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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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The post March comes in with a roar of new Yiddish music appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The mysterious case of Barbra Streisand and the missing half-pound of Zabar’s sturgeon
The whole story of Barbra Streisand and the sturgeon began a few months ago on a Thursday when I was at my regular spot at the fish counter.
A very pleasant, attractive woman ordered a pound of Nova and, before Slim, my long sharp slicing knife, and I started our journey through the salmon, she said, “I’m buying this for Barbra Streisand.”
I was skeptical, so I asked her what her relationship was with Barbra. She told me her name was Christine and that she was Barbra’s editor and had edited Barbra’s autobiography. Well, that made me look up and take notice. She must be genuine, I thought, who would make up such a story?
As I sliced, I heard Barbra in my head singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and lost all track of time. I threw the lox I had sliced up on the scale with flair; one pound it was.
While I continued to work, an idea popped into my head. I spotted a succulent block of sturgeon in the showcase of fish and thought, “I’m going to cut as perfect a slice as I can, wrap it carefully in tissue paper and place it neatly in the Zabar’s wrapping on top of the pound of Nova.” I didn’t disclose what I was doing because I wanted it to be a lovely surprise — if she happened to like sturgeon, that is.
Two Thursdays later, when I arrived at work, I found a small square envelope sitting on my board face-up. It read “For Len.” Inside was a folded card on which was printed in raised gold letters “BARBRA STREISAND.”
I opened the card, looked inside and found a handwritten note: “Dear Len, What a lovely gift! Did you know how much I love sturgeon? Thank you. It was delicious!” She signed it “Barbra” in a nice, swirly signature.
That night at home, I just couldn’t get it out of my mind: I actually had a handwritten note from Barbra Streisand. How many people could say that? Now that I knew she liked sturgeon, I decided I would personally send her a pound as a gift. But then I stopped.
“You don’t know her,” I said to myself. “It would be inappropriate and silly. I went back and forth until I gave up, watched Yentl instead, then went to sleep.
That night, I had a dream.
Barbra was in Zabar’s, walking up and down the aisles, smiling, going through each department, carefully selecting items when, suddenly, she noticed that her shopping cart was full. At that moment, she found herself standing opposite me at the fish counter.
“Welcome to the heart of the store, Ms. Streisand,” I said.
She smiled, I smiled back. I invited her to step behind the counter so she could have a better, closer look at all the fish. Next thing I knew she was standing there beside me, asking about my slicing technique and, for that fleeting moment, I was the star — a master lox slicer.
“Look who’s here, guys,” I told my co-workers. “It’s Barbra Streisand paying us a short visit,” at which point Barbra and I began a duet — “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.” I wanted so much to finish the song with her, but I woke up before I could.
In the morning, as I considered Barbra’s thank you note and our unfinished dream duet, I realized that she and I have a lot more in common than meets the eye.
We are both old. She is 83 and I am 95. We’re both Jewish. We both like sturgeon. But most of all we are both professional singers — my career started in 5th grade, at P.S. 180 in Brooklyn, when I was chosen to sing the lead in Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” Then, in 6th grade, I played Nanki-Poo in The Mikado. And, when I was 12, I sang in the Oscar Julius Choir at Tempel Bethel in Borough Park. I also sang at Jewish weddings — 50 cents as part of a choir, $1 when I performed a solo.
Suddenly, I realized that maybe it wouldn’t be so inappropriate to send Barbra a half-pound of sturgeon as a belated 83rd birthday present. Except I didn’t have her address.
Enter Christine.
On another Thursday, as I was cleaning my knives, one of my co-workers tapped me on the shoulder and told me there was a woman looking for me. And there she was. Did Barbra want more Nova, I wondered, or some sturgeon?
She told me she had an appointment in the neighborhood and thought she’d stop in and say hello. I told her how I had considered sending Barbra a belated birthday gift, though I added that it would be just as easy for her to order some online.
Christine gave me her phone number, so later I texted her and asked if I could send Barbra the sturgeon. “Sure,” she texted back and gave me an address.
I got to work.
I selected the best-looking block of sturgeon in the display counter, sliced off half a pound and wrapped it up. Then I removed the dorsal fin from the most succulent whitefish in the showcase, wrapped it and placed it on top of the sturgeon. I walked over to the bakery and retrieved one of Zabar’s rugelach, wrapped it in foil and placed it alongside the dorsal fin. There was a paper plate on the shelf behind me. I took out my black marker and wrote “Happy Birthday” to Barbra and signed my name.
I finished the package and brought it up to Bernardo in the shipping department, and gave him instructions as to where and to whom it should be sent. I returned to the fish counter thinking a job well done. But — she never got the sturgeon
I set the wheels in motion with the appropriate department at Zabar’s to investigate “The case of the missing sturgeon.”
In the annals of crime, there are those cases that go down in the books as unsolved; so too in the world of undelivered smoked fish. This is one of those cases.
As for the replacement sturgeon I sent to Barbra, a recent call to Christine revealed somewhat anticlimactically, that Barbra did receive it, but due to some confusion, it was sliced and sent as a regular shipment with no indication that it came from me, her fellow singing professional. Perhaps she sent a perfunctory thank you note to Zabar’s, perhaps she wondered why she was getting another round of sturgeon, without explanation, so close to her birthday, or maybe, just maybe, she suspected it was from her new friend, Len.
Still, I’d like to think that I’ll have another opportunity to wish her a happy birthday. When her 84th comes around in a couple of months, I’ll be at the fish counter. And I’ll be ready.
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Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’
(JTA) — In the fall, a video of Nick Fuentes criticizing Donald Trump drew the praise of progressive ex-Congressman Jamaal Bowman.
“Finally getting it Nick,” Bowman commented, apparently recognizing some common ground between himself on the left and Fuentes, on the far right, who said in the video that Trump was “better than the Democrats for Israel, for the oil and gas industry, for Silicon Valley, for Wall Street,” but said he wasn’t “better for us.”
Now, Fuentes says there is actually no common ground between him and those on the left.
“My problem with Trump isn’t that he’s Hitler — my problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler,” Fuentes said during his streaming show on Tuesday, which focused mostly on the potential for an American attack on Iran.
He continued, “You have all these left-wing people saying, ‘Why do I agree with Nick Fuentes?’ It’s like, I’m criticizing Trump because there’s not enough deportations, there’s not enough ICE brutality, there’s not enough National Guard. Sort of a big difference!”
Fuentes, the streamer and avowed antisemite who has previously said Hitler was “very f–king cool,” has been gaining more traction as a voice on the right. His interview with Tucker Carlson in October plunged Republicans into an ongoing debate over antisemitism within their ranks, inflaming the divide between a pro-Israel wing of the party and an emerging, isolationist “America First” wing that’s against U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Once a pro-Trump MAGA Republican, Fuentes has become the leader of the “groyper” movement advocating for farther-right positions. The set of Fuentes’ show includes both a hat and a mug with the words “America First” on his desk.
In a New York Times interview, Trump recently weighed in on rising tensions within the Republican Party, saying Republican leaders should “absolutely” condemn figures who promote antisemitism, and that he does not approve of antisemites in the party.
“No, I don’t. I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” replied Trump when asked by a reporter whether there was room within the Republican coalition for antisemitic figures.
Asked if he would condemn Fuentes, Trump initially claimed that he didn’t know the antisemitic streamer, before acknowledging that he had had dinner with him alongside Kanye West in 2022.
“I had dinner with him, one time, where he came as a guest of Kanye West. I didn’t know who he was bringing,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Do you mind if I bring a friend?’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ And it was Nick Fuentes? I don’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Trump flaunted his pro-Israel bona fides in the interview, mentioning the recent announcement that he was nominated for Israel’s top civilian honor and calling himself the “best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel.”
Fuentes, meanwhile, spent the bulk of his show on Tuesday speculating that Trump will order the U.S. to attack Iran, and concluded that “Israel is holding our hand walking us down the road toward an inevitable war.”
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Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’
(JTA) — Larry Ellison, the Jewish founder of Oracle and a major pro-Israel donor, has recently been in the headlines for his media acquisition ventures with his son.
The new scrutiny on the family has surfaced a decades-old detail about Ellison: that he once rechristened a superyacht after realizing that its original name carried an antisemitic tinge.
In 1999, Ellison — then No. 23 on Forbes’ billionaires list, well on his way to his No. 4 ranking today — purchased a boat called Izanami.
Originally built for a Japanese businessman, the 191-foot superyacht was named for a Shinto deity. But Ellison soon realized what the name read backwards: “I’m a Nazi.”
“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,” Ellison said in “Softwar,” a 2013 biography. “When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat.” He renamed the boat Ronin and later sold it.
The decades-old factoid resurfaced this week because of a New York Magazine profile of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, the chair and CEO of Paramount-Skydance Corporation.
Skydance Corporation, which David Ellison founded in 2006, completed an $8 billion merger last year with Paramount Global. Larry Ellison, meanwhile, joined an investor consortium that signed a deal to purchase TikTok, the social media juggernaut accused of spreading antisemitism. Together, father and son also staged a hostile bid to purchase Warner Bros. but were outmatched by Netflix.
After acquiring Paramount, David Ellison appointed The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, in an endorsement of Weiss’ contrarian and pro-Israel outlook that has been challenged as overly friendly to the Trump administration.
Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive Jewish parents, has long been a donor to pro-Israel and Jewish causes, including to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. In September, he briefly topped the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world’s richest man.
In December, Oracle struck a deal to provide cloud services for TikTok, with some advocates hoping for tougher safeguards against antisemitism on the social media platform
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