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.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO