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March comes in with a roar of new Yiddish music
(New York Jewish Week) — As they say in the mameloshn (mother tongue), “Dos Yidish lid iz umetum.” In other words, “Yiddish song is in the air.”
This month a collection of new Yiddish songs will be performed for the first time in America at a Manhattan museum; two Brooklyn blues musicians will release their recordings of old Yiddish folk songs and a new web site preserving the work of a couple who played a pivotal role in promoting Yiddish song is set to debut.
If all that weren’t enough, the stars of the Yiddish stage will also appear at an event celebrating the woman who was dubbed “the Sherlock Holmes of Yiddish song.”
“Because we all have this weird relationship with Yiddish, every project that people do takes it to a different place,” Alex Weiser, director of public programs at YIVO, told the New York Jewish Week. “Interesting, weird things are currently happening with Yiddish song.”
Read on for ways to get your Yiddish on.
Sister act
As part of Carnegie Hall’s multi-venue celebration of women in music, on Sunday, March 5, the Paul Shapiro Quartet takes the stage at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park to perform “Di Shvester: The Sisters.” The sisters (by another mother, anyway) in this concert of Jewish and Yiddish music are Eleanor Reissa, the singer/director/actress who is fluent in Yiddish, and Cilla Owens, the superb jazz vocalist who teaches at Hunter College and can sing in Yiddish as well.
Reissa and Owens will perform some songs by the Barry Sisters, the Bronx-born trio of the mid-20th century who brought Yiddish songs into the mainstream. One of the songs they will perform is based on a poem by the Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt, aka Woody Guthrie’s mother-in-law. In a cross-genre segue, Reissa and Owens will follow “Zumer Bay Nakht Oyf Dekher” (“Summer At Night On The Roof”) with “Up On the Roof,” the Carole King/Gerry Goffin sung memorably by Laura Nyro.
Shapiro, whose albums for John Zorn’s Radical Jewish Culture series were critically acclaimed, has worked with Owens, who has spent most of her life in Crown Heights, since 1990. Shapiro first started collaborating with Reissa, who grew up in Brownsville, at Yiddish New York in 2017.
“To me they’re both Brooklyn royalty,” said Shapiro, who hangs his fedora in the Lower East Side’s Grand Street Co-ops.
“When I sing with Cilla, I feel like I’m home,” Reissa said
The two vocalists have appeared together several times in Shapiro’s Ribs and Brisket Revue, which began at the now-shuttered Cornelia Street Café.
Percussionist Ricky Gordon, right, and Jeremiah Lockwood, the front man for The Sway Machinery, form the duet Gordon Lockwood. (Courtesy)
A right to sing the blues
For the entire month of March a free five-song EP titled “Once Upon a Time the Fire Burned Brighter: Ballads from the Yiddish Gothic” is available for download. Created by the Brooklyn-based blues performers Gordon Lockwood, these are re-interpretations of Yiddish folk songs, three of them by Lifshe Schaecter Widman, a Yiddish folksinger who begot the Yiddish poet Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, who begot the Yiddish scholar and former newspaper editor Itzik Gottesman, now a senior lecturer in Yiddish language and culture at the University of Texas at Austin whose Yiddish Song of the Week blog is an important source for lovers of Yiddish song.
The EP will be accompanied by videos of the five songs, plus additional multimedia that will be viewable online. Gordon Lockwood may sound like a Canadian folk singer, but it is actually a duo comprised of percussionist Ricky Gordon, who performs with Wynton Marsalis and has collaborated with Spike Lee, and Jeremiah Lockwood, the front man for The Sway Machinery, a brass-heavy world music band. Lockwood, a card-carrying ethnomusicologist with a PhD from Stanford, recently produced an album of music that features several Hasidic cantors from Brooklyn. In April, Gordon Lockwood will perform their “Once Upon A Time” repertoire in New Haven and New York.
Yiddish royalty
On March 23, the life of Chana Mlotek — the late, great musicologist, folklorist and archivist, who curated the Yiddish music collection at the vaunted YIVO archives — will be celebrated at YIVO’s West 16th St. headquarters. Nine descendants of the Mlotek clan will participate, along with actors Reissa and Steven Skybell, who played Tevye in the Yiddish production of “Fiddler On The Roof.”
Singers will include Lorin Sklamberg of The Klezmatics and Sarah Gordon of the Brooklyn Yiddish rock band Yiddish Princess. Gordon is the daughter of the late Adrienne Cooper, often referred to as the “mother of the Yiddish revival.” The evening’s musical director will be Zalmen Mlotek, Chana and Yosl’s son and artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene.
On March 20, the Workers Circle is expected to launch The Yosl and Chana Mlotek Collection of Yiddish Song, a website that turns the Mloteks’ three-volume “Pearls of Yiddish Song” anthology into a searchable multimedia resource. Consisting of more than 400 Yiddish songs, the web site will include content curated from YouTube and TikTok, according to an email from the publicist.
The Mlotek collection adds another important resource to a field that includes YIVO’s collection of 4,000-plus Yiddish songs, a project directed by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and featuring the field recordings of the late musicologist Ruth Rubin, and many in the Yiddish song scene are looking forward to it.
“We’ve been waiting for this for many, many years,” said Linda Gritz, a retired molecular biologist active in the monthly sing at the Workers Circle in Brookline, Massachusetts. The group has been meeting online during the pandemic and unable to use the couple dozen copies of each Mlotek book, so it has had to create PDFs of 30 songs for its monthly virtual gatherings.
“When it’s online, people could request any song from any book and we could put the URL in the chat and go to it,” said Gritz. “That’ll be an amazing resource.”
Songs for and about refugees
On March 26, “Pleytem Tsuzamen” (“Refugees Together”) will be performed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Two performances of Josh Waletzky’s Yiddish song cycle will mark the American debut of the work, which was first performed in 2019 at the Weimar Republic of Yiddishland gathering in Germany. Performers will come from Latvia, Germany, England and Canada, and Brooklyn violinists Jake Shulman-Ment and Deborah Strauss are part of the cast.
“It’s fitting that we’re doing it a couple of weeks before Pesach [Passover] because there’s a Pesach theme that goes through a lot of the songs,” said singer Daniel Kahn, who lives on a houseboat in Hamburg and plays accordion in the production. “It’s incredible how prescient and universal Josh’s song cycle has proven to be…. Those songs and their themes of displacement and upheaval resonate with the liberational traditions within Yiddishkayt [secular Yiddish culture] and Jewish practice.”
English and Ukrainian supertitles will make the two-hour concert, co-sponsored by National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, accessible to non-Yiddish speakers.
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Art theft, angels and neo-Nazis force a reckoning with the past in ‘The Tavern at the End of History’
Tavern At The End of History
Morris Collins
Dzanc Books, 326pp, $27.95
In Morris Collins’ novel about two directionless adults on the hunt for a famous work of art presumed to have been stolen during the Holocaust, one character theorizes that “the only way towards a moral life” is to let go of the past. But Tavern At the End of History a follow up to Collins’ debut novel — the post-colonial thriller Horse Latitudes — is all about remembering, even that which is painful, and reckoning with it.
When readers are first introduced to Jacob, his inappropriate remarks to a student have cost him his professorship and his marriage, and he’s become an alcoholic. At a park in Brooklyn, he meets Baer, an impoverished Orthodox man living in a ramshackle apartment with only a fat orange cat to keep him company. As it turns out, they are both connected to the disgraced Kabbalah scholar Alex Baruch.
After meeting Baruch at a conference in Berlin, Jacob became a devoted follower. Even after Baruch was exposed for lying about being a German Holocaust survivor, Jacob remained loyal and has agreed to meet with Baruch at his sanitarium in Maine the same weekend Baruch plans to auction off a sketch by the deceased Jewish artist Alexander Lurio.
Baer reveals that the sketch had belonged to his family before the war, but, he says, it was confiscated by the Nazis. Jacob agrees go to Maine and look for the sketch with Baer’s cousin Rachel, an art historian still reeling from her husband’s suicide after she helped him leave the Orthodox community. But art isn’t the only interesting thing on Baruch’s private island. There are neo-Nazis, an erotic statue garden, otherworldly entities, and an eccentric group of Jews, although it’s unclear if they are fellow visitors of the sanitarium or patients.
Jacob, Rachel, and the other Jews at the sanitarium are incessantly haunted by the past — for Baruch, this becomes literal, when a friend he presumed had died in the Holocaust appears at his doorstep. The oddball group spends their five days in Maine, primarily telling stories about their trauma, all linked to the Holocaust either through their own experiences or those of their parents. It may be doubtful that there is any sense to be derived from tragedy, but they try their very best.
For Baruch, this means trying to justify lying about his past and doing unspeakable things to make his life easier. Jacob funnels his confusion into philosophical debates about how — or even if — the Holocaust and Israel should be understood in relation to one another. Rachel seems to believe misfortune can be rectified as she hunts for the stolen Lurio sketch.
The book often veers into unsettling territory, sometimes painting overwhelmingly disturbing scenes from the Holocaust, but Collins’ illustrative writing keeps the story engaging, even in its bleakest moments. His world-building is so convincing it’s almost incomprehensible that the Lurio works are fictionalized. Even the enigmatic Alex Baruch and the fake writings Collins “quotes” from feel real.
Because the book takes place in 2017, some of its musings on Israel and antisemitism feel less jarring than they could be. The characters watch the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally on the television, scenes that could now easily be substituted with more alarming images of government officials cozying up to neo-Nazis. The discussions about the Holocaust and Zionism feel less edgy than they may have almost a decade ago, as so much new scholarship questioning the role of memory and trauma in the creation of Israel has come out.
The book ends with some ambiguity about what exactly transpires on the island and how our characters will be able to move on. Still, Collins crafts a compelling art mystery, buttressed by a tale of a group of lost souls trying to find meaning in a world that sometimes feels hopeless.
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Netanyahu returns to Washington — this time to shape a deal with Iran, not fight one
When President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet at the White House today – their 6th meeting in the U.S. in the last year – their discussion will focus on a shared commitment to confronting the Iranian nuclear threat, but the stakes are different for each of them.
For Trump, a nuclear agreement could cement his legacy as a peacemaker, perhaps even earn him a long-coveted Nobel Peace Prize. For Netanyahu, a deal could bolster his political standing back home in a difficult election year.
In 2015, when President Obama was on the verge of signing a nuclear deal with Iran, Netanyahu cast himself as the indispensable interpreter of the Iranian threat to Washington, as he has again. But back then, Netanyahu came to publicly oppose what he called “a very bad” Iran deal, pushing back against the U.S. president. Now, he is visiting the White House with the hope of shaping U.S. policy on Iran, not challenging the president.
Trump has described the first round of discussions with Iran as “very good,” even as U.S. aircraft carriers and other military assets build up in the region. He has insisted that Tehran is “wanting to make a deal very badly.” Israel, for its part, has made clear that any agreement must go beyond limits on uranium enrichment and also address Iran’s ballistic missile program and its network of regional proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis – that have been attacking Israel.
Netanyahu has said he plans to present the president with Israel’s approach to the nuclear talks led by Trump’s close advisers, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff.
Netanyahu is betting that intimacy equals influence. That being the leader who shows up in person — again and again — ensures Israel is not outflanked as decisions are made. Last June, that strategy appeared to pay off. Netanyahu launched a charm offensive aimed at drawing Trump into a more active role in dismantling Iran’s nuclear program. If talks fail, Trump could act again. “Either we will make a deal, or we will have to do something very tough like last time,” Trump told Axios.
But the frequency of these meetings also reflects some vulnerability. It showcases a prime minister who cannot afford distance and disagreement with the White House.
The domestic clock is ticking
The longest-serving Israeli leader is facing a real risk that Israel’s legislature, the Knesset, will dissolve in the coming weeks if his coalition fails to resolve the explosive issue of military conscription for Haredi yeshiva students. The Haredi parties have threatened to vote against the budget ahead of the March 31 deadline — a move that would trigger elections as early as June.
If Netanyahu emerges from the White House visit with rhetorical alignment or symbolic support, he could buy himself time and political oxygen.
These gestures matter for Israel, where the education minister, Yoav Kisch, has formally invited Trump to attend the Israel Prize ceremony on Independence Day in Jerusalem to receive the prestigious award for a “Unique Contribution to the Jewish People.” Israeli officials have also invited him to participate in the annual torch-lighting ceremony, one of the most emotionally charged moments on the Israeli civic calendar.
If Trump accepts the invitation and travels to Israel again, it would be a political gift of the highest order. For Netanyahu’s supporters, that imagery could energize turnout and blunt opposition momentum. For undecided voters, it reinforces a familiar argument: Whatever Netanyahu’s flaws at home, replacing him would risk destabilizing Israel’s most important relationship abroad and its closest ally in any confrontation with Iran.
But Trump’s current position on Iran may still cross Netanyahu’s red lines. And Trump has shown before that he is willing to act unilaterally, even without backing from allies.
Still, he is very popular in Israel, and that benefits Netanyahu. A new survey by the Jewish People Policy Institute showed that 73% of Israelis rate Trump as a better-than-average U.S. president for Israel’s interests and 54% of Jews in Israel view Trump as one of the best presidents in U.S. history.
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5 things to know ahead of the Trump-Netanyahu meeting
President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are set to meet at the White House Wednesday in a highly anticipated discussion. The primary focus of the meeting is expected to be the ongoing negotiations between the United States and Iran, particularly regarding Tehran’s treatment of protesters and the possibility of a renewed agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.
But it also comes amid intensifying debates over U.S. military assistance to Israel, eroding bipartisan support for that aid, and recent controversial Israeli moves in the West Bank, all of which could shape the conversation.
How US military aid to Israel works
U.S. military aid to Israel has long been governed by a 2016 memorandum of understanding under which Washington pledged $38 billion in assistance over a decade — $33 billion in military grants and $5 billion for joint missile defense programs. Israel receives roughly $3.8 billion annually, including approximately $500 million earmarked for missile defense. The agreement is scheduled to be renegotiated in 2028.
Since the outbreak of the Gaza war on Oct. 7, 2023, Congress has authorized at least $16.3 billion in additional aid. The flow of funds is subject to congressional review and measures such as the Leahy Law, which bars assistance to foreign security forces implicated in gross human rights violations.
US aid to Israel no longer enjoys the bipartisan support it once did
Amid the Gaza war and the rise of a U.S. anti-war, pro-Palestinian movement, American public support for Israel has declined significantly across both major parties.
A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that only 24% of Americans under 30 view the Israeli government favorably, compared with roughly half of those over 60. Among Republicans, negative views of Israel increased from 27% in 2022 to 37%, while among Democrats the rise was steeper — from 53% to 69%. Nearly 4 in 10 adults under 30 believe the U.S. provides “too much” aid to Israel, compared with one-third of adults overall.
The debate over U.S. aid to Israel played a significant role in last week’s Democratic congressional primary in New Jersey. A super PAC associated with the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC spent more than $2 million on negative ads that helped fuel the defeat of former Rep. Tom Malinowski, who describes himself as pro-Israel but who drew AIPAC’s fire because he is opposed to unconditional aid.
Why Netanyahu wants to reduce U.S. military aid
In recent weeks, Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have publicly expressed a desire to reduce Israel’s dependence on U.S. military assistance. Netanyahu has said he hopes to “taper off” U.S. aid over the next decade and has indicated that he does not intend to seek a full renewal of the 2016 agreement.
This push is rooted in frustrations during the Gaza war, when several allies, including the Biden administration, temporarily halted or delayed certain arms transfers over concerns that specific munitions could be used in ways that might cause excessive harm to Palestinian civilians. Israeli officials argue that these restrictions constrained Israel’s ability to fight at critical moments.
Israeli leaders also see strategic and economic value in redirecting the billions of dollars currently spent on U.S. weapons toward Israel’s own defense industry. At the same time, declining support for U.S. aid to Israel among both “America First” Republicans and Democrats concerned about Gaza casualties has made the Israeli government increasingly wary of relying on Washington for its long-term defense needs.
On Jan. 28, Netanyahu claimed that what he called an arms “embargo” under former President Joe Biden cost Israeli soldiers their lives — a statement former U.S. officials quickly condemned.
“Netanyahu is both not telling the truth and ungrateful to a president that literally saved Israel at its most vulnerable moment,” said Amos Hochstein, a former U.S. diplomat under Biden. Brett McGurk, who served in senior national security roles under presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump, as well as Biden, said the claim was “categorically false.” Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides added: “He is wrong. Biden’s support for Israel has been rock solid, and he provided it at enormous political cost.”
For its part, the Trump administration published its 2026 National Defense Strategy at the end of January, which states, “Israel is a model ally, and we have an opportunity now to further empower it to defend itself and promote our shared interests.”
The meeting’s focus: Iran
Discussions regarding Iran are expected to dominate the meeting. Iran and Israel have long been adversaries, with Tehran openly committed to Israel’s destruction. The meeting comes ahead of months of increased tension between the two nations. During the 12-Day War in June 2025, Israel struck key Iranian military assets, and the U.S., buoyed by prior Israeli military successes, attacked major Iranian nuclear facilities. The present condition of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs after the strikes is unclear, and Israel remains determined to eliminate the security threat posed by Iran.
Following the outbreak of anti-regime protests in Iran in mid-January, Trump encouraged demonstrators in a Jan. 13 Truth Social post, writing: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! … HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”
Shortly after the post, Netanyahu reportedly urged Trump not to strike Iran, citing fears of a major Iranian retaliation against Israel — an outcome Iranian officials have explicitly threatened. While Trump has repeatedly warned Iran of potential military action over Iran’s treatment of protesters, and moved a fleet of aircraft carrier strike groups to the Middle East, he has emphasized his preference for reaching a diplomatic solution with Iran, particularly focused on the country’s nuclear program.
The Trump administration met with Iranian officials in Oman over the weekend in the hopes that a deal might be struck. With talks expected to continue next week, Netanyahu is now seeking to broaden the scope of any potential agreement between the U.S. and Iran. According to a statement from his office, Netanyahu hopes the Trump administration will push for provisions addressing Iran’s ballistic missile program and Iran’s support for regional militant groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, as well as ensuring Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
On the sidelines, Israel makes controversial moves in the West Bank
Recent Israeli decisions regarding the West Bank may also surface during the meeting, following announcements on Sunday by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Defense Minister Israel Katz of new measures expanding Israeli control over territory in the West Bank presently controlled by the Palestinian Authority. The steps will make it easier for Jewish Israelis to purchase land in the West Bank and could allow Israeli police to demolish homes in areas under PA jurisdiction — moves that would violate the Oslo Accords.
The recent Israeli decisions run counter to explicit Trump administration requests that Israel avoid controversial actions in the West Bank, particularly as Arab states have warned that steps toward annexation could jeopardize their willingness to help manage postwar Gaza or normalize relations with Israel.
Trump told Axios on Tuesday, “We have enough things to think about now. We don’t need to be dealing with the West Bank.” U.S. officials also reiterated Trump’s opposition to Israeli annexation of the territory, stating, “A stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration’s goal to achieve peace in the region.”
With a potential deal with Iran on the table, U.S. military aid to Israel under growing scrutiny, and Israeli actions in the West Bank complicating regional diplomacy, Wednesday’s meeting comes at a unique moment for the U.S.-Israel relationship. But as past meetings between Trump and Netanyahu have shown, there is a very real chance the meeting could veer off script.
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