In this virtual exhibition you can find out more about the people, buildings and plays that made Yiddish theatre in London so special, as well as explore the unique collection of Yiddish theatre photographs, documents and objects held at the Jewish Museum London.
posted by Deathalicious
on Apr 5, 2013 -
6 comments
Hanukkah draws nigh and that means
latkes.
[The oil in which the potato pancake is cooked symbolizes the miraculously long-burning fuel that lit the Second Temple.] Bubala Please shows you how to keep it real.
[more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Dec 2, 2012 -
75 comments
Almost immediately upon my arrival in my first teaching job, I became the go-to guy for the Holocaust. Of course, this was partly due to my dissertation, but in larger part, I suspect, because of my Jewishness. This was fine with me for a number of reasons. First, as a junior faculty member, this identification, though merely professional, could only help in my quest for tenure. An expert on the Holocaust carried infinitely greater weight, I thought, than an expert on ministerial instability during the French Third Republic.
Dissolution: My life as an accidental Holocaust expert—and why I decided to quit
posted by timshel
on Feb 25, 2012 -
13 comments
Forget
Adam Sandler. Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of Jewish take-offs of popular songs. The Fountainheads have produced
Purim and
Pesach (Passover) covers. The Maccabeats had a good amount of exposure with their
Hanukkah and put out a
Purim, too.
Of course,
not all of these songs are covers.
posted by dzkalman
on Apr 5, 2011 -
8 comments
Henry Roth had one of the most anomalous careers in modern letters: a brilliant novel at age twenty-eight, the incomparable Call It Sleep, lost for thirty years but never quite forgotten, then a torrent of words let loose in his seventies and eighties. ... Roth continued to resist any single explanation for his catastrophic writer's block, but it became evident that it was the incest, and the self-loathing that accompanied it, that threw the biggest roadblock across his path. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Jan 12, 2011 -
7 comments
Debbie Friedman passed away today. She was the most well known and influential composer of Jewish music and litergy in the United States.
The Jerusalem Post says that "Friedman’s music is performed in synagogues around the world more than that of any other modern composer."
Her most well known song is a setting of
Mi Shebeirach, a prayer for healing.
posted by kdern
on Jan 9, 2011 -
24 comments
A story of moose snouts, tenement animal husbandry and Crisco - the Lower East Side.
RAZ: Now, you describe the markets in this part of the Lower East Side, around the Bowery that Mr. Glockner's wife would often go to to find fresh produce, I was amazed to read about what you could get in New York City in the 1860s. I mean, there were a lot of choices.
Ms. ZIEGELMAN: You could buy bear. You could buy moose. And not only moose, you could buy moose snout. This was considered a particular delicacy.
RAZ: By whom?
Ms. ZIEGELMAN: That I don't know. [more inside]
posted by caddis
on Jun 9, 2010 -
11 comments
Is Facebook chametz? An interview with two rabbis about their
Facebook group, encouraging Jews to consider giving up Facebook for Passover
next week. While the word
"chametz" strictly refers only to leavened bread, which is prohibited during Passover, the group is inspired by a Chassidic interpretation that connects the leavening of bread to an "over-inflated sense of self."
posted by albrecht
on Mar 24, 2010 -
77 comments
What's a Coastie? Two University of Wisconsin undergrads record and post to YouTube an ode to
"Coasties," out-of-state students who live in expensive off-campus apartments, wear Spandex tights with Uggs, spend their parents' money on designer handbags and Starbucks, and -- oh yeah, like 15% of their classmates but only 1 in 200 Wisconsin natives,
are Jews.
Controversy ensues.
posted by escabeche
on Dec 24, 2009 -
143 comments
“We got a bit excited because we realized that people have
collected lots of
dybbuk stories, but
our fragment describes a real event, where you see how they come together and pray in order to exorcise the ghost from a widow,”
[more inside]
posted by ServSci
on Dec 21, 2009 -
11 comments
The Survey of American Jewish Language and Identity reports on the results of an online survey of 25,179 American Jews and 4,874 American Gentiles. Non-Jews say "klutz" but not "schmutz." The more Orthodox you are, the more likely you are to say "Good Shabbos" instead of "Shabbat Shalom." And so much more you'll plotz.
posted by escabeche
on Nov 10, 2009 -
87 comments
Mountain air, clear as wine
And the scent of pines
Brought by the twilight breeze
With the sound of bells
Shortly before the Six Day War of 1967 an amateur singer
performed [YT] an elegy for the then-divided city of Jerusalem "locked in a dream ... with a wall in its heart".
[more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia
on May 21, 2009 -
8 comments
Chanukkah is the story of a group of warriors (the Maccabees, later the
Hasmoneans, led by Mattathias) who rose up against the Greeks (the
Seleucids), united the Jews, reclaimed the Temple (
Beit HaMikdash), and then lit one day's supply of oil which miraculously lasted for eight days, started a brand new holiday called Chanukkah, and brought Jewish sovereignty and peace to the land of Israel. Except that almost every part of that story is either wrong or completely misleading.
[more inside]
posted by andoatnp
on Dec 21, 2008 -
66 comments
