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My grandmother was a ‘Sherlock Holmes of Yiddish song,’ but she couldn’t solve the mystery of antisemitism
(JTA) — When I was younger, my family sang Yiddish songs at almost every holiday and gathering.
Funny songs, sad songs, songs about love, about the Holocaust, about hunger, about labor and resistance — the usual Yiddish fare. My Bubby, Chana Mlotek, a Yiddish archivist and ethnomusicologist, collected hundreds of them with my Zeyde, Yosl Mlotek, who became known as the address for Yiddish in America. Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer called them “the Sherlock Holmeses of Yiddish folk songs” for their investigations of Jewish music.
We would gather by the piano in my grandparents’ living room in the Bronx, with the piano being helmed by my Bubby, sometimes my great-aunt Malke Gottlieb (with whom my Bubby compiled a collection of songs from the Jewish ghettos), then my father, then my uncle. Eventually each of the eyniklekh — the grandkids — would have to sing in Yiddish.
Of course, I didn’t recognize until I got older that Yiddish songs are an incredible porthole into history, while also testifying to the vivaciousness of a people nearly destroyed and a culture almost erased. It’s through these lyrics and other stories from my grandparents that I learned the history of our people and the faith we had in America, “Dos Goldene Land,” where immigrants came to escape religious persecution. One famous song, in particular, was about the tragic letdown of this promise.
“The Ballad of Leo Frank” was about the Jewish factory manager from Atlanta. In 1913, a 14-year-old employee at his pencil factory named Mary Phagan was found dead. Frank was accused of her murder on flimsy evidence.
After a trumped-up trial, a biased jury found Frank guilty after four hours of deliberation. The case was retried, and appealed before the United States Supreme Court, without success. Hundreds of thousands of petitions were sent to Gov. John Slaton of Georgia, who eventually commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. But months later, a bloodthirsty gang, who were later to inspire the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, kidnapped Frank from jail and lynched him.
Thanks to Yiddish music, we knew all these facts. The painful details of the Frank case were heard in melancholic Yiddish songs like “The Ballad of Leo Frank” and “Lebn zol Columbus” (“Long Live Columbus”), which we as children crooned around the piano in the living room of my Bubby’s apartment.
“A bilbl hot men oysgetrakht / Oyf undzern a yidl” — they made up a blood libel about one of our Jews — goes the lyrics from one of these songs.
We sing these songs to learn about our history, hoping never to repeat it. But just a couple weeks ago, antisemitic mobs weren’t just part of a songbook. They were here, right in the heart of New York City.
Frank’s story is the subject of a new revival of a Broadway musical, “Parade,” starring Ben Platt, which opened this month at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre. During previews, members of a neo-Nazi group called The National Socialist Movement rallied outside the theater, handing out leaflets and accusing Frank of being a pedophile and a murderer. Mostly, they were there to stoke fear and rekindle the same Jew hatred that cost Frank his life more than a century ago.
This is only the latest example of what has been an alarming growth of antisemitism in the United States. Jews who grew up learning (or singing) about blood libels in Russia have always slept with one eye open, haunted by the fear that antisemitism would rear its ugly head here, too.
Just last week as I entered the subway in midtown Manhattan, I was verbally accosted by a man who lowered his shirt collar to show me his swastika tattoo. And so the story goes.
As Passover approaches, the words of the Haggadah come to mind: “b’khol dor vador” — in every generation. In every generation, enemies emerge and the responsibility to rekindle learning and reclaim identity falls upon us, each in our own unique way.
It feels fitting then that my grandparents’ anthology is now accessible to a whole new audience.
The Yosl and Chana Mlotek Yiddish Song Collection at the Workers Circle went live this week. It is a searchable, comprehensive database of Yiddish music and song, spanning centuries, genres, artists and more, bringing my grandparents’ anthologies online. Hundreds of Yiddish songs, including the Leo Frank ballad, can be freely accessed thanks to a thorough digitization process overseen by my brother, Elisha Mlotek, who served as creative director for the website.
Sponsored by the Mlotek family, this new website is a loving collaboration between the Arbeter Ring (Workers Circle) and the Mlotek family and will ensure Yiddish song and in turn Jewish history never cower in the face of prejudice. As Elisha describes the music collected on the website, “It is an essential record of our people — the richness and resilience of our culture.”
My grandfather died in 2000. Chana died in 2013, at age 91. Bubby’s piano now lives in my father’s office at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, but we still come together around song. (In fact, it was my cousin Lee who recently reminded us of the Leo Frank song he learned from my uncle in an Arbeter Ring shule, or school.)
This Thursday my Bubby’s sons, her grandchildren and even some of her great-grandchildren will participate in a tribute concert to her at the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, where Chana served as the music archivist for decades. The in-person free concert, presented in collaboration with Carnegie Hall and which can be streamed digitally, will include family friends who also happen to be some of the most special Yiddish singers of the day, including Joanne Borts, Sarah Gordon, Elmore James, Daniella Rabbani, Eleanor Reissa, Lorin Sklamberg and Steven Skybell, who played Tevye in “Fidler Afn Dakh,” the Yiddish production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Now is as welcome a time as any to celebrate Jewish life, learn a Yiddish song and discover the lessons of history along the way.
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Kate Hudson Reminisces About Jewish Grandmother’s ‘Amazing’ Cooking, Gets Emotional Over Jewish Food
Kate Hudson attends premiere of “Song Sung Blue” by FocusFeatures at AMC Lincoln Square in New York, NY on Dec. 11, 2025. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Actress Kate Hudson got nostalgic talking about her Jewish grandmother’s cooking, and all the Jewish foods that she loves and makes, during a podcast interview that aired on Wednesday.
The star of “Song Sung Blue” made an appearance on the New Year’s Eve episode of “Table Manners,” a podcast hosted by Jewish mother and daughter duo Lennie and Jessie Ware in which they talk largely about food and family while sharing a meal with their guest. Hudson has Hungarian Jewish roots on her maternal side of the family, and after she did DNA testing, the actress discovered that she is also half Sicilian, she said on the podcast. She also learned that she has German and Swedish roots.
When Hudson was asked at the start of the podcast to share a memorable dish from her childhood, she began by talking about her mother, award-winning actress Goldie Hawn, and her great cooking before mentioning her grandmother’s skills in the kitchen.
“I grew up with a mother that could throw anything into a pot, no cookbook, no nothing, and somehow it tasted amazing,” said the “Running Point” star. “And my grandma was an amazing cook, but she was a very traditional Jewish cook, like challah, amazing matzah balls, brisket – her brisket was to die for – [and] latkes. And she’d make the best challah French toast.”
Later on, Jessie asked the Golden Globe-winning actress to share a “nostalgic taste” that can transport her back in time. Hudson replied by talking about her grandmother’s matzah ball soup. The actress said she makes matzah ball soup too, but nothing compares to her grandmother’s.
“My grandmother made the best matzah balls,” Hudson explained. “Their fluff made them perfect. Perfect matzah ball soup … her matzah balls, nothing like ’em.” She also said that “any Jewish meat,” like her grandmother’s brisket, makes her feel like she’s with her “gram.”
“It makes me emotional, Jewish food,” Hudson added. “And blintzes, for instance. I grew up with blueberry blintzes, and I love them so much. I just with my daughter got some the other day and I got so emotional. You realize no matter how religious you are – we’re not a religious family. It’s not like, we didn’t go to temple. I mean we did when my grandma was alive, but after that, we didn’t really carry the religious part of our Judaism. But the traditions are so amazing and beautiful.”
The conversation then circled back to challah and Hudson shared that she bakes a four-strand challah with the help of a “diagram” but also small challah rolls.
“I still make challah. We pray on the challah bread. We do the whole thing,” she shared. “Every time I do, we talk about what each ingredient, what it represents. There are such beautiful traditions. And my grandma gave that to us, no one else. She was the only one. And thank God for that. Sitting around the table on a Jewish holiday and the food that it represents, just makes me happy.”
Jessie replied by telling her mother, “You never told me what all the ingredients of challah bread represent. You’ve just given me Jewish guilt.” Lennie laughed and replied that she has never baked challah before. Hudson immediately offered to share her challah recipe, saying, “They’re so easy.”
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New York City Woman Punched Over Hat Defending Jews
A New York City subway platform on Oct. 25, 2022. Photo: Jakub Porzycki via Reuters Connect
A woman was punched in the face this week while riding the New York City subway for wearing a hat that said “F— Antisemitism,” according to a local report.
“F— Jews,” the suspect, described as a “Black man in his 40s,” allegedly said to her before striking the blow on Tuesday afternoon, the New York Daily News reported, citing local law enforcement.
The victim then “fled” the railcar at the 116th St. – Columbia University subway station in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, while the assailant remained on board, the News added. She was reportedly not seriously injured, as medics did not treat her following the incident’s being reported to law enforcement.
The assault is one of the latest acts of antisemitism on the city’s public transport. Last month, two Black men assaulted two Jewish men on a train in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, with one of them seizing hold of a victim’s neck and shoving him. Not a day later, according to a local NBC affiliate, someone stabbed a Jewish man in the same neighborhood. It has been reported that the dispute began when the would-be stabber uttered an antisemitic comment to the victim.
Beyond public transit, New York City has seen an alarming surge in antisemitic hate crimes over the last two years, following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
Jews were targeted in the majority (54 percent) of all hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024, according to data issued by the New York City Police Department (NYPD). A new report released on Wednesday by the New York City Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, which was established in May, noted that figure rose to a staggering 62 percent in the first quarter of this year, despite Jewish New Yorkers comprising just 11 percent of the city’s population.
New York City is home to the world’s largest Jewish community outside of Israel.
In a moment of rising neo-Nazism and tensions between Arab Muslims and Jews over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this week’s subway incident highlights antisemitism in New York City’s African American community, which has been the source of much of the recent antisemitic violence.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, in just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November 2024, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In each case, the assailant was allegedly a Black male, a pattern of conduct which continues to strain Black-Jewish relations across the Five Boroughs.
In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery. In another incident, a man smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.
In 2023, an analysis of NYPD data conducted by Americans Against Antisemitism (AAA), found that 97 percent of antisemitic hate crimes were perpetrated by members of other minority groups and nearly a quarter by teenagers. Over two-thirds, 69 percent, of the assailants, it added, were Black, the report continued, with most attacks, 77 percent, taking place in predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
Tensions between Blacks and Jews have limited inter-group cooperation in recent decades, causing the halcyon days of the relationship in the 20th century, when Jewish philanthropy helped sustain the Civil Rights Movement, to seem more like ancient history than a current, lived experience. Black antisemitism increased in volume and visibility in the 1960s, with the rise of the Nation of Islam and the Black Power movement, and since then some prominent Black leaders have called Jews “hymies,” stoked a race riot in Crown Heights in which Blacks assaulted Jews in the streets, and promoted the anti-Zionist movement, which aims to dispossess Jews of their homeland in Israel. Most recently, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement blamed Israel for police killings of Black men.
The rift is often cited as a missed opportunity for a permanent solidarity between two historically oppressed groups. However, that has not stopped Black and Jewish leaders from attempting to revive the Black-Jewish alliance of lore.
In 2019, Black and Jewish members of Congress launched the Black-Jewish Congressional Caucus and “relaunched” it in 2023 with the help of the National Urban League, American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League.
“It’s an incredible and positive development,” Darius Jones, CEO of the National Black Empowerment Council, told The Algemeiner during the relaunch event in 2023. “Fighting antisemitism and racism has inspired a resurrection of the Black-Jewish relationship at the community level, and it’s great to see it happening and even better that national leadership is stepping up to move it along.”
Several members of Congress delivered remarks during the event, including co-chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-NY), who said that both Jews and Blacks are equally reviled by white supremacists.
“Jewish tradition teaches that it is incumbent upon us to speak out and act against injustice. African American and Jewish communities have a long, shared history of confronting discrimination and racism in the United States, and the recent rise of white supremacy, bigotry, and antisemitism poses a direct threat to both our communities,” Schultz said. “This caucus will build upon our historic fight for a better, more peaceful world, while also raising awareness in Congress about the common issues facing our communities.”
In 2024, the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), a nonprofit which promotes academic freedom and free speech, partnered with South Carolina State University and Voorhees University — two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) — to host a series of student and faculty seminars on the history of “Black-Jewish solidarity,” from the creation of Rosenwald Schools for Black children following the abolition of slavery to the present day.
“Recent surveys and studies show a disturbing rate of antisemitic attitudes among Black Americans, especially young people,” AEN executive director Miriam Elman told The Algemeiner at the time. “HBCUs have a critically important role to play as allies with the Jewish community to counter antisemitism.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Jewish Community in Spain Condemns Online Map Labeling Schools, Businesses as ‘Zionist’
The children’s bookstore in Sant Cugat, Spain, was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti and slogans, prompting outrage from the local Jewish community. Photo: Screenshot
Members of Spain’s Jewish community have filed complaints against a French online platform over a map pinpointing Jewish-owned businesses, schools, and Israeli-linked companies in Catalonia, warning it revives Europe’s darkest antisemitic practices and dangerously promotes harassment and violence.
According to the local Jewish outlet Enfoque Judío, the interactive map — known as Barcelonaz — was launched by an unidentified group claiming to be “journalists, professors, and students” on the French-hosted mapping platform GoGoCarto.
As a publicly accessible and collaboratively created online platform, the map marks over 150 schools, Jewish-owned businesses — including kosher food shops — and Israeli-linked as well as Spanish and international companies operating in Israel, labeling them as “Zionist.”
“Our goal is to understand how Zionism operates and the forms it takes, with the intention of making visible and denouncing the impact of its investments in our territory,” the project’s website states.
Users are also encouraged to donate and to submit additional locations that meet the criteria set by the map’s creators.
Jewish leaders in Spain have strongly denounced the initiative, warning that it fosters further discrimination and hatred against the community amid an increasingly hostile environment in which Jews and Israelis continue to be targeted.
Several community organizations have filed complaints with GoGoCarto, demanding the site’s removal and arguing that it violates French laws against hate speech and discrimination, Enfoque Judío reported.
The newly unveiled project “clearly has an antisemitic and discriminatory character, as it seeks to identify and stigmatize a population based on its real or perceived religious affiliation,” the complainants wrote in a letter obtained by Enfoque Judío.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, Spain has become one of Israel’s fiercest critics, a stance that has only intensified in recent months, coinciding with a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents targeting the local Jewish community — from violent assaults and vandalism to protests and legal actions.
Last week, Israeli mural artists Hodaya and Dudi Shoval were physically assaulted in Barcelona while working on a project that turns existing murals into pro-Israel messages, confronting a rising tide of antisemitic and anti-Israeli graffiti throughout the city.
While working in the city center, a group of unknown individuals approached them and started shouting antisemitic insults before turning violent.
As the Shovals and their camera crew tried to flee the scene, the assailants began throwing objects, including a glass bottle that smashed against their photographer’s head.
Amid this increasingly hostile climate, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has faced growing backlash from political leaders and the Jewish community, who accuse him of fueling antisemitic hostility.
As part of its anti-Israel campaign aimed at undermining and isolating the Jewish state internationally, the Spanish government announced earlier this week a ban on imports from hundreds of Israeli communities in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights — making Spain the second European Union country to implement such a policy in its ongoing effort to boycott Israel.
Spain’s newly implemented measure marks its latest attempts to curb Israel’s defensive campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, as ties between the two countries continue to deteriorate amid ongoing tensions.
In September, Spain also passed a law to take “urgent measures to stop the genocide in Gaza,” banning trade in defense material and dual-use products from Israel, as well as imports and advertising of products originating from Israeli settlements.
On Tuesday, Spain’s consumer ministry ordered seven travel booking websites to take down 138 listings for holiday homes in Palestinian territories, warning they could face sanctions if they continue advertising Israeli-owned properties in those areas.
Earlier this year, the Spanish government also announced it would bar entry to individuals involved in what it called a “genocide against Palestinians,” block Israel-bound ships and aircraft carrying weapons from Spanish ports and airspace, and enforce an embargo on products from Israeli communities in the West Bank.