Lorde’s ‘Team’ Gets a Yiddish Cover

Image by Getty Images

By Daniel Estrin May 27, 2015

Do you wish pop star Lorde would lay down a track in Yiddish already? Well, the next best thing just happened.

The Technicalities, an Israeli husband-and-wife Yiddish music duo in their early 30s, recently recorded this cover of Lorde’s hit song “Team.” Shira Z. Carmel — who also sings in the popular Israeli doo-wop band The Hazelnuts — croons in the mamaloshen with her husband Alon Diament on accordion.

The Yiddish cover is a part of an , including covers in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and French.

Saul Noam Zaritt, editor of a new Yiddish Studies journal and soon-to-be Harvard Yiddish prof, translated the lyrics along with Yael Levi to include some clever winks. Where the chorus begins “We live in cities,” you’ll hear “shtetlach.”

And his translation of the line “living in ruins of the palace within my dreams” includes a reference to the Polish shtetl Kuzmir, where an old Jewish legend says a Polish king built a palace for his Jewish princess.

For musician and author Yuval Ben-Ami, who spearheaded the tribute project, the “ruins of the palace” is Yiddish itself: the dying language of a palatial culture. Singing Lorde in Yiddish, Ben-Ami says, is “doing it an honor that honors us.”

Listen to the cover here, and try to follow along with the English lyrics. (Or the Yiddish!)

(Daniel Estrin is a print and radio journalist. Follow him on Twitter at @danielestrin.)

Jewniverse is a daily email list and blog featuring extraordinary, inspirational, forgotten, and just-plain-strange dispatches from Jewish culture, tradition and history. Sign up at www.TheJewniverse.com.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re in the middle of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 22.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO