On "The Shmooze," Daniela Smolov Levy and Mark Kligman talk about their five-part lecture series that reveals how popular Italian opera was aimed not only at Italian immigrants and native-born Americans but also the Yiddish-speaking public, who were then emerging as an integral part of the American cultural scene.

Episode 317

January 13, 2022

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, MA

Melissa Weisz, Malky Goldman, and Rachel Botchan join us on "The Shmooze" to talk about their upcoming performance of "Di Froyen (The Women)," based on the play "Women’s Minyan" by Naomi Ragen, adapted for the New Yiddish Rep by Weisz and Goldman, and directed by Botchan. The play is a one-act drama of an abused Orthodox Jewish wife who is being kept from her children. In conversation the women talk about the role of Yiddish in their work and the universality of the story.

Our conversation touches on their work as actors, co-writers, and director of the one-act drama and the role of Yiddish in their work.

Presented as part of the Yiddish Book Center’s 2022 Decade of Discovery Women in Yiddish.

Episode 316

January 6, 2021

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, MA

Justin Cammy visited with "The Shmooze" to talk about his newly published translation of Avrom Sutzkever’s "From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg." Justin’s translation is based on two extant versions of the full text of Sutzkever’s memoir, diary notes, and full testimony at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946.

Episode 315

December 16, 2021

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, MA

"The Shmooze" visits with Frank London to chat about the upcoming “Celebrate Hanukkah with the Klezmatics” taking place at Symphony Space December 5, 2021. The performance will feature Hanukkah-themed songs, many written by American folk singer Woody Guthrie, who was inspired by the Jewish culture he encountered while living in Coney Island in the 1940s.

Episode 314

December 2, 2021

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, MA

We visit with translator Helen Mintz to speak about how four stories from her translation of "Vilna My Vilna: Stories by Abraham Karpinowitz" (Syracuse University Press) have been adapted by Stephen Aberle and will be presented as a staged reading by Western Gold, a Vancouver theater company, November 28 to December 6, 2021.

Episode 313

November 18, 2021

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, MA

This week we visit with cartoonist Ken Krimstein to talk about his new graphic novel, based on six of hundreds of newly discovered, never-before-published essays by Eastern European Jewish teens written on the brink of World War II, and found in 2017 hidden in a Lithuanian church cellar.

Episode 312

November 11, 2021

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, MA

The Shmooze visits with curator Sam Sackeroff to talk about Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art, currently on exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York. The exhibit of paintings, drawings, and Judaica focuses on the seizure and movement of artworks as they traveled through distribution centers, sites of recovery, and networks of collectors before, during, and after World War II.

Episode 311

November 4, 2021

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, MA

Alex Weiser and Ben Kaplan sit down with The Shmooze to talk about their forthcoming collaboration, "The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language." The new full-length opera is based on the true story of Yiddish linguist Yudel Mark, who in 1950s postwar New York City set out to write the world’s first fully comprehensive Yiddish dictionary—an effort of linguistic preservation, and a memorial to the dead. The opera invites audiences to consider the extent to which a language and a culture can be saved, the nature of grief, and the power of language itself to transform and shape us into who we are.

Episode 310

October 28, 2021

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, MA

This week "The Shmooze" goes transatlantic for a conversation with London-based Vivi Lachs, a social and cultural historian, Yiddishist, and postdoc research fellow at Queen Mary University of London. The author of several books including "White Chapel Noise," Vivi translated the newly released "London Yiddishtown: East End Jewish Life in Yiddish Sketch and Story, 1930–1950," a collection of previously untranslated short stories and sketches by Katie Brown, A. M. Kaizer, and I. A. Lisky.

Episode 309

October 21, 2021

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, MA

Cameron Bernstein, a 2021/2022 Yiddish Book Center Fellow, joined The Shmooze to talk about her early interest in Yiddish and how she’s taken Yiddish language, culture, and history to platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

Episode 308

October 14, 2021

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, MA