• Leybl Botwinik is a writer of science fiction, poetry and songs (in both Yiddish and English) who grew up in Montreal's vibrant Yiddish cultural scene. He is the son of the late Dovid Botwinik, a composer of Yiddish songs, music educator, and Yiddish activist, and the brother of Sender Botwinik, a Yiddish educator, choral director, and music producer. Now living in Israel, Leybl has passed on the Yiddish language and culture to his children. In this episode, he shares stories from his Yiddishist upbringing as well as personal experiences and reflections on the October 7 massacre. The interview was conducted via Zoom on May 30, 2025 (Erev Shabbos/Shvues).

• Rebbetzin Yetta Kane, a Holocaust survivor, grew up in Miadziol (Yiddish: Miadl – מיאַדל), a small town in Belarus. She recounts memories of her childhood and how her family survived the Holocaust by hiding in the forests of Belarus with the partisans. Yetta and her late husband, Rabbi and Cantor David Kane, co-authored the memoir How to Survive Anything: The Life Story of David and Yetta Kane. This is Part 2 of our interview, recorded at her home in the Los Angeles area on April 8, 2025. Part 1 aired on April 23, 2025.

• Music:

  • Chava Alberstein: Friling
  • Intro instrumental music: DEM HELFANDS TANTS from Jeff Warschauer: The Singing Waltz

Air Date: June 11, 2025

• Samuel Kassow is interviewed by Sholem Beinfeld about Rokhl Auerbach and her book Warsaw Testament („וואַרשעווער צוואָות“), which Kassow translated into English. The interview was by Zoom on May 30, 2025, with Kassow and Beinfeld at their homes in Connecticut and Cambridge, MA, respectively.

• Samuel Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor, Emeritus, of History at Trinity College, and is recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars on the Holocaust and the Jews of Poland. Kassow was born in 1946 in a DP-camp in Stuttgart, Germany and grew up speaking Yiddish. Kassow attended the London School of Economics and Princeton University where he earned a PhD in 1976 with a study about students and professors in Tsarist Russia. He is widely known for his 2007 book Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, has won numerous awards, and has lectured widely.

• Sholem Beinfeld is co-editor-in-chief of the Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary and Professor of History, Emeritus, Washington University, St. Louis. He translated The Rudashevsky Diary, which was published as the November, 2024, issue of The Jewish Quarterly.

• Additional info on Warsaw Testament:

  • Publisher White Goat Press's page: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/about/white-goat-press-0/rokhl-auerbach
  • Distributor page: https://www.ipgbook.com/warsaw-testament-products-9798988677390.php

• Music:

  • Hélène Engel: Yeder Ruft Mikh Zhamele from Voices Of The Ghetto (Voix Du Ghetto): Warszawa, 1943
  • Intro instrumental music: DEM HELFANDS TANTS from Jeff Warschauer: The Singing Waltz

Air Date: June 4, 2025

Air date: May 14, 2025

This week's show is in observance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Highlights:

• Rabbi Arthur Schneier, Holocaust survivor, world-renowned human rights activist, and senior rabbi of Manhattan's Park East Synagogue for more than fifty years, shares his wartime memories of the Carpathian town Yasinia (Ukrainian: Ясіня; Hungarian: Kőrösmező; Czech: Jasiňa; Yiddish: Yasin (יאַסין)). He recalls his grandfather, the town's rabbi, Moyshe Bergmann, and describes his narrow escape from the 1941 Kamenets Podolsk Massacre. We reached Rabbi Schneier at his Manhattan office via Zoom on Feb. 20, 2025. See also Rabbi Arthur Schneier's page at Park East Synagogue: https://parkeastsynagogue.org/about-us/clergy/rabbi-arthur-schneier/
• Rebbetzin Yetta Kane is a Holocaust survivor who grew up in Miadziol (Belarusian: Мядзел; Yiddish: Miadl (מיאַדל)), a small town in Belarus. She shares memories of her childhood and her family's survival during the Holocaust, including hiding from the Nazis in the forests of Belarus with the Partisans. Yetta and her late husband, Rabbi and Cantor David Kane, are authors of the´ memoir How to Survive Anything: The Life Story of David and Yetta Kane. We interviewed her at her home in the Los Angeles area on April 8, 2025.

Music:

• Norbert and Rochelle Horowitz, Rita Karin: Farvos Iz Der Himl Geven Nekhtn Loyter
• Norbert and Rochelle Horowitz, Rita Karin: Yisrolik
• Nikitov: S'dremlen Feygl Af Di Tsvaygn
• Sarah Gorby: Zog Nit Keynmol
• Chava Alberstein: Unter Dayne Vayse Shtern
• Chava Alberstein: Friling
• Hélène Engel: Yeder Ruft Mikh Zhamele from Voices Of The Ghetto (Voix Du Ghetto): Warszawa, 1943
• Shalom Katz: El Moleh Rachamim
• Intro instrumental music: DEM HELFANDS TANTS, an instrumental track from the CD Jeff Warschauer: The Singing Waltz

Air date: April 23, 2025

This week's highlights:

• We welcome back Rabbi Yitzchok-Boruch Teitelbaum, known in his Monroe, NY, community as der Pshischer Rebbe, for Pesach greetings and words of wisdom.
• We meet Chazan Dr. Moshe Moskovitz, the High Holiday cantor at Los Angeles’s Congregation Shaarei Tefila, to discuss his background, his yiches (he’s the grandson of two post-war Carpathian cantors), and his journey into chazones (the musical art of leading Jewish prayer in the Ashkenazi tradition), as well as Pesach from a cantorial perspective — guiding us through several cantorial recordings along the way.
• Pesach greetings from many of our cohosts, friends and sponsors, as follows:
  • Israel Book Shop (Eli Dovek ז״ל recorded Mar 28 2007)
  • American Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston (member and Holocaust survivor Tania Lefman, and member and Holocaust survivor Mary Erlich), co-sponsor of Boston's 2025 In-Person and Virtual Community Holocaust Commemoration of Yom HaShoah, Sunday, April 27 at 10:30 AM Eastern. (Registration required.) We reached them at their homes in Greater Boston by phone on April 9, 2025.
  • Yetta Kane, Holocaust survivor and rebbetzin in Los Angeles with whom we just completed an interview to be aired a little later this year. Recorded at her home in Long Beach on April 8, 2025.
  • League for Yiddish, New York, NY, (Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, Chair of the Board). Recorded at her home in Teaneck, NJ, on April 9, 2025.
  • Leah Shporer-Leavitt, Newton, MA, co-host of The Yiddish Voice / דאָס ייִדישע קול (from 2024)
  • Dovid Braun, Leonia, NJ, co-host of The Yiddish Voice / דאָס ייִדישע קול (from 2024)
  • Yankele Bodo, Tel Aviv, Israel, actor and singer (from 2016)
  • Eli Grodko, New Millford, NJ, friend of the show. Recorded at his home in Teaneck, NJ, on April 8, 2025.
  • Boston Workers Circle, Brookline, MA (Yiddish committee member Linda (Libe-Reyzl) Gritz)
  • Sholem Beinfeld, Cambridge, MA, co-host of The Yiddish Voice / דאָס ייִדישע קול, co-editor of the Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary and Professor of History, emeritus, Washington Univ., St. Louis, with extended remarks on Pesach 5785. We recorded Sholem by phone on April 9, 2025.
  • Verterbukh.org, the online Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary, Greater Boston (Khayem Bochner, co-editor and director of the online dictionary)
  • Hy Wolfe, Director of CYCO Yiddish Book Center, Long Island City, NY (from 2020)

We wish all our cohosts, sponsors and friends a Happy and Kosher Pesach.

מיר ווינטשן אַלע אונדזערע אונטערשטיצער, פֿרײַנד און באַטייליקטע אַ פֿריילעכן און כּשרן פּסח

Music:

• Moishe Oysher: Chad Gadyo
• Moshe Stern: Uvchein Yehi Ratzon
• Leibele Glantz: Tfilas Tal
• Moshe Ganchoff: Btses Yisroel
• Leibele Glantz: Ma Nishtono Nusach
• Moshe Koussevitzky: Fir Kashes
• Intro instrumental music: DEM HELFANDS TANTS, an instrumental track from the CD Jeff Warschauer: The Singing Waltz

Air date: April 9,...

Happy Purim ! אַ פֿריילעכן פּורים

Highlights:

• Sholem Londner: 2 jokes for Purim
• Shane Baker: Yiddish story for Purim: Drunk All Year, Sober on Purim אַ גאַנץ יאָר שיכּור, פּורים ניכטער
  • Used with the permission of Shane Baker and the Congress for Jewish Culture, originally released on YouTube in 2023.
• From our archive:
  • Hasia Segal (2010): Purim greetings from FL
  • Iosif Lakhman (2010): Purim greetings from Brighton (Boston), MA
  • Miriam Libenson (1999): The Story of Purim
  • Morris (Moyshe) Hollender (2011): Kiddush for Purim and short interview
  • Matele Friedman (2016): Ikh Bin Geboyrn Simkhes-Purim (Born on the Joyful Purim Holiday)

Music:

• Emmanuel Fisher: Shoshanas Yakov
• Leahke Post: Purim
• Tova Ben-Zvi: Haynt Iz Purim Brider
  • Intro instrumental music: DEM HELFANDS TANTS, an instrumental track from the CD Jeff Warschauer: The Singing Waltz

Air date: March 12, 2025

Highlights:

• Sholem Beinfeld, regular co-host of The Yiddish Voice and professor emeritus at Washington University, St. Louis, shares thoughts on the new Trump administration as of March 5, 2025, one day after President Trump's first speech to Congress of his second administration.
• Rukhl Schaechter (שׂרה-רחל שעכטער), editor of Forverts (a/k/a the Yiddish Forward, פֿאָרווערטס), online at forward.com/yiddish, reflects on 25 years with this Yiddish institution, originally as a writer and now as its editor. She spoke with us on Zoom from her home in Yonkers on Nov. 24, 2024. (Previously aired Nov. 27, 2024)

Music:

• Intro instrumental music: DEM HELFANDS TANTS, an instrumental track from the CD Jeff Warschauer: The Singing Waltz

Air date: March 5, 2025

This week on The Yiddish Voice / דאָס ייִדישע קול, we featured an in-depth conversation with historian Benyomen Moss (Kenneth B. Moss), the Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Jewish History at the University of Chicago. He spoke with Sholem Beinfeld, professor emeritus at Washington University, St. Louis, about his book An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland (Harvard University Press, 2021). We reached Moss in Chicago via Zoom on Jan. 19, 2025.

What future did Poland's Jews imagine for themselves in the years between the world wars? As antisemitism intensified and liberalism faltered, some Polish Jews sought new ways to understand their community’s place in an increasingly hostile world. Moss explores how these Jewish thinkers grappled with diasporic vulnerability, the forces of nationalism, Zionism’s promises, and the difficult political choices ahead.

Moss, an acclaimed historian of modern Jewish thought, is also the author of Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2009) and co-editor of From Europe’s East to the Middle East (2023). His work has been recognized with prestigious fellowships and awards, including the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Related links:

• Publisher page for Unchosen People: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674245105

• Review of Unchosen People in Forverts (March, 2022), in Yiddish, by Mikhail Krutikov: https://forward.com/yiddish/483574/did-prewar-jewish-socialists-believe-that-jews-had-a-future-in-poland/

• Kenneth Moss page at U. of Chicago: https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/Kenneth-Moss

• Music for Tu Bishvat

  • Victor Berezinsky: Tu Bishvat
  • Henry Carrey: Tu Beshvat (Music and Lyrics by Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman)

• Intro instrumental music: DEM HELFANDS TANTS, an instrumental track from the CD Jeff Warschauer: The Singing Waltz

Air date: February 12, 2025