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Harry Belafonte, singer and civil rights activist who popularized ‘Hava Nagila’ in the US, dies at 96
(New York Jewish Week) — Barrier-smashing singer, actor and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, who once boasted of being “the most popular Jew in America” because of his rendition of a Hebrew classic, died Tuesday at his longtime Upper West Side home. He was 96.
The New York City native was the one of the first Black artists to achieve widespread commercial success in the United States, and while he was raised Catholic, his life frequently dovetailed with Jewish causes, values and people. Among Belafonte’s many Jewish connections — which included brokering a meeting between Nelson Mandela and Jewish leaders in 1989 — was his marriage to his Jewish second wife, dancer Julie Robinson. The couple, who were married from 1958 to 2004, raised two children, Gina and David.
In 2011, Belafonte revealed in his autobiography, “My Song: A Memoir” that his paternal grandfather was Jewish. Belafonte’s parents were both Jamaican immigrants: his mother, Melvine, was the child of a white mother from Scotland and a Black father, and his father, Harold George Bellanfanti, who later changed the family name, was the son of a Black mother and white Dutch-Jewish father. In his book, Belafonte describes his paternal grandfather, whom he never met, as “a white Dutch Jew who drifted over to the islands after chasing gold and diamonds, with no luck at all.”
Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr., in Harlem on March 1, 1927. His father was largely absent during his childhood; his mother, who struggled with finding work, forged a relationship with a Jewish tailor who taught her how to mend garments. “That tailor gave me my first sense of kinship with Jews, which would deepen over time,” Belfonte wrote in his memoir. He spent a portion of his childhood with his grandmother in Jamaica, but he returned to New York to attend George Washington High School in Washington Heights — where Alan Greenspan and Henry Kissinger were also educated — before dropping out.
Following a stint in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Belafonte was bitten by the acting bug when, working as a janitor’s assistant, he was given a pair of tickets to the American Negro Theater as a gift. “It was there that the universe opened for me,” he told NPR in 2011. “I decided with any device I could possibly find, I wanted to stay in this place. What I had discovered in the theater was power: power to influence, power to know of others and know of other things.”
In the late 1940s, Belafonte enrolled in acting classes, where he met his lifelong friend Sidney Poitier. The impoverished pair would often share a single theater ticket, trading places at intermission. He also befriended Jewish actor Tony Curtis, writing in his memoir: “He lived in the Bronx with his family; why live downtown, he’d say, when he could live uptown for free? And who cared if they still greeted him up there as Bernie Schwartz?”
He and Curtis frequently went to parties together, he wrote, sometimes with the actress Elaine Stritch, “who swore more colorfully than any sailor I’d known,” and “the blunt Jewish comic” Bea Arthur, “who’d start matching wits with Elaine until the two of them had everyone in uncontrollable laughter.”
To pay for acting classes, Belafonte began dabbling in singing at nightclubs, and it was there that a true superstar was born. One of Belafonte’s early successes were his performances of the Hebrew dance hit “Hava Nagila” at the classic downtown folk club the Village Vanguard. His rendition, Belafonte joked to The New York Times in 2017, made him “the most popular Jew in America.”
In that same interview, Belafonte recalled the tough uptown streets of his childhood, and how he was drawn to the fast money his uncle’s number-running business earned. “Everybody in that world were role models in how to survive, how to be tough, how to get through the city, how to con, the daily encounters,” he said. “But my mother saw to it that unless I wanted to live life absent of testicles, she wasn’t going to have me follow her brother Lenny. Somewhere in there is a Sholem Aleichem — a rich story to be told of the lore of that time.”
With his 1953 breakthrough album, “Calypso” — which included his most iconic work, “The Banana Boat Song” — Belafonte “almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music,” according to The New York Times’ obituary. “Calypso” climbed to the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release and stayed there for 31 weeks; it is reported to be the first album by a solo artist to sell more than a million copies. By 1959 he was the most highly-paid Black performer in history, according to the Times.
Known around the world as the “King of Calypso,” Belafonte recorded and performed a wide range of global and folk classics throughout his wide-ranging musical career — Jewish standards among them. In 1959, he performed “Hine Ma Tov” in England, with what appears to be an Israeli military choir; his 1963 album, “Streets I Have Walked,” includes a rendition of “Erev Shel Shoshanim” (“Evening of Roses”), a popular Jewish wedding song.
Belafonte’s greatest passion, however, was neither acting nor singing — it was civil rights activism. There, too, he worked closely with many Jewish activists, as part of the historic Black-Jewish civil rights alliance of the 1950s and 1960s. But, as he recalled in his memoir, it was racism delivered by a Jewish TV executive that first inspired him to take on racial segregation in the United States.
The executive, a Jew from Montreal named Charles Revson, asked Belafonte to stop hosting white dancers on his performance show, citing the preferences of Southern viewers. Belafonte said he rejected the instruction and let Revson cancel the show. He realized, he wrote, that TV could only reflect societal attitudes, not change them. “To change the culture you had to change the country,” he concluded.
Through his civil rights activism, Bellafonte befriended Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956; the pair remained close until King’s assassination in 1968. “My apartment was a retreat for him,” Belafonte told NPR of King and his 21-room apartment in 2008. “He had his own entrance, his own kitchen. The home became, for him, a place where he could think and reside, take his shoes off, have his collar open and be him.”
Belafonte helped provide the seed money to launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and he was one of the lead fundraisers for that organization and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was “deeply involved” in the 1963 March on Washington and helped fund the Freedom Rides.
Belafonte’s commitment to social justice endured throughout his long life and career. In the 1980s, he helped organize the Live Aid concert, and he served as UNICEF’s goodwill ambassador after Jewish entertainer Danny Kaye pioneered the role. He was also a co-chairman of the Women’s March on Washington in January 2017, along with Gloria Steinem, though ill health kept him from attending.
Though primarily famous for his singing, Belafonte continued to make movies throughout his career; in 1970 he produced and co-starred in “The Angel Levine” alongside the original “Fiddler on the Roof” star Zero Mostel. Based on a story by Bernard Malamud, Belafonte starred as the titular Jewish angel. (The “project had a sociopolitical edge,” the Times noted, as the entertainer’s Harry Belafonte Enterprises hired 15 Black and Hispanic apprentices to work on the film’s crew.)
The cause of Belafonte’s death was congestive heart failure. He is survived by his two children with Robinson; the two children he had with his first wife Marguerite Byrd, Adrienne Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte; and eight grandchildren. After divorcing Robinson in 2004, he married photographer Pamela Frank in 2008; Frank also survives him, along with stepchildren Sarah Frank and Lindsey Frank and three step-grandchildren.
“There’s just so much left that’s in my basket of possibilities,” Belafonte told The New York Times ahead of his 90th birthday in 2017. “I’m not as young as I feel, or as young as I would consider myself to be. The 90 figure is a blur. But I do know that if there’s anything left for me to do, I had best hurry up and do it, because time is not an ally.”
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Mamdani once vowed to arrest Netanyahu. Now he won’t join protests against him.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Wednesday that he will not join protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he arrives in the city to address the United Nations annual gathering next week and pushed back on the suggestion that he ever encouraged New Yorkers to protest the Israeli leader.
“I do not have any plans to attend any protest at the U.N. General Assembly,” Mamdani told reporters. “To New Yorkers, I have never encouraged them to protest. What I have always told them is that they have the right to do so in the city.”
But two months ago, when Mamdani was asked what New Yorkers frustrated with Netanyahu should do when the Israeli leader came to the city for the annual fall U.N. event, the mayor repeatedly pointed to protest as an option. “I think one of the bedrocks of our city is protest,” Mamdani said at a July 22 press conference. “It is something that has been a part of what makes our city so special: that New Yorkers can express themselves, whether they are in support or in opposition, no matter the topic.”
Mamdani’s July remarks came after a legal review the mayor ordered concluded that he lacks the power to order the arrest of Netanyahu, a pledge he made during his mayoral election campaign.
In July, when a reporter followed up directly, “Are you urging them to protest?” Mamdani stopped short of saying yes. But he again pointed to protests as a way for New Yorkers who oppose Netanyahu to make their voices heard. “I’m simply saying that this is a city where — if anyone feels a level of frustration or opposition, protest is something that we will always respect,” Mamdani said. “I leave it to New Yorkers themselves to make that decision,” he added.
From arrest pledge to protest rights
Mamdani had campaigned on ordering Netanyahu’s arrest based on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in November 2024, which accused the Israeli prime minister, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Netanyahu has rejected the charges. The United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court and the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the ICC months after it issued the warrants.
After taking office, Mamdani ordered a legal review and acknowledged in July that New York City does not have the authority to execute the ICC warrant.
He made that announcement in an unusual video address describing Netanyahu as “a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people” and declared that the Israeli leader would not be welcome in New York, home to the largest concentration of Jews in the United States.
The address drew criticism from Jewish leaders who questioned why the mayor was devoting so much attention to an arrest he acknowledged he could not legally carry out. The criticism came amid growing tension between Mamdani and parts of New York’s Jewish community over his rhetoric about Israel. Jewish organizations have also raised concerns about it contributing to a hostile climate for Jews across the city.
It was against that backdrop that Mamdani was pressed at the July press conference about what he would tell Palestinian supporters who had welcomed his promise to arrest Netanyahu, and were disappointed that he could not fulfill it. That is when he turned to protest as a remaining option. “I want to make it very clear that that welcome ends with me,” Mamdani said. “ I will not be welcoming Benjamin Netanyahu or any other war criminals when they come to this city.”
Netanyahu is expected to arrive in New York City next Wednesday under heavy security measures and address the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday before returning to Israel. One Israeli media outlet reported that the official plane carrying the Israeli leader, known as “Wings of Zion,” will land at Newark International Airport in New Jersey instead of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York due to concerns that Mamdani could try to prevent the aircraft from remaining parked at JFK during Netanyahu’s visit.
Protests against Netanyahu are planned outside his hotel and near the United Nations during his address. Jewish groups are also planning a mass rally against antisemitism on Wednesday.
At Wednesday’s press conference, Mamdani drew a sharper distinction between encouraging protests and defending the right to hold them. “We respect that right,” he said. “And this is a city that is proud of the Constitution, proud of the First Amendment; we’ll continue to do so.”
Mamdani cited the same First Amendment right when asked about students from Ramaz and SAR, two prominent Modern Orthodox schools, who are planning a prayer vigil outside the mayor’s residence on Friday morning in support of Israel. “They can have a vigil, or I’ve heard some describe it even as a ‘protest,’” he said. “Whatever it is intended to be, they have the room and space to do so outside of Gracie Mansion. Though, he added, he would “probably be somewhere else across the city” when they gather.
The post Mamdani once vowed to arrest Netanyahu. Now he won’t join protests against him. appeared first on The Forward.
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Renoir’s paintings have been stolen again. Their history may never be found.
The timing was as swift as Auguste Renoir’s brushstrokes. In the pre-dawn darkness of Sept. 8, thieves in camouflage and helmets took less than three minutes to saw through a wire-mesh fence and carry off four paintings from the neo-Provençal villa in the south of France where the artist spent the final years of his life.
Perhaps spooked by the city’s newly acquired police dog, the looters dropped two works as they fled from the Musée Renoir across the hillside above Cagnes-sur-Mer, through ancient olive groves, orange trees and figs. Two Renoir works remain missing — a reminder of the peculiar power these paintings exert, not only on those who love them, but on those who covet them and yearn to possess them at almost any cost.
Three of the four stolen works were MNRs — Musées Nationaux Récupération, the French designation for “orphan” works recovered after World War II but never restituted because their rightful owners could not be identified or located. French museums hold them provisionally, a limbo that for some has lasted more than 70 years.
For one of the missing Renoirs, the latest theft amounts to a double tragedy: wartime spoliation followed by modern looting.
German property records show that, during World War II “Jeune femme au puits” was “confiscated by SS man Brandl,” an apparent reference to Hermann Brandl, a Nazi officer and black marketeer who went by the pseudonym “Otto,” and led an organization that bought goods and artworks outside normal channels. Recovered in Bavaria, the painting passed through the Munich Central Collecting Point and was returned to France.
The painting is small and unfinished, oil on wood. A woman in a blue apron stands at a well, drawing water. We do not know her name, but Renoir preserved her gesture and her face. History did not preserve who she was.
I find that omission difficult to leave alone.
I felt something similar in Paris in 2019, when I first stood before another Renoir, “La Petite Irène,” in an exhibition at the Musée Maillol. The portrait had not been publicly exhibited in Paris for 73 years. Yet there was little to explain the tragic history of the girl in blue — or the fact that her portrait itself had been looted during the German Occupation.
In 1946, a French critic had encountered the portrait in a Paris exhibition of artworks recovered from Germany. He wrote that the painting brought him to his knees and asked: “Who was Mlle. Irène Cahen d’Anvers?”
Seventy-three years later, I was asking essentially the same question.
The question became a search. The search became an investigation. The investigation became a book.
Irène Cahen d’Anvers was eight when Renoir painted her, with cascading ginger hair, a distant gaze and lips pressed red as if bitten. She was born into a family of art collectors who were also part of one of Belle Époque France’s great Jewish banking dynasties. She survived the German Occupation. Her sister Élisabeth, her daughter Béatrice de Camondo and her two grandchildren did not. All were victims of the Holocaust.
Before the arrests, Irène’s son-in-law Léon Reinach entrusted her Renoir portrait to the Louvre for safekeeping in 1939. The museum evacuated it with treasures including the Mona Lisa and the French crown jewels to the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley.
But it was not safe there. In 1941, a Nazi looting unit arrived with a list of works belonging to private Jewish collectors and seized Irène’s portrait along with other paintings. Reinach boldly demanded its return, enlisting senior French museum officials in an unsuccessful campaign. Instead, the portrait eventually passed through Hermann Göring’s art-looting network.
After the war, Monuments Men investigators traced it to a Bavarian farmhouse owned by a murky art merchant near Neuschwanstein castle, a repository for looted art. In 1946, the portrait was returned to Irène, who later described it as “a remembrance of my youth and of all.”
Yet three years later, she sold it to Emil Bührle in a choice that seems almost incomprehensible. Bührle was a German-born Swiss arms manufacturer whose wartime fortune was built in significant part on weapons sales to Nazi Germany. He had also bought looted paintings during the war and, afterwards, was forced to restitute them — only, in several cases, to buy them back because he could not bear to part with them.
French archival records show that museum officials fiercely opposed the sale of “La Petite Irène.” Bührle’s own broker acknowledged that the Louvre had been interested in acquiring it, and a French commission voted to deny the export license needed to remove the Renoir from France.
Yet somehow those objections fell away. The broker’s correspondence showed that he bargained over the price and currency exchange rates with Irène and her banker. Bührle ultimately paid 240,000 Swiss francs — roughly $1.5 million in today’s dollars.
To understand Irène’s decision, I had to understand what the war had done to her.
During the Occupation, Irène left her grand Paris residence for a smaller apartment on Rue de la Tour in the 16th arrondissement and lived under the Italian surname of her former second husband. She survived by hiding in plain sight in occupied Paris, moving within a world of older Jewish women who survived by rotating among friends and discreet addresses. Helped by political connections and by a Catholic conversion decades earlier, she had obtained a coveted certificate declaring that she was not Jewish..
After the war, survivors returning from Auschwitz wrote to that Rue de la Tour apartment. Their painful letters told Irène what had happened to her missing family.
Her daughter Béatrice had survived arrest, Drancy and deportation to Auschwitz, where she was put to work in an ammunition factory. Newly uncovered records of letters from survivors indicate that she was murdered on Jan. 3, 1945, with more than 800 other prisoners, only weeks before Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, which is now known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Béatrice died knowing that her two adult children were already dead, according to former prisoners who later wrote to Irène. Léon Reinach — the son-in-law who had fought to recover Irène’s portrait — also died at Auschwitz. Irène’s sister Élisabeth, painted beside her younger sister Alice in Renoir’s “Pink and Blue,” was murdered after deportation as well.
What, then, did Irène see when she looked at Renoir’s image of the eight-year-old girl she had once been?
A family relic? A remnant of a vanished world? A Jewish identity she had spent a lifetime navigating? Or simply losses too great to absorb?
The correspondence surrounding the 1949 sale offers one practical explanation. Bührle’s intermediary wrote that Irène, then 77, wanted to prevent the portrait from being sold at auction after her death because, given its value, it was unlikely any single heir could keep it.
It is an almost mundane explanation for a painting burdened with so much history: She wanted to avoid the public spectacle of an auction and Bührle had the fortune to pay for it quickly.
After the sale, “La Petite Irène” largely disappeared into Bührle’s private collection in Zürich. Only in recent years, now that the Bührle archives have been opened to greater scrutiny and much of the collection has gone on long-term loan to the Kunsthaus Zürich, has the history behind the painting received sustained public attention.
Today “La Petite Irène” hangs alone against an expanse of green in an austere reflection room at the Kunsthaus. Recently, the museum created the gallery around the portrait, inviting visitors to contemplate Irène’s story, record their reactions on a digital screen or draw responses to a history that is finally being confronted.
When I first saw the painting in Paris in 2019, I was struck not only by the girl but by the silence surrounding her. Now that silence is beginning to recede. The history has become part of the portrait’s biography — and part of the mystery of her gaze.
And now another Renoir has disappeared.
The woman in “Jeune femme au puits” still has no name. We know more about the travels of her painting than we know about her: taken during the war, recovered in Bavaria, returned to France, stolen again.
Paintings outlive the people who make them, own them, covet them, steal them and fight to recover them. Perhaps that is part of their strange power.
They carry what we remember — and what we fail to remember.
The post Renoir’s paintings have been stolen again. Their history may never be found. appeared first on The Forward.
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Translation series connects English readers to prewar Eastern European Jewish life
דאָס איז איינער פֿון אַ סעריע קורצע אַרטיקלען אָנגעשריבן אױף אַ רעלאַטיװ גרינגן ייִדיש און געצילעװעט אױף סטודענטן. די מחברטע איז אַלײן אַ ייִדיש־סטודענטקע. דאָ קען מען לײענען די פֿריִערדיקע אַרטיקלען אין דער סעריע.
אַ דאַנק אַ סעריע נײַע ענגלישע איבערזעצונגען פֿון מיזרח־אײראָפּעיִשע ייִדישע ווערק, האָבן ענגליש־לייענערס הײַנט אַ געלעגנהײט זיך צו באַקענען מיטן ייִדישן לעבן־שטייגער פֿאַרן חורבן.
די סעריע, „ייִדישע שטימען“ — אַ בשותּפֿותדיקער איניציאַטיוו פֿון ייִװאָ און דעם פֿאַרלאַג בלומסבערי — איז שוין צו ניץ געקומען סײַ לערערס פֿון קורסן, וווּ די סטודענטן פֿאַרשטייען ניט קיין ייִדיש, סײַ לייענערס מיט אַן אינטערעס צו דער ייִדישער געשיכטע.
„ייִדישע שטימען“ באַשטייט פֿון ביכער װאָס זענען קײן מאָל פֿריִער ניט איבערגעזעצט געװאָרן אױף ענגליש. זיי נעמען אַרײַן אַ ברײטע גאַמע אידעעס און פּערספּעקטיװן װאָס האָבן צוגעטראָגן צו דער מאָדערנער ייִדישער קולטור אין (און מחוץ) מיזרח־אײראָפּע.
זינט 2023, װען די סעריע איז לאַנצירט געװאָרן, זענען אַרױס פֿינעף בענד, װאָס צװײ פֿון זײ — „מיסיסיפּי“ און „די חסידישע װאַרשע“ — זענען ערשט דערשינען מיט אַ פּאָר װאָכן צוריק. ביז איצט האָט מען איבערגעזעצט בלויז ייִדיש־שפּראַכיקע װערק אָבער מיט דער צײַט װעט מען איבערזעצן טעקסטן פֿון אַנדערע לשונות, אַזױ װי פּױליש און העברעיִש, וואָס מע האָט ביז איצט ניט איבערגעזעצט אויף ענגליש.
די סעריע, סובסידירט פֿון דער משפּחה פֿון האַריעט יאַסקי, װערט רעדאַקטירט פֿון אַליסאַ קװינט און עליסאַ בן-פּורת. (איך אַלײן אַרבעט מיט זײ װי אַן אַסיסטענטקע). קװינט איז אַ היסטאָריקערין פֿונעם ייִדישן טעאַטער, און בן-פּורת איז אַ היסטאָריקערין פֿונעם ייִדישן לעבן אין רוסלאַנד און אין סאָװעטן־פֿאַרבאַנד. ס׳איז דערפֿאַר נישט קײן חידוש אַז דער סעריעס קוקװינקל איז אַ היסטאָרישער. כאָטש די איבערגעזעצטע װערק רעפּרעזענטירן פֿאַרשײדענע קאַטעגאָריעס — למשל פּיעסעס, זכרונות און דערצײלונגען — איז דער עיקר זײער היסטאָרישע רײַכקײט.
„מיר קלײַבן אױס טעקסטן װאָס װאַרפֿן אַ שײַן סײַ אױף ברײטע טענדענצן, סײַ אױף ספּעציפֿישע פֿראַגעס װעגן ייִדיש לעבן אין מיזרח־אייראָפּע, און אין אַנדערע לענדער װוּ מיזרח־אייראָפּעיִשע ייִדן האָבן געװױנט װי אימיגראַנטן אָדער פּליטים. אַפֿילו די ׳ליטעראַרישע׳ װערק װי דערצײלוגען און פּיעסעס פֿאָרשן מיר פֿון אַ היסטאָרישן שטאַנדפּונקט“, האָט מיר קװינט געזאָגט.
צוליב דעם דאָזיקן שליחות שפּילט אַ װיכטיקע ראָלע דער אַרײַנפֿיר צו יעדן באַנד, װאָס איז תּמיד געשריבן פֿון אַ היסטאָריקער. אַ מאָל איז דער מחבר פֿון דער הקדמה אױך דער איבערזעצער, און אַ מאָל נעמען אונטער באַזונדערע מענטשן די צװײ אױפֿגאַבעס. „דעם היסטאָריקערס אַרבעט אינעם אַרײַנפֿיר איז אַרױסצוציִען און צוצובינדן די ביאָגראַפֿישע, גײַסטיקע און געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע אַספּעקטן פֿונעם װערק, אױף אַן אופֿן װאָס איז גלײַכצײַטיק װיסנשאַפֿטלעך און צוטריטלעך צו אַלע לײענערס, אַרײַננעמענדיק די װאָס האָבן פֿריִער ניט געװוּסט קײן סך װעגן דער טעמע,“ האָט בן-פּורת געזאָגט.
ביז אַהער באַשטײט די סעריע פֿון די דאָזיקע בענד, װאָס זענען אַלע בראָשירטע ביכלעך גרינג אַרומצוטראָגן אין אַ רוקזאַק און צו לײענען אַבי װוּ:
— „דרײַ ייִדישע פּיעסעס פֿון פֿרױען׃ װײַבערשע ייִדישע פּערספּעקטיװן“, איבערגעזעצט פֿון אַלען לויִס ריקמאַן, מיראָ מניעװסקי און אליע פּיאַצאַ, מיט אַ הקדמה פֿון אַליסאַ קװינט. דאָס בוך נעמט אַרײַן דרײַ פּיעסעס אָנגעשריבן פֿון דראַמאַטורגינס אין דער רוסישער אימפּעריע, אין פּױלן און אין ברוקלין, ניו־יאָרק, צװישן 1880 און 1920. אַלע דרײַ באַהאַנדלען קאָנטראָװערסיעלע „װײַבערשע“ טעמעס אַזױ װי חתונה און גט, שװאַנגערשאַפֿט, קינדל־קאָנטראָל און פּראָסטיטוציע. דראַמעס װאָס באַטראַכטן איבערלעבונגען דורך װײַבערשע אױגן זענען אַ זעלטנקײט אין דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור.
— „חורבן דובאָװע׃ אַ פּינקס פֿון אַ טױטער שטאָט“, פֿון רחל פֿײַגנבערג (1926), איבערגעזעצט פֿון סינטיע און אַלבערט מאַדאַנסקי, מיט אַן אַרײַנפֿיר פֿון עליסאַ בן-פּורת (לײענט װײַטער דאָ). פֿײַגנבערג באַשרײַבט דאָס לעבן און דעם טראַגישן אוקמום פֿונעם שטעטל דובאָװע אין אוקראַיִנע, װוּ כּמעט אַלע ייִדן זענען בעת דער רוסישער בירגערקריג אין 1919 אָדער פֿאַרטיליקט אָדער פֿאַרטריבן געװאָרן. װען נישט פֿײַגנבערגס רירנדיקע דערצײלונג װאָלט דאָס ייִדישע לעבן אין דובאָװע אין גאַנצן פֿאַרגעסן געװאָרן. איר נאַראַטיװ האָט געדינט פֿאַר אַ גבֿית־עדות אינעם מישפּט פֿון שלום שװאַרצבאָרד אין 1927.
— „די מוטער פֿונעם ייִדישן טעאַטער׃ זכרונות פֿון אסתּר־רחל קאַמינסקאַ“ (1927-1926), איבערגעזעצט און מיט אַ הקדמה פֿון מיכל יאַשינסקי (לײענט װײַטער דאָ). קאַמינסקאַ איז געװען די באַרימטסטע ייִדישע אַקטריסע פֿון איר דור — טאַקע אַ „סופּערשטערן“ סײַ אױף דער בינע, סײַ אין ייִדיש־שפּראַכיקע פֿילמען. זי איז געװען ספּעציעל באַקאַנט פֿאַר אירע מאַמע־ראָלעס: דער טיטל פֿון דער איבערזעצונג פֿאַררופֿט זיך סײַ אױף דעם, סײַ אױף איר השפּעה אױף דער אַנטװיקלונג פֿון ייִדישן טעאַטער. קאַמינסקאַס זכרונות זײַנען פֿול מיט אומפֿאַרגעסלעכע געשיכטעס װעגן די פֿריילעכע מאָמענטן און די שװעריקײטן פֿונעם טעאַטער־לעבן, און מיט באַמערקונגען װעגן דער טעאַטער־קונסט װאָס זי האָט געהאָלפֿן אױספֿורעמען.
— „מיסיסיפּי׃ אַ ייִדישע פּיעסע װעגן דעם סקאָטסבאָראָ־ענין“ (1935), פֿון לײב מלאך, איבערגעזעצט פֿון עלען פּערעצמאַן, מיט אַן אַרײַנפֿיר פֿון אַליסאַ קװינט (לײענט װײַטער דאָ). מלאך האָט אָנגעשריבן די פּיעסע בתּשובֿה אױפֿן טרויעריק באַרימטן סקאָטסבאָראָ־ענין אין די דרום־שטאַטן, װען נײַן אַפֿריקאַנער־אַמעריקער זענען פֿאַלש באַשולדיקט געװאָרן אין פֿאַרגװאַלדיקן צװײ װײַסע פֿרױען אין אַ באַן. די װאַרשעװער טרופּע „יונג טעאַטער“, רעזשיסירט פֿון מיכל װײַכערט, האָט געשפּילט „מיסיסיפּי“ איבער 100 מאָל. דער ייִדישער עולם האָט מיטגעפֿילט מיט די שװאַרצע פּערסאָנאַזשן, סײַ פֿון אַ הומאַניסטישן שטאַנדפּונקט, סײַ צולוב די אײגענע איבערלעבונגען מיט אַנטיסעמיטיזם אין פּױלן.
— „די חסידישע װאַרשע׃ ר׳ זלמן און דאָס אַלעקסאַנדער־שטיבל“ (1960), פֿון יחיאל האָפֿער, איבערגעזעצט און מיט אַ הקדמה פֿון יונתּן בױאַרין (לײענט װײַטער דאָ). די מעשׂיות דערצײלן די אָפֿט־הומאָריסטישע טווּנגען פֿון ר׳ זלמן, אַן עקסצענטרישער לופֿטמענטש און אַ חסיד פֿונעם אַלעקסאַנדער־רבין. דורך זלמנס אַוואַנטורעס שילדערט האָפֿער דאָס לעבן פֿון אַ װאַרשעװער שטיבל, װוּ מענער האָבן געדאַװנט, געלערנט תּורה, געגעסן און זיך אויסגעטענהט. די דערצײלונגען מאָלן אױס אַ לעבעדיק בילד פֿון פֿאַר־מלחמהדיקן חסידות אין װאַרשע, װאָס איז געבליבן פֿעסט, נישט־געקוקט אױף דער ייִדישער מאָדערניזירונג ביזן חורבן.
אין 2027 און 2028 װעט „ייִדישע שטימען“ אַרױסגעבן:
— די דראַמאַטישע זכרונות פֿון שמעון דזשיגאַן, פֿונעם גאָר באַרימטן קאָמעדיע־פּאָר, דזשיגאַן און שומאַכער (איבערגעזעצט פֿון מרים אייזיקס, מיט אַן אַרײַנפֿיר פֿון דיעגאָ ראָטמאַן).
— חיים גראַדעס נישט־פּובליקירט מײַסטערװערק, „די פֿרױען פֿון דער געטאָ“, װעגן אַ גרופּע פֿרױען װאָס האָבן איבערגעלעבט די װילנער געטאָ (איבערגעזעצט און מיט אַ הקדמה פֿון דוד פֿישמאַן).
— די פּױליש־שפּראַכיקע זכרונות פֿון יולאַ װאַלד, די טאָכטער פֿון אַ חסידישן קרעטשמער אין דער צײַט פֿון דער ערשטער װעלט־מלחמה (איבערגעזעצט פֿון מאַרטאַ דודזיק־רודקאָװסקאַ, מיט אַן אַרײַנפֿיר פֿון גלען דײַנער).
— אױטאָביאָגראַפֿישע מעשׂיות װעגן די רײַזעס פֿון יוסף יצחק שניאורסון (דעם ריי״ץ), דער זעקסטער ליובאַוויטשער רבי (איבערגעזעצט און מיט אַן אַרײַנפֿיר פֿון אלי רובין).
„מיר האָבן כּמעט ניט קײן צײַט אָפּצוכאַפּן דעם אָטעם“, האָט אַליסאַ קװינט געזאָגט. „יעדער פּראָיעקט איז אַן אוצר, מיטן אײגענעם קוקװינקל אױף די דערפֿאַרונגען און געדאַנקען פֿון מיזרח־אײראָפּעיִשע ייִדן. ס׳איז אַ פּריװילעגיע זיך צו טײלן מיט אַזעלכע באַטײַטיקע טעקסטן מיט ענגליש־רעדנדיקע לײענערס.“
קױפֿט דאָ אַלע פֿינעף בענד פֿון דער סעריע ( כּדי צו פֿאַרשפּאָרן 20%, ניצט דעם קאָד YIDDISHVOICES בעתן באַצאָלן).
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