VIDEO: In honor of Petula Clark’s 90th birthday — a hilarious Yiddish take on the song ‘Downtown’
The clever lyrics in this clip, subtitled in English, were written by the bestselling author of 'Born to Kvetch,' Michael Wex
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Culture Barry Manilow on dueling cantors, Levy’s Rye and his musical’s New York debut
Barry Manilow never meant to become a pop star, and his Grammy, Emmy and Tony-winning career as a songwriter is a source of perennial tsuris for his lyric-writing partner Bruce Sussman. If you ask them, “Mandy” came, gave and (forget what you heard) did some taking. That breakout hit diverted the pair’s original ambition: writing…
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Yiddish World How a Yiddish folksong appeared on a 1967 American pop album
At the height of his success in 1967, Jay Black, lead singer of the pop band, Jay and the Americans, recorded a popular Yiddish folk song and managed to convince his record label, United Artists, to include it on the B-side of their album, “Try Some of This!” The story, first published by the Forward…
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Culture Finally, we can move on from ‘Dreidel Dreidel’ — a true Hanukkah bop has dropped
In the past few weeks, I’ve written about everything wrong with Hanukkah today — kitschy merchandise, Christmasification, the Maccabees. So as we approach the end of the eight nights, I wanted to finish on a sweeter note: a pop anthem made for the holiday that, in my humble opinion, does everything right. “Hanukkah” comes from…
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Yiddish World Yiddish translation of iconic Russian song plays on national Russian TV
Yoel Matveyev, the Forverts’ correspondent in Russia, was sitting alone in a Moscow train station in the middle of the night, when he suddenly got the inspiration to translate the Russian song, “Nadezhda”, about two lovers separated by a long and difficult journey, into Yiddish. Although the song was written in 1971, it remains hugely…
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Culture How BTS and K-pop exploded the world music scene
In June, a self-contained — if not quite silent — majority made its presence known to the world. Fans of K-pop, the common shorthand for South Korean popular music, banded together to inflate President Donald Trump’s projected turnout for his widely-publicized rally in Tulsa, Okla. While their scheme, which resulted in a sea of empty…
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Culture Happy 78th Birthday To Paul McCartney, The Jewish Beatle
About seven years ago, Sir Paul McCartney, who turns 78 today, released an album called “New.” But given the artist’s love affair with all things Jewish for the past half-century — including collaborators, business associates, girlfriends and wives — the title could well be meant as a transliteration of the all-purpose Jewish word nu. Recently,…
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The Schmooze Kacey Musgraves, Country Music Superstar, Is My On-The-Go Rabbi
Driving up Route 206 in the pouring rain on the way to my parents’ home in northern New Jersey, I slammed my foot on the brake, trying not to hit the car in front of me. Saturday morning traffic on 206 is a nightmare. As I waited at the stop light that would allow me…
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Yiddish אַ קורס וועגן די ייִדישע דיאַלעקטן אינעם אַלטן ייִשובֿA course about the Yiddish dialects of the ‘Old Yishuv’
דער ירושלימער ייִדיש שטאַמט פֿון ליטוויש ייִדיש בעת דער צפֿתער ייִדיש שטאַמט פֿון אוקראַיִניש ייִדיש.
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