Don’t just say you’re a secular Jew. To honor our heritage, study it.
Meet four secular Jews who are uniquely knowledgeable in the rich Yiddish cultural legacy, which includes literature, history and yes, religion.
Meet four secular Jews who are uniquely knowledgeable in the rich Yiddish cultural legacy, which includes literature, history and yes, religion.
“The Butcher’s Share,” the new album by Yiddish-punk outfit Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird, could hardly be more timely. Drawing from and building upon the great tradition of Yiddish songs of resistance – partisan songs, worker’s anthems, gangster ballads – Kahn’s latest album speaks directly to the urgent political challenges of our time and…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The longtime editor of the Bundist journal Lebns-Fragn and an Israel-correspondent for the Forverts, Yitzhak Luden z”l, used to say that Yiddish today outside of the Hasidic world is a language mainly spoken at festivals. Soon we’ll be able to say that it’s also spoken on river…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the traditional Jewish betrothal ceremony (called tnoyim in Yiddish), the bride and groom barely play a role. The parents of both sides draw up a document detailing all the prenuptial conditions; the parents then sign that document, alongside two “kosher” witnesses. But at the recent engagement…
It’s about two hours before their show at the JCC in Manhattan, and I’m having dinner with Psoy Korolenko and Daniel Kahn, the duo known as the Unternationale. As a solo performer, Korolenko has been winning fans in the United States, mostly at clubs and gatherings catering to young Russian émigrés and at university campuses….
October 4 was the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, which erupted when Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists planned to march through the East End of London. Five thousand black-shirted men amassed on the border of Stepney, which at the time 60,000 Jews called home. But they didn’t get in: 300,000 people…
Courtesy of Daniel Kahn We all know people who seem to have been born in the wrong decade — or even in the wrong century. Only very few of them, however, attempting to connect their society with that of another world, stretch across eras, and become giants — artists and thinkers like Sun Ra, Walter…
For all of its charitable mishloach manot-giving and passive-aggressive gragger-shaking, Purim is hardly the tamest Jewish holiday. At its best (worst?) the celebration follows a sort of Bakhtinian carnivalesque disorder, with masks, public denunciations of the villain Haman and booze — lots of booze. With that in mind, one would expect Moscow, surely a world…
די פּאָעטעסע, וואָס איז געבוירן געוואָרן דעם 7טן אויגוסט, האָט געשריבן לידער וואָס זענען באַליבט געוואָרן בײַ מענטשן פֿון אַלע עלטערס.
THE TEMPLE EMANU-EL STREICKER CENTER and Virtual
Aug 10, 2022
7 pm ET ·
Will the last Jew left in New York’s congressional delegation be reelected? Will New York’s senior congresswoman receive another term? Or will one of the newcomers upend Manhattan politics?