Yiddish
Montreal, a Love StoryTuesday, June 28, 2011 by Allan Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The second International Yiddish Theater Festival, an elaborate ten-day fete whose program ranges from carnavalesque performances to academic symposia, just wrapped up last week in Montreal. What is especially surprising about this celebration is that Montreal is a city with a Jewish population of less than 80,000.
Shakespeare, Much Improved?Tuesday, March 22, 2011 by Nahma Sandrow | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
One of the few things people think they know about Yiddish theater in America is that once upon a time there was a production, probably of King Lear, advertised as "translated and much improved." Joel Berkowitz's history, Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (2002), quotes the line but never gives an attribution, which suggests that nobody ever actually said it. But someone might have.
The Riddle of the SatmarThursday, February 17, 2011 by Allan Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
A prospect terrifying to secular Israelis and Zionists worldwide has been the rapid growth of the Jewish state's ultra-Orthodox (haredi) community. Given the stranglehold of haredi political parties on recent coalition governments, and the encroachments by non-Zionist haredi clerics upon Israel's chief rabbinate, once religiously moderate and firmly Zionist, the fear is not entirely irrational.
Editors' Picks
The Wedding Guests Have Goose Feet Damion Searls, Los Angeles Review of Books. In postwar America, I.B. Singer was the one who made it—into English, into the pages of Playboy and Esquire and the New Yorker, into big Hollywood movies, into being thought “modern.” But the identity politics that worked for Singer in the short term risk making him unread now.
Radio Days Jenna Weissman Joselit, From Under the Fig Tree. Thirty years ago, musicologist Henry Sapoznik discovered a trove of 1,000 recordings of inter-war American Yiddish radio shows.
Job the Trotskyist Isaac Bashevis Singer, New Yorker. “There is no worse lowlife than a Jewish Chekist, Yevsektsia member, or plain Communist. They spit on the truth. They’re ready to kill and torture over the least suspicion.” (Fiction; Translated by David Stromberg)
Spinning Spinoza Allan Nadler, Forward. From David Ben-Gurion to Jonathan Sacks, Jews are determined to see the traditionally Jewish elements of Spinoza’s thought—by misreading his genuine heresy.
Launching Yiddish Farm Ezra Glinter, Forward. Some 50 miles northwest of Manhattan, two men aim to create an immersive Yiddish environment that is also a model of sustainable agriculture. (With video)