Meet the musicians turning old Yiddish poems into 21st-century songs
Two new albums reimagine a centuries-old tradition of adapting poetry to music
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News A Ukrainian immigrant in L.A. fights Putin with poetry
Watching Russian missiles slam into Ukrainian cities, seeing that 40-mile long Russian army convoy snaking its way toward Kyiv — it’s frightening, frustrating and debilitating. As tragedy unfolds in slow motion, there’s so little, really, that any of us can do. It’s like watching a child drown, the Russian author Maxim Osipov wrote, when you…
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Culture A Black Jewish poet’s call: High Holiday atonement means reckoning with racial injustice
Last year’s High Holidays followed a summer filled with racial justice protests, as many Jewish communities reckoned with their treatment of Jews of color and broader history on issues of race. Amidst this tumult, Aaron Levy Samuels, a co-founder of the media company Blavity, began to write a new poem, titled “Forgiveness.” The poem ties…
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Culture Sacrifice through Heresy
Read this article in Yiddish Qorbanot: Offerings Poems by Alisha Kaplan SUNY Press, 2021 Many people believe that sacrificing for a greater good is a virtue. In the Jewish tradition, even martyrdom in the right context is called “the sanctification of God’s holy name.” But what should you do when holiness is weakened — by…
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News Old Irving Park neighbors push to rename Kolmar Park to honor German-Jewish author killed in the Holocaust
Block Club Chicago is a nonprofit newsroom focused on Chicago’s neighborhoods. Subscribe to support their on-the-ground reporting here. Neighbors are pushing for a Northwest Side park to be renamed after an influential German-Jewish author and poet who died in the Holocaust. Kolmar Park, 4143 N. Kolmar Ave., is named for the street on which it…
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Fast Forward Jewish poet given Christian burial in Belarus
(JTA) — The remains of a Jewish poet were reburied in Belarus under a crucifix in a ceremony that featured prayers by priests. The reburial of Shmuel Yefimovich Plavnik, better known by his pen name Zmitrok Byaduli, took place on Tuesday at a Christian cemetery in Minsk, promoting critics to complain that it erased the…
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Community An ‘Al Cheyt’ for white Jews in 5781
An “Al Cheyt” for White Jews in 5781 It’s been a long year (The lunar one) And we’ve got atoning to do We could beat our chests But we are buying books And adding Facebook photo frames (I’m telling on myself here) So, it’s time to ground our feet and dig in deep to the…
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Community Winning “chai-kus” from around the country
Ever heard of haiku? Well what about “chai-ku?” The Book Meshuggenahs is a group of 18 award-winning Jewish children’s book authors – all women – from the United States and Israel. This year, they began an annual contest for “chai-ku,” and awarding each winner with a certificate and one of their books. They hope to…
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