Benny Mer
By Benny Mer
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Yiddish World Tel-Aviv Diaspora Museum changes its name—and perspective
Read this article in Yiddish In the heat of the COVID pandemic, the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora has recently re-opened under a new name – ANU: Museum of the Jewish People. The word “anu” means us in Hebrew. But it’s not only the name that’s been changed. The inner architecture and permanent exhibit have…
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Culture Like mushrooms after the rain: The flourishing of Yiddish culture in the D.P. camps
Read this article in Yiddish Words Reaching for Life: Yiddish Culture in Displaced Persons Camps (Hebrew) Ella Florsheim Published by the Zalman Shazar Center and Yad Vashem Publications, 2020, 344 pp. My father was among the 250,000 refugees who lived in Jewish displaced persons camps throughout Germany and Austria after World War II. But unlike…
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Yiddish World Why the exhibit on the Warsaw Jewish quarter, Muranow, is so good
When I first heard that Warsaw’s Polin Museum had an exhibit about Muranow, the former Jewish quarter of the Polish capital, my first instinct was to buy a ticket to Warsaw – until I remembered that we’re in the midst of an epidemic. Although I live in Israel, Muranow has become very familiar to me…
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Culture The USSR Turned Against The Jews. But First, It Was A Yiddish Intellectual Haven.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s not every day that a manuscript gets discovered in an attic, let alone a complete book written by a distinguished Yiddish author. Well, in the world of Yiddish, where even published books are often relegated to synagogue basements, occasions like these are not entirely unusual. Nonetheless,…
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Yiddish World Reimagining the Lively Character of Pre-War Smocza Street
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. For the past few months I’ve been living in a place that no longer exists. I may be sleeping in my own bed in Tel Aviv, but every morning, at the light of dawn, I steal across the borders of time to a thriving Jewish street in…
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Culture ‘The Best Hope For Yiddish is in Israel:’ An Interview With Scholar Avrom Nowerstern
The following article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It was translated from the Yiddish by Meena Viswanath. Dr. Avrom Nowerstern, the long-standing Yiddish teacher and researcher, is the director of Beth Shalom Aleichem in Tel Aviv. He was born in Argentina in 1951 and moved to Israel in 1969. Nowerstern is no newcomer to…
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Theater They helped elect Los Angeles’ first Black mayor; but to him, they were just Bob and Shirley
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