Who was the audience for the rhyming Purim play?
This excerpt of Alef Kats’s ‘Purim shpil,’ presented in English, focuses on King Ahasuerus as a drunken fool
Itzik Manger
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Culture The USSR Turned Against The Jews. But First, It Was A Yiddish Intellectual Haven.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s not every day that a manuscript gets discovered in an attic, let alone a complete book written by a distinguished Yiddish author. Well, in the world of Yiddish, where even published books are often relegated to synagogue basements, occasions like these are not entirely unusual. Nonetheless,…
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Culture The Rediscovery of a Yiddish Master Painter From Czernovitz
In 2002, during a visit to his native Israel, Haim Baron’s mother urged him to buy one of his cousin Isiu Schärf’s artworks. Baron had seen some of Schärf’s work before in the apartment of his maternal grandmother, Schärf’s aunt, who had sponsored the artist’s emigration from Romania to Israel in 1974. And Baron and…
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The Schmooze Almost the Whole ‘Megile’
“The Megile of Itzik Manger” and the National Yiddish Theatre seem like a perfect partnership: love and marriage, horse and carriage, Purim shpiel and the Folksbiene. Manger is considered one of the most important Yiddish poets and playwrights, and “The Megile” is one of several plays in which he put his own stamp on a…
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The Schmooze Lev Berinsky, a Poet in Exile Between Time and Eternity
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. Lev Berinsky is poet who cannot be bounded by easy definitions. He writes in Russian and Yiddish, and lives in Israel, but is best known in Germany. A poet to his core, he is also a gifted translator, journalist and essayist. Though his work is scattered throughout…
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The Schmooze Out and About: Midrash and the Megillah; Einstein’s Archives Unleashed
How Yiddish poet Itzik Manger brought midrash to the Megillah. Bob Dylan, Brandeis University, 1963: Coming soon to a record store near you. In other Dylanalia, Bob’s upcoming Asian tour now includes stops in both China and Vietnam. David Kaufmann on new poetry by Adrienne Rich. The Hebrew University is putting Albert Einstein’s archives on…
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