Yiddish New York 2024

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9:30am EST

Lecture: Arbeter Froyen and Antifascism - Jewish Women Workers and Internationalism in the 1930s

Thursday December 26, 2024 9:30am - 10:45am EST

507 - Hebrew Union College

Women of the Yiddish left played a key role in building the international anti-fascist movement in the 1930s. In these two talks, we will look at the life stories of women such as Clara Bodian, a worker in the feather industry who was elected as a delegate to the World Congress of Women against War and Fascism in Paris in 1934, and June Croll, a leader of the Anti-Nazi Federation in New York in 1935. As committed Communists and internationalists, these Jewish women dedicated themselves to building international solidarity networks with anti-fascist women’s groups across Europe, while at the same time deepening their commitments to fight racism and anti-Semitism in the United States.

Speakers

Jennifer Young

Jennifer Young currently serves as Education Program Manager at the Yiddish Book Center, and formerly served as the Director of Education at the YIVO Institute. She has worked as a writer, editor, and walking tour guide, and as a museum educator at the Tenement Museum and the New-York... Read More →

Thursday December 26, 2024 9:30am - 10:45am EST
507 - Hebrew Union College 1 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012

Lecture (Hybrid)

9:30am EST

Lecture: Ashkenazi Songs Before Yiddish

Thursday December 26, 2024 9:30am - 10:45am EST

503 - Hebrew Union College

What did the music of medieval Ashkenaz sound like? On many levels, it will always remain a mystery. Indeed, although some form of Jewish-German was certainly spoken there, only two surviving sources of Yiddish writing from before 1400 have survived: a two-line fragment from 1272 and a more complete collection from 1382. Rather than writing in their spoken language, Ashkenazi authors chose Hebrew, writing prolifically, including numerous poems meant to be sung, at least upon occasion. This poetry, in both its form and content, also present a fascinating glimpse into the Jewish-Christian cultural exchange of the time, as well showing the extent of assimilation. Unfortunately, not a single piece has survived with notated music. We will never know the exact melodies to which they were sung, however, with some detective work: by borrowing the melodies used by their Gentile neighbors, or, in some cases, from the rich Jewish oral tradition, a kind of “best guess” solution can be reached, bringing the soundscape of our distant ancestors back to life once more, no matter how imperfectly.

Speakers

Avery Gosfield

Was born in Philadelphia into a music-loving family that produced a composer (Annie Gosfield), a virtuoso steel guitarist (Lucky Oceans), as well as one outlier, political artist Josh Gosfield. Active as a performer, teacher and researcher, she directs the early music group Lucidarium... Read More →

Thursday December 26, 2024 9:30am - 10:45am EST
503 - Hebrew Union College 1 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012

Lecture (Hybrid)

9:30am EST

Teens

Thursday December 26, 2024 9:30am - 12:30pm EST

The projects we do each December in the Youth Theater Workshop are really asking "What time is it on the clock of the world?/ ?װיפֿל אַ װעלטזײגער איז עס /How can our Yiddish languages, books, poems, songs, ancestral stories, and importantly *New York City itself * help us make sense of the moment we are in? How, as youth storytellers, can we use tradition and the stuff only we know to lift the spirits of our community (style, good outfits, jokes, music, dance moves, your favorite thing here) and create an enchanted space in which to think? We'll create an incredible theater show, with an original script, sets, and so much DrAmA (only the good kind! ) Led by Raya Ferholt-Wirz, Jenny Romaine and Ozzy Gold-Shapiro.

Speakers

Raya Ferholt-Wirz

Raya Ferholt-Wirz (teens) is a student at Beacon High School and a multi-instrumentalist who mainly plays violin and trombone. Her trombone focus recently has been on the afro-latin FATCAT program taught by Zack O’Farrill along with some Balkan brass and Klezmer tunes. On violin... Read More →

Ozzy Gold-Shapiro

Ozzy Gold-Shapiro (teens) is a curious historian, Yiddishist, cultural worker, and raconteur living on Nipmuc, Pocumtuc, and Nonotuck land in so-called western Massachusetts. They have been involved as a researcher, translator, and performer in a number of archival Yiddish-based... Read More →

Jenny Romaine

Jenny Romaine (teens) is a director, designer, puppeteer and co-artistic director of Great Small Works visual theater collective. She is music director of Jennifer Miller’s CIRCUS AMOK. Romaine/ Great Small Works performs, teaches, and directs in theaters, schools, parks... Read More →

Thursday December 26, 2024 9:30am - 12:30pm EST

Kids & Teens (On-Site)

9:30am EST

YNY Symposium: The Scorekeepers - Bringing Manuscripts to the Masses

Thursday December 26, 2024 9:30am - 12:30pm EST

506 - Hebrew Union College

What is a “critical edition” and how does it open new vistas for musicians? The symposium follows a pioneering world-wide, crowd-sourced effort by the Klezmer Institute to bring hundreds of newly-discovered musical manuscripts from Ukraine's national library into circulation. Klezmer musicians around the globe are now performing lost melodies collected on An-sky's famed folklore expeditions through Ukraine (1911-1914) and subsequent fieldwork by Soviet-Jewish ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovsky. Join moderator Mark Slobin (Wesleyan Emeritus) scholars and researcher-musicians involved in this amazing project to get a behind-the-scenes look at its challenges and significance, and listen to some of the musical treasures that have been unearthed.

Speakers

Mark Slobin

Mark Slobin is the Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music Emeritus at Wesleyan University and the author or editor of books on Afghanistan and Central Asia, eastern European Jewish music, film music, and ethnomusicology theory, two of which have received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award: “Fiddler... Read More →

Thursday December 26, 2024 9:30am - 12:30pm EST
506 - Hebrew Union College 1 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012

Lecture (Hybrid)

11:15am EST

Lecture: Memories of the Yiddish Kitchen *ONLINE ONLY*

Thursday December 26, 2024 11:15am - 12:30pm EST

Zoom

"Memories of the Yiddish Kitchen” invites you to join our workshop at YNY and contribute to the 5th edition of our collaborative YNY cookbook. The celebrated folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (NYU, POLIN Museum-Warsaw) will get the conversation going with food memories of her own, among them her grandfather’s favorite dish (beef testicles grilled on a hot shovel), her grandmother’s favorite dish (sautéed lung, spleen, and beef cheeks), her mother’s favorite (ptsha: calf’s foot jelly), a family favorite (pickled tongue), her aunt’s speciality (stuffed spleen), her mother’s beloved blote (sour cream and chopped radish, cucumber, scallions, and dill) and shtshav (cold sour sorrel soup), her maternal grandfather’s Passover raisin wine, and our family’s beloved for soup nuts (mandln), eyerlekh, helzl, and potato-nik. These are among the largely forgotten foods of the Yiddish kitchen, to say nothing of the ganef-kneydl (thief’s dumpling) in tsholnt. Other foods continue to be debated with greater or lesser fervor: gefilte fish, latkes, matzoh balls, kugel, bagels, and more. Still others, beloved and remembered, either still grace the table or we wish they did, but have forgotten how to make them from scratch or at all: farfl, kreplekh, rosl, and flodn.
Bring your memories, bring your recipes, and bring your requests!
Please send whatever you can in advance to ynyncoordinator@gmail.com by December 15.
- Use letter size paper, vertical
- Send scans, saved as jpgs, of photos and drawings, recipes (handwritten or typed, your own and any that were handed down to you)
- Send typed texts in Word, not PDFs
Barbara will share her mother’s (vegan) split pea barley soup, tips for making the best old-school potato latkes, the secret to perfect kasha, and more.
This presentation will originate remotely and individuals at HUC are asked to attend on personal devices.

Speakers

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. She is currently Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Her books include Destination Culture: Tourism... Read More →

Thursday December 26, 2024 11:15am - 12:30pm EST
Zoom

Lecture (Hybrid)

11:15am EST

Lecture: “Shelter Books” - Yiddish and Ukrainian Children’s Literature in Times of Violence

Thursday December 26, 2024 11:15am - 12:30pm EST

503 - Hebrew Union College

Books offer their readers a portable shelter in times of crisis, helping families to frame and process trauma and furnishing resources for building resilience. With an eye toward the current war in Ukraine, we will examine a trove of Yiddish and Ukrainian children’s books that cut across a century of violent upheaval, beginning with the Holodomor and the Holocaust, and continuing into the present. As scholars of children’s literature and culture, we will discuss the meaningful points of connection between the Yiddish and Ukrainian projects of healing and cultural preservation.

Speakers

Emily Finer

Emily Finer is Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She researches transnational and multilingual interactions between English, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Russian language cultures, specialising in children’s literature... Read More →

Miriam Udel

Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University, where her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. She is the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury... Read More →

Thursday December 26, 2024 11:15am - 12:30pm EST
503 - Hebrew Union College 1 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012

Lecture (Hybrid)

11:15am EST

Leyenkrayz: Der Abort / Yiddish Literature and Abortion

Thursday December 26, 2024 11:15am - 12:30pm EST

507 - Hebrew Union College

Yiddish writers in the "Old World" and the new made vivid the multiple circumstances women faced when terminating a pregnancy. This leyenkrayz, conducted entirely in Yiddish, will engage with some surprising texts on the subject.

Speakers

Eve Jochnowitz

Eve Jochnowitz, PhD (cooking, language) was a fellow at the Frankel Institute ofAdvanced Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan and currently teaches Yiddish at the YIVO institute and the Workers Circle. She worked for several years as a cook and baker in New York and received... Read More →

Thursday December 26, 2024 11:15am - 12:30pm EST
507 - Hebrew Union College 1 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012

Lecture (Hybrid)

1:00pm EST

YNY Teens Performance!

Thursday December 26, 2024 1:00pm - 1:30pm EST

CL Lounge

YNY Teen Performance! Every year YNY's youth put on a thought-provoking and outstandingly creative theatrical performance. You don't want to miss this!

NOTE: This will be on-site only.

Speakers

Jenny Romaine

Ozzy Gold-Shapiro

Raya Ferholt-Wirz

Thursday December 26, 2024 1:00pm - 1:30pm EST
CL Lounge 1 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012

Kids & Teens (On-Site)

2:00pm EST

YNY Student Concert

Thursday December 26, 2024 2:00pm - 3:30pm EST

Chapel - Hebrew Union College

We’re excited to cap off this year’s workshops with the always-fun-and-we-beg-you-to-be-not-too-long student concert. Cheer on your fellow workshop participants and dance along as they strut their stuff in this live performance at Hebrew Union College. Hot tip – never miss the YNY Teens presentation, and a big dance party usually breaks out at the conclusion of the student concert!

Thursday December 26, 2024 2:00pm - 3:30pm EST
Chapel - Hebrew Union College 1 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012

Concert (Hybrid)

Yiddish New York 2024

From $11.18