Writer and artist Molly Crabapple visited with "The Shmooze" to speak about her forthcoming book, "Here Where We Live Is Our Country", the first popular history of the Bund. Molly re-creates the Bundists’ extraordinary world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, clandestine revolutionaries and lovers on the barricades. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Sam Rothbort created “memory paintings” with the hope of resurrecting the vanished world of his shtetl childhood. Decades later, his great-granddaughter Molly discovered these paintings, and one stood out: a girl, her dress the color of sky, hurling a rock through a cottage window. It was this painting—"Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows"—that introduced Molly to the Jewish Labor Bund.

Episode 406

March 5, 2026

Amherst, MA

Librettist and playwright Stephanie Fleischmann and composer and playwright Alex Weiser sat down with "The Shmooze" to talk about their collaboration on "Tevye’s Daughters." Their opera is based on Sholem Aleichem’s iconic Yiddish stories, exploring the tragic death of Tevye’s lesser-known daughter, Shprintse. The opera also traces the lasting impact of Shprintse’s fate on her sisters as elderly immigrants living in New York. The opera will be performed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on March 19, 2026.

Episode 405

February 24, 2026

Amherst, MA

Author Jane Ziegelman joined "The Shmooze "to talk about her latest book, "Once There Was a Town." In conversation Jane talks about Yizkor (memorial) books and how she discovered the story of her family’s ancestral shtetl between the pages of the Luboml Yizkor book.

Episode 404

February 12, 2026

Amherst, MA

Juliette Carbonnier joins The Shmooze to talk about her one-woman play, Polin. Polin is both a travel story and a ghost story, taking the audience through the Warsaw cabaret scene of the 1920s, the Lodz Ghetto in the 1930s, the Terezin concentration camp in the 1940s, and the Catskills Borscht Belt of the 1950s. Polin is also a love letter to New York City as homeland, so that is where we begin and end the journey. Polin was developed through Princeton University’s Martin A. Dale ’53 Fellowship and will be presented on January 30, 2026, at the Jalopy Theatre in Brooklyn, New York.

Episode 403

January 15, 2026

Amherst, MA

Film director, film producer, and screenwriter Mark Jay spoke with "The Shmooze" about his 1993 documentary film "East Endings". "East Endings" documents a night at Bloom’s in May 1993—then one of the last remaining kosher restaurants in Whitechapel. Harry Blacker, renowned cartoonist and satirist of British Jewry, arrives to celebrate his 83rd birthday. Greeted by a group of old friends including Anna Tzelniker, Barnet Litvinoff, Bill Fishman, Brian Sewell, Simon Blumenfeld, and Rabbi Lionel Blue, they spend the evening together reminiscing about the Jewish East End of the 1930s: its humor, history, and politics of solidarity.

Episode 402

December 16, 2025

Amherst, MA

Sebastian Schulman joined The Shmooze to talk about the Yiddish Book Center’s upcoming online course Speak the World! A Tour of Global Jewish Languages. Sebastian shared that the four-part online course will explore Jewish languages with scholars, activists, and artists who are working in the field today. Instructors will speak about the diversity, history, and the contemporary efforts to preserve, document, and continue speaking these languages. This course is presented in partnership with The Jewish Language Project.

Episode 401

December 15, 2025

Amherst, MA

Dr. Rachel Lichtenstein, one of the foremost chroniclers of Jewish East London, visited with The Shmooze to talk about A. N. Stencl, a native Yiddish speaker from Poland, who settled in London’s East End in 1936 and became an activist and campaigner for the continuation of Yiddish. His extraordinary life spanned the height and demise of contemporary Yiddish culture. Stencl’s literary journal, Loshn un lebn (Language and Life), featured his own memoirs, poems, and essays alongside an array of work by other Yiddish writers from around the globe that explored political and literary topics of the time. Rachel’s work on Stencl includes a forthcoming book, The Prince of Whitechapel, a website hosting the complete collection Loshn un lebn, and a digital archive on Stencl in collaboration with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Centre for Jewish History in New York, funded by Arcadia.

Episode 400

December 9, 2025

Amherst, MA

Ellen Cassedy and Andrew Cassel joined The Shmooze to talk about their work translating So We Died: A Memoir of Life and Death in the Ghetto of Šiauliai, Lithuania, by Levi Shalit. Few accounts of the Šiauliai, or Shavl, Ghetto survived the war. Shalit’s work offers English-language readers a rare insight into a vital chapter of history. In conversation we learn about Levi Shalit the writer and how his literary and journalist style illuminates the Shavl Ghetto’s daily struggles, false hopes, and atrocities.

Episode 399

October 30, 2025

Amherst, MA

Yiddish: A Global Culture sound clip of "Women Behaving Badly"

Shakespeare & Company’s Artistic Director Allyn Burrows and the co-chair of the upcoming Celebrating Jewish Plays program Greg Lipper sat down with "The Shmooze" to talk about the weekend-long event. Celebrating Jewish Plays runs October 10–12, 2025, and will feature four staged readings—"The Price," by Arthur Miller; "The Sisters Rosensweig," by Wendy Wasserstein; "Here There Are Blueberries," by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich; and "Roz and Ray," by Karen Hartman, featuring Tony-nominated actor John Douglas Thompson ("The Gilded Age"). Established in the 1970s, Shakespeare & Company, in Lenox, Massachusetts, develops and performs Shakespeare’s works as well as other classic, contemporary, and socially and politically significant works. The company embraces the core values of Shakespearean ethos: collaboration, commitment to language, visceral experience, and classical ideals expressed with physical prowess and an embodied contemporary voice.

Episode 397

September 21, 2025

Amherst, MA "