Celebrate The Fourth Of July With These Stunning Yiddish Covers Of American Classics
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Jordan Kutzik June 30, 2017
This post originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts.
Jews like many immigrant groups sought both to assimilate into broader American society and to hold onto their roots. One way to express pride in their Americanism and at the same time celebrate their own culture was to sing patriotic American songs in Yiddish. During the period of mass-immigration to America (1881-1924), songwriters created many Yiddish versions of patriotic American songs, as well as original patriotic songs in Yiddish.
In honor of America’s birthday here are four patriotic songs in Yiddish sung by the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus under the direction of Binyumen Schaechter. The videos, filmed during a 2014 concert, have subtitles in both English and transliterated Yiddish so you can sing along.
“The Star-Spangled Banner” (Original lyrics: Francis Scott Key, Yiddish: Berl Lapin)
Here the choir performs a stirring bilingual rendition of “America the Beautiful” (Original lyrics: Katharine Lee Bates, Yiddish: Berl Lapin)
And here are two patriotic songs that were originally written in Yiddish:
“America” by Zishe Weinper.
And a short ode to the Fourth of July by Elyokum Zunser.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
