Back in 1906, when he was 15, Benny Swartzberg could not have foreseen that, a century later, his growing collection of postcards would provide the raw material for an online store managed by his grandson. But today, Swartzberg’s grandson Steven Weiss has turned that collection into an unusual shop, selling such merchandise as journals covered…
On a frigid January evening in New York City, Rebecca Joy Fletcher and Stephen Mo Hanan performed their two-person act, “Kleynkunst!: Warsaw’s Brave and Brilliant Yiddish Cabaret,” before a full house at Helen’s Restaurant, Cabaret & Piano Lounge in Chelsea, as part of a five-day-long European cabaret festival called Kabarett Fête. The title of Fletcher’s…
Last month’s publication of “The Cross and Other Jewish Stories” by Ukrainian-born Yiddish author Lamed Shapiro marks both a new beginning and the beginning of the end for the New Yiddish Library Series. “The Cross” is the seventh book of the series, a collaborative effort involving the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, the…
A new Yiddish course is debuting in an unexpected place: Bangkok. The Goethe Institute in the Thai capital is offering Yiddish for the first time to graduates of its advanced German-language program, most of whom are Thai Buddhists. The class, which is being conducted in German and Yiddish, will also teach the basics of Jewish…
Filmmaker Dan Katzir is the last person anyone would expect to fall in love with Yiddish. Growing up in a prominent Israeli family with strong Zionist beliefs — his great-great-uncle was former Israeli prime minister Moshe Sharet, and his great-uncle was former Israeli president Efraim Katzir — he had been brought up to be averse…
Where can you find a lively venue these days in which more than a third of the attendees under the age of 30 are fluent Yiddish speakers? Every Thursday, from 10 p.m. until about 2:30 a.m., a group called Chulent meets on the third floor of the Millinery Centre Synagogue — an old building in…
Washington – Even as a new study found that American Jews are significantly more opposed to the Iraq War than are Christians, Jewish organizations decided not to take up the issue at their annual policy conference. Drawing from the results of 13 polls conducted since 2005, the Gallup Organization found that 77% of American Jews…
FRAN “THE NANNY” DRESCHER APPLAUDS ZUBIN “THE CONDUCTOR” MEHTA There’s that old saw about Jewish events starting on “Jewish time” — 20 minutes late or, as Israel’s consul general, Arye Mekel, once joshed, “Israeli time, which is 20 minutes after Jewish time.” Since the February l Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’s concert began at 7 p.m., not…
The Orthodox Jewish director of a new documentary about Jesus’ purported burial chamber is beating back a flurry of attacks, saying that Jewish archaeologists and Christian scholars are threatened by the implications of his claim. “Israeli archaeologists don’t like to find anything connected with Jesus, because it seems to ‘Christianize’ Jewish history, and Christian scholars…
The Bush administration is being accused of politicizing civil rights enforcement after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales used a major address in front of Christian allies to unveil the Justice Department’s stepped-up plan for defending religious liberties. Gonzales presented the new initiative, dubbed the First Freedoms Project, in a February 20 speech in Nashville, Tenn., to…
Jerusalem – After an initial barrage of hostile comments from a broad spectrum of Israeli Jews, the so-called Future Vision document on Arab-Jewish relations in Israel — prepared by a group of top Israeli-Arab public figures — is quietly getting a closer look from some of the Jewish state’s leading institutions. A senior official in…
