the massacres of Jews in the Russian Empire before WWI and especially in the postwar chaos surrounding its dissolution (1917-1922) were so well-orchestrated that some modern scholars consider them to have constituted a…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Few people know that Long Island was once a national center of duck farming with hundreds of active poultry farms. Digging through Purim issues of yesteryear our archivist Chana Pollack recently came upon this amusing ad that ran in The Forward on March 5th, 1925, telling Jewish…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. When Hirsch Lewin was deported from Germany in 1940 after six months of suffering in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he could not have imagined that seventy-six years later, musicians in Berlin would release an album of the music he had produced. Even when Lewin founded his record…
Leonard Cohen died exactly a year ago on November 7, 2016. In honor of his yarzheit, or the anniversary of his death, the Forward is proud to reprise this story and video of an amazing version of ‘Hallelujah’ in Yiddish. The Berlin-based singer-songwriter and “punk-Klezmer” musician Daniel Kahn is one of the most innovative performers…
One day, Jessye Stein, a computer teacher on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, was trying to persuade a student to return to his Lakota language class when the young man suddenly posed an unexpected question. “He asked me where I come from, where my people come from and what my ancestral language…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the final countdown before the election, Ruchie Freier was still uncertain whether she would win the race for Civil Court Judge. But win she did, and starting in January 2017, she’ll become the first Hasidic woman ever elected to this high position. Sipping hot tea with…
Last November, Israeli Hasidic singer Chaim Shlomo Mayesz’s Yiddish music video of his newly released album Bas Kol went viral, garnering more than 400,000 hits. The video, which was shot at his brother’s Hasidic wedding in Borough Park, featured Mayesz rapping to the tune of Fifth Harmony’s hip hop track “Worth It”. The song and…
Last year Yiddish Soul was the highlight of the Folksbiene’s Kulturfest, a festival that featured hundreds of performances over eight packed days and attracted tens of thousands of attendees. At the time, I wrote in the Yiddish Forward that this high-profile concert of Hasidic and cantorial music, presented as part of SummerStage in Central Park,…
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