S. An-sky, born Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport, was a Jewish author, playwright, researcher of Jewish folklore, polemicist, and cultural and political activist. He is best known for his play The Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds, written in 1914, and for Di Shvue, the anthem of the Jewish socialist Bund.
Psoy Galaktionovich Korolenko is a pseudonym of a Russian songwriter and performer by the name of Pavel Eduardovich Lion. Pavel Lion is also a slavist with a Ph.D. in Russian literature.
Enemies, A Love Story is a tragicomedy novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer first published serially in the Jewish Daily Forward on February 11, 1966. The English translation was published in 1972.
Yiddish song is a general description of several genres of music sung in Yiddish which includes songs of Yiddish theatre, Klezmer songs, and "Yiddish art song" after the model of the German Lied and French mélodie.
Hanukkah music contains several songs associated with the festival of Hanukkah.
"Oyfn Pripetshik" is a Yiddish song by M.M. Warshawsky (1848–1907). The song is about a rabbi teaching his young students the aleph-bet. By the end of the 19th century it was one of the most popular songs of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, and as such it is a major musical memory of pre-Holocaust Europe.
Zalmen Mlotek is an American conductor, pianist, musical arranger, accompanist, composer, and the Artistic Director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF), the longest continuous running Yiddish theatre in the world. He is an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music and a leading figure in the Jewish theatre and concert worlds. As the Artistic Director of the NYTF for the past twenty years, Mlotek helped revive Yiddish classics, instituted bi-lingual simultaneous English and Russian supertitles at all performances and brought leading creative artists of television, theatre and film, such as Itzhak Perlman, Mandy Patinkin, Sheldon Harnick, Theo Bikel, Ron Rifkin, and Joel Grey, to the Yiddish stage. His vision has propelled classics including NYTF productions of the world premiere of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl in Yiddish (1998), Di Yam Gazlonim and the 1923 Rumshinky operetta, The Golden Bride (2016), which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and listed as a New York Times Critics Pick. During his tenure at the NYTF, the theatre company has been nominated for over ten Drama Desk Awards, four Lucille Lortel Awards, and has been nominated for three Tony Awards. In 2015, he was listed as one of the Forward 50 by The Forward, which features American Jews who have had a profound impact on the American Jewish community.
Aliza Greenblatt was an American Yiddish poet. Many of her poems, which were widely published in the Yiddish press, were also set to music and recorded by composers including Abraham Ellstein, Solomon Golub, and Esther Zweig. They were also recorded by Theodore Bikel and Sidor Belarsky, among others. Greenblatt published five volumes of Yiddish poetry and an autobiography in Yiddish, Baym fentsṭer fun a lebn and her works include such well-known Yiddish songs as Fisherlid, Amar Abaye, and Du, Du.
Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird is a German klezmer band founded by Jewish-American singer-songwriter and actor Daniel Kahn, originally from Detroit, Michigan. The band was formed in 2005 and is based in Berlin. They have released five albums through German world music label Oriente Musik.
Adrienne Cooper was a Yiddish singer, musician and activist who was integral to the contemporary revival of klezmer music.
Eleanor Chana Mlotek was a musicologist, specializing in Yiddish folklore. Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate, once called Mlotek and her husband, Joseph, “the Sherlock Holmeses of Yiddish folk songs.” She was also inducted in Hunter College's Hall of Fame.
Tates, mames, kinderlekh, also known as Barikadn, is a Yiddish song from the 1920s associated with the socialist General Jewish Labour Bund movement. The song describes a workers' strike in Łódź; as men, women and children joined in to construct barricades in the streets of the city. Tates, mames, kinderlekh was written by Shmerke Kaczerginski, who later became a Communist Party activist and a partisan fighter. Kaczerginski was only 15 years old at the time the song was written in 1926. The song rapidly became widely popular in the Jewish community in Poland.
Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II is an album by Six Degrees Records which consists of Yiddish songs written during World War II and the Holocaust.It was nominated for the 61st Annual Grammy Awards.
Mascha Benya, born Masha Benyakonsky, was a Russian-born soprano known especially for her promotion and performance of Yiddish and Hebrew folk and art music in the United States after World War II. After a short career as an opera singer in the Jüdischer Kulturbund in 1930s Berlin, she emigrated to New York after Kristallnacht and became an important figure in the teaching of Yiddish and Hebrew song through the Workman's Circle, Kaufman Music Center, and other organizations, as well as a touring singer, radio performer, and recording artist.
Vera Rozanka, was a Ukrainian Yiddish Theatre actor and manager, soprano, writer, radio performer, and recording artist. During her career, she shared the stage with many notables of the Yiddish Theatre world, including Aaron Lebedeff, Ben Bonus, Fraydele Oysher, Miriam Kressyn and Menasha Skulnik. Among her typical acts were to perform as non-Jewish Russian, Ukrainian or Romani characters in folk costumes, performing under the name "the yiddishe shikse" (Shiksa).
David Berezovski was a journalist, writer, translator and newspaper editor active in Vilnius and Grodno in the 1920s and 1930s. He is best known for being editor of the Grodno newspaper Grodner moment, later known as Undzer grodner expres and then as Nayer grodner moment, from 1924 to 1939. He was killed in The Holocaust in 1943, possibly at the Treblinka extermination camp.
The Jewish Labour Bund, more commonly known as the Jewish Labour Bund Melbourne, the Australian Bund, or simply the Bund, is the Australian wing of the Bundist movement. It was a member of the historical International Jewish Labor Bund, and is the largest and most active Bundist organisation left in the world. It was founded in 1928 Jewish Polish immigrants, and expanded rapidly after the Second World War with the mass arrival of Holocaust survivors to Australia. The Bund is currently registered only in the state of Victoria, where it is legally known as the Jewish Labour Bund, Inc., and is based primarily in the city of Melbourne.
Daloy Politsey, also known as In Ale Gasn is a Yiddish-language anti-authoritarian protest song. The modern commonly known & recorded version of the song is actually a combination of two different protest songs from the late 19th and early 20th century Russian Empire; Hey Hey Daloy Politsey and In Ale Gasn respectively. The modern song was recorded in 1972 by the Yiddish Youth Ensemble on their album of Yiddish Songs of Work and Struggle. The recording later appeared in the soundtrack for the documentary film Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists. As such the song is often rendered as In Ale Gasn/Daloy Politsey to highlight this combination. The two songs were historically associated with the Bundist movement along with the Jewish anarchist movement. The two songs were sung during the Russian revolutions as a rallying cry for Revolutionary Socialist and Anarchist Jews.
Arbeter Froyen, also known as Tsu Di Arbeter Froyen, is a Yiddish language poem-cum-song written by David Edelshtat, and first scribed by Yankev Glatshteyn. The song combines themes of Socialist Feminism with the ideals of the Jewish Labour Bund. The text of the poem was published on the 8th of May 1891 in Di Fraye Arbeter Shtime in America, with the first publication of the song as a combination of poem and music being in Warsaw, 1918. However the song had been sung before its first written attribution, as shown by contemporaries to events in the late Russian Empire like Anatole Litvak, Shalom Levin, and Abba Levin; who record that the song was popular in the 1890s amongst strikers.
Vakht Oyf, or Vi lang, o vi lang, is a Yiddish-language song associated with the Bundist and Jewish Anarchist movements written by David Edelstadt. The song is featured in the film Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists.
