The queen of Yiddish cabaret, Eleanor Reissa, is a Brooklyn-born native Yiddish speaker whose work in theater as a director, actor, writer, and choreographer garnered her a Tony Award nomination and propelled her into the front ranks of Yiddish theater and music.

Episode 0115

June 9, 2016

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, Massachusetts

The new website sholemaleichem.org considers the life and work of the great Yiddish writer on his hundredth "yortsayt." Sholem Aleichem biographer Jeremy Dauber and filmmaker Sam Ball, driving forces behind the site, talk about the project’s use of exciting multimedia and interactive resources, and about the writer’s formidable legacy and the sometimes surprising ways his work continues to influence contemporary culture. The Yiddish Book Center is a collaborator on the site.

Episode 0114

May 12, 2016

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, Massachusetts

Over his career, Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer worked with dozens of female translators, with whom he developed close—and often complicated—relationships. Filmmaker Asaf Galay talks about his documentary "The Muses of Bashevis Singer," which includes interviews with a number of those women, and about the writer’s particular approach to translating his work for an English-reading audience.

Episode 0113

April 18, 2016

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, Massachusetts

Author and scholar Ilan Stavans talks about his latest book, "The New World Haggadah," a contemporary take that focuses on the Jewish experience from Moses to the Americas, and discusses why a multicultural, multilingual "Haggadah" is so important for today’s seder.

Episode 0112

April 6, 2016

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, Massachusetts

As journalists writing in the wartime Polish ghettos, Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz captured the anxiety and uncertainty of daily life for Jews with breathtaking immediacy. Professor Sam Kassow, coeditor of "In Those Nightmarish Days," a collection of their work recently published by the Yiddish Book Center’s New Yiddish Library, discusses the important contributions the two men’s reporting make to our understanding of this place and time.

Episode 0111

March 15, 2016

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, Massachusetts

Last summer, educators from around the country came to the Yiddish Book Center for our inaugural Great Jewish Books Teacher Workshop, where they worked together to develop curricula to bring modern Jewish literature and culture into their classrooms. Here, three of those teachers tell us what brought them to the workshop and how the program will shape their teaching.

Episode 0110

December 30, 2015

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, Massachusetts

Though it has a long and varied history, the town of Oświęcim, Poland, is notorious for one thing: Auschwitz. Yet for centuries prior to World War Two, Jews and non-Jews lived side by side there. Shiri B. Sandler, curator of the exhibit "A Town Known as Auschwitz"--now at the Yiddish Book Center--discusses the rich history of the town and its Jewish residents from the sixteenth century through the post-war period.

Episode 0109

December 10, 2015

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, Massachusetts

Tina Wasserman, author of "Entree to Judaism: A Culinary Exploration of the Jewish Diaspora" and "Entree to Judaism for Families: Jewish Cooking and Kitchen Conversations with Children," visits with us to discuss some traditional Hanukkah recipes and the histories behind them.

Episode 0108

December 7, 2015

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, Massachusetts

At the Great Jewish Books Summer Program, high school students spend a week at the Yiddish Book Center delving into both classic and new works of modern Jewish literature. Two members of the Great Jewish Books class of 2015 talk about the engaging conversations they had in class, the fun of bonding with other students with shared interests, and the surprising things they discovered about the literature and themselves.

Episode 0107

November 15, 2015

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, Massachusetts

In 1938, Fania Lewando, the chef and owner of a popular vegetarian restaurant in Vilna, Lithuania, published hundreds of her recipes—from traditional Jewish dishes to vegetarian versions of holiday staples—in a cookbook. Culinary anthropologist Eve Jochnowitz tells us how the book was rediscovered decades later and how she came to translate it from the original Yiddish, making its delicious contents available for the first time to English-speaking cooks.

Episode 0106

November 4, 2015

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, Massachusetts