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A 4,000-person Yiddish sing-along will take place in Central Park this summer
(New York Jewish Week) — This summer, New Yorkers will have the opportunity to hear their favorite Yiddish songs under the stars — and sing along at the same time.
“New York Sings Yiddish,” a free concert of Yiddish music featuring The Klezmatics and more, will be performed in Central Park on June 14 at 7 p.m. as part of Capital One City Parks Foundation’s SummerStage series. There have been other Yiddish concerts as part of this longstanding, free-of-charge NYC summer tradition. But this year, for the first time ever, the concert will be a massive sing-along — the Yiddish lyrics to each song will be projected onto a giant screen and accessible through a QR code on audience members’ phones.
Presented in partnership with the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene and the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and supported by the the Workers Circle, a slew of well-known Yiddish musicians are slated to perform, including, Joshua “SoCalled” Dolgin, Lea Kalisch, Cantor Magda Fishman, Sara Mina Gordon, Cantor Netanel Hershtik, Elmore James, Daniel Kahn and Eleanor Reissa.
“It’s completely new this year,” Workers Circle CEO Ann Toback told the New York Jewish Week of the sing-along. “It used to be an organic sing-along because the audience had grown up on many of these songs. Today, we’re really looking at new generations, many of whom are interested in Yiddish and love Yiddish music or, or are intrigued by Yiddish music, but they didn’t grow up on these songs. How much fun is it that this year’s concert is providing a tool so we can continue this tradition of coming together and singing these inspirational inherited songs?”
In addition to audience participation, the concert — arranged by Zalmen Mlotek, musical director at the Folksbiene, and klezmer superstar Frank London — also celebrates the launch of the newly digitized Yosl and Chana Mlotek Song Collection. The project from The Workers Circle digitized five anthologies of Yiddish songs from Chana Mlotek, the longtime ethnomusicologist at YIVO who died in 2013, and her husband, Yosl, who worked as the education director for the Workers Circle and managing editor for the Forvertz, who died in 2000. (And, yes, Yosl and Chana Mlotek are the parents of the Folksbiene’s director.)
“On this special evening, New York will celebrate its Yiddish heritage and soul with some of our most brilliant musical stars — and under the stars,” Zalmen Mlotek said in a press release. “We invite all New Yorkers to come together in Central Park for a wonderful concert filled with Klezmer artistry and Yiddish theater gems for a memorable night.”
Entrance to the free, two-hour concert is first-come, first-served, with doors opening at 6 p.m. Attendees should enter at the Central Park entrance on 72nd St. and 5th Ave. Find more information here.
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The post A 4,000-person Yiddish sing-along will take place in Central Park this summer appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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VIDEO: ‘Shtisel’ bubbe Lea Koenig in a Yiddish music video
Lea Koenig, who played Shulem Shtisel’s mother Malka in the popular Israeli TV series Shtisel, sings a Yiddish song in a new music video posted on YouTube. The lyrics are accompanied by English subtitles.
As Koenig sings the song, “Kum zhe mame” (Come, Mommy), we see her leafing through old photo albums, gazing at images of her mother, presumably long gone. The poignant scene reminds us that even a woman in her 80s could occasionally feel like a little girl again, longing for her “mommy.”
“Kum zhe mame” was originally a Russian song called “There’s Little Light From the Window” written in 1964, with lyrics by Constantin Vanshkin and music by Eduard Kolmanovsky. In 1968 it was translated into Hebrew by Leah Noar. Now Israeli actor Yaniv Goldberg has written a Yiddish version.
This isn’t the first Yiddish translation of “There’s Little Light From the Window,” though. The late songwriter Moshe Sachar, who wrote the songs for the Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof in the 1960s, translated the Russian song into Yiddish, which the popular Israeli singer David Eshet sang on his 1972 record album Farbotene lider (Forbidden Songs).
But there’s a major difference between the two Yiddish translations. Sachar’s song is political, describing a mother in the former Soviet Union trying to protect her son, while Goldberg’s is more personal and sentimental.
Lea Koenig was born in 1929 in Łódź, Poland. Her parents were the Yiddish actors Dina and Józef Kamień. When the Nazis occupied Poland her family escaped to Tashkent, in Soviet Uzbekistan. Her father was murdered in the Holocaust. In the end of the 1940s, Lea Koenig emigrated with her mother to Romania, where she studied at the National University of Arts in Bucharest and began acting in local Jewish theater productions. In 1961, she emigrated to Israel.
Primarily acting in Hebrew, Koenig performs in Israel and all over the world, as well as in the Tel Aviv Yiddish theater, Yidishpiel. She speaks English, Hebrew, German, Polish, Romanian, Russian and Yiddish.
The post VIDEO: ‘Shtisel’ bubbe Lea Koenig in a Yiddish music video appeared first on The Forward.
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If You Oppose Terrorism in the West But Not in Israel, You Don’t Oppose Terrorism
An Israeli soldier stands during a two-minute siren marking the annual Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, at an installation at the site of the Nova festival where party goers were killed and kidnapped during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, in Reim, southern Israel, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Soon after the unfortunately named Jihad Al-Shamie’s terror attack on a Manchester synagogue, his father, Faraj Al-Shamie, issued a statement on behalf of the family. The statement distanced the family from Jihad’s jihadi actions, saying that they strongly condemn the “heinous act, which targeted peaceful, innocent civilians.”
That is as it should be. However, it was soon revealed that while Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel was still in progress, Faraj al-Shamie, a trauma surgeon, had praised those undertaking the attack. He had described them as “God’s men on earth.”
That calls into question the sincerity of his attempt to distance his family from his son’s terrorist attack. After all, the vast majority of those killed on October 7 were also “peaceful, innocent civilians.”
Why would somebody condemn his own son’s terror in England, while praising the larger scale terror inflicted by Hamas and other militants in Israel? There are two broad possible explanations.
One explanation is that while he is not actually opposed to acts of terror in the United Kingdom, he has a personal interest in suggesting otherwise.
Being seen to endorse domestic terror, especially if one is an immigrant and a minority in one’s country of adoption, can invite unwanted opprobrium. There are self-interested reasons to avoid this.
The other explanation is that he is opposed to heinous acts against peaceful, innocent civilians only when those civilians are not in Israel. Being in Israel, however, does not make civilians less peaceful or innocent. Nor will it help to suggest that civilians in “settler colonial states” cease to be innocent civilians. First, Jews are indigenous to Israel. Second, under the “settler, colonial” framework, all residents of the US — other than those descended from native Americans — would have no claim against violent terrorism by the indigenous peoples.
Thus, anybody willing to justify the indiscriminate terror against civilians in Israel demonstrates that they are not actually opposed to terrorism.
In this way, somebody’s opinion about terrorism in Israel is the litmus test of how genuine their opposition to terrorism is. If you are not opposed to killing Jews in a synagogue in Jerusalem (or a music festival in the Negev desert, or kibbutzim adjacent to Gaza), then you have no principled reason to oppose killing Jews in a synagogue in Manchester, or office workers in the World Trade Center, or passengers in a flight over Lockerbie.
We should employ this litmus test more often. We should ask anybody purporting to oppose anti-Jewish and other terrorism in Western countries whether they are similarly opposed to terror in Israel. If they are not willing to state such opposition, they will thereby demonstrate just how phony their opposition to domestic terrorism is.
It is quite possible, of course, that many of those justifying terrorism in Israel would be willing to justify it in other Western countries too. Many of them, even in the US, for example, are happy to call for “death to America.”
Nevertheless, it would be helpful to encourage them, as individuals, to acknowledge this explicitly — rather than hide behind slogans like “globalize the intifada,” which other people, including those seeking public office, attempt to sanitize by introducing ambiguities that are not actually there.
This approach asks us not to restrict their speech (beyond cases of incitement to imminent violence), but rather to encourage them to speak their minds more fully. This is how we can make it clearer to a broader swath of the population exactly what values many of those “social justice” activists actually hold.
Now, it might be said that just as opponents of terror in the West must also oppose terror in Israel, so those who oppose terror both in the West and in Israel should oppose the violence used by Israel and Israelis.
There certainly are cases where this is true. Those opposed to the violent targeting of Palestinians in America, as we all should be, ought also to be opposed to Baruch Goldstein’s murderous rampage, or the terror that a fringe group of the Israeli right visits upon Palestinians in the West Bank. However, that is compatible with recognizing that there is a moral difference between Hamas’ October 7 attack and Israel’s response to it, which sought to prevent another such attack from ever happening again.
British police responded forcefully to Jihad Al-Shamie’s attack, by shooting him, which is exactly what they should have done under the circumstances. That is true even if it turns out that the police should have taken more care not to harm those Jews within the synagogue, two of whom the police accidentally shot. Whether there was any police culpability is a matter for detailed forensic investigation.
Similarly, albeit at a larger scale, one could find fault with some of the ways that Israel has undertaken its response, without drawing a moral equivalence with the Hamas attack. The October 7 attack is manifestly wicked. That Israel responded militarily is the opposite. It had both a right and a duty to protect its citizens from further such attacks. Criticism of the details of that response is a matter for close forensic investigation. However, such an investigation cannot be replaced by memetic metastasizing of the “genocide” accusation.
David Benatar is Emeritus Professor Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. His most recent book is Very Practical Ethics (Oxford, 2024)
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The Netherlands’ Moral Mirror Is Cracking
A view shows the Peace Palace, which houses the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in The Hague, Netherlands, April 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
For decades, Israel viewed the Netherlands as one of its most reliable European friends, a nation whose moral compass — forged in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust — pointed firmly against antisemitism and toward Israel’s right to exist in peace.
Dutch diplomacy was measured, its civil society was open, and its historical consciousness ran deep.
But that image of the Netherlands has begun to fracture. Since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war, the Netherlands has witnessed a surge of anti-Israel rhetoric, antisemitic incidents, and violent protests that have shaken Jewish communities and confounded Israelis who long saw the Dutch as allies in both memory and morality.
The numbers tell a sobering story
The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) has reported an 818% increase in antisemitic incidents compared to the pre-October 7 average.
In 2024 alone, 421 incidents were recorded, the highest since the watchdog began systematic monitoring.
These are not abstract statistics; they represent Jewish families harassed, synagogues threatened, and Israelis attacked on Dutch streets.
One shocking example was the “Jew-hunt” in Amsterdam after the Ajax vs. Maccabi Tel Aviv match in November 2024.
What should have been a sporting event spiraled into open violence: Israeli fans chased through the streets, attacked by mobs on scooters, assaulted simply for being visibly Jewish or Israeli. The term “Jew-hunt” was not invented by the press; it came from officials describing what they saw. For many Israelis, this was not a local disturbance, it was a moral alarm bell ringing from a country they once saw as safe ground.
From moral clarity to moral confusion
How did this happen? Why would a nation that still teaches Anne Frank’s story with pride see antisemitism return so visibly to its streets?
Part of the answer lies in the Dutch self-image. The Netherlands prides itself on tolerance, free speech, and moral independence. In recent years, however, those same virtues have created fertile ground for extremism to hide behind “activism.” The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, long a subject of heated debate, has become a proxy battlefield for identity politics, post-colonial guilt, and populist anger.
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, murdering 1,200 people and abducting hundreds, the global narrative quickly shifted, especially online. In Dutch cities, massive protests filled the streets, some peaceful, many not. Chants of “From the river to the sea” echoed in public squares. At first glance, these may appear as calls for Palestinian statehood. But in practice, they too often turned into calls for Israel’s elimination, and sometimes, for violence against Jews.
The Dutch demographic landscape also plays a role. The country’s growing communities with roots in Muslim-majority countries often bring with them deep identification with the Palestinian cause. That, combined with a small and highly visible Jewish population (less than 1% nationwide), has produced an imbalance in public discourse.
In many cities, Jewish students now report hiding their identity, removing Stars of David, or avoiding public events for fear of harassment.
The power of media and the failure of nuance
Dutch media coverage has also shifted. Complex Israeli security dilemmas are often flattened into emotional images of Gaza’s suffering, stripped of the context of Hamas’ terror infrastructure or its strategy of human shields. Social media compounds the problem, turning outrage into performance, and moral judgment into tribal belonging.
When the moral conversation becomes binary, oppressor versus oppressed, nuance dies first, and Jewish safety follows. This is not about silencing criticism of Israeli policies; it is about recognizing the line between critique and hate, a line that in the Netherlands, like across Europe, has grown dangerously blurred.
A legacy betrayed
There is something deeply tragic about this Dutch transformation. The Netherlands, more than most European nations, has wrestled publicly with its wartime past, with its collaboration, its resistance, and its guilt. Out of that reckoning grew an ethos of “never again,” not just for Jews, but for all peoples. Yet today, that moral inheritance is being hollowed out by selective empathy.
It is one thing to criticize a government; it is another to chase Jews through the streets of Amsterdam. It is one thing to advocate for Palestinian rights; it is another to vandalize offices of Christian organizations that support Israel, accusing them of “backing genocide.” Such behavior is not protest; it is persecution reborn under new slogans.
The test for Dutch democracy
The Netherlands now faces a test not unlike the one that Europe faced in darker times: Will it confront antisemitism wherever it appears, even when it wears the fashionable mask of “anti-Zionism”?
If yes, that means stronger political leadership, consistent law enforcement, and educational courage — and teaching students to distinguish between political dissent and ethnic hatred. It also means insisting that free speech does not include the freedom to terrorize Jewish citizens.
If the Netherlands wants to remain the moral compass it once claimed to be, it must first look in the mirror and admit that the image reflected there is no longer as clear as it once was.
Because the question Israelis now quietly ask is not whether the Netherlands still supports Israel’s right to exist. It’s whether Dutch society still remembers why that right matters.