This event has been postponed. We’ll announce a new date as soon as we can.
Join Ilan Stavans, co-editor of How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish, and our friends at the Yiddish Book Center for a spectacular night of Yiddish poetry and music.
Celebrating the glorious tradition of turning great Yiddish poems into songs, the evening will include works by Celia Dropkin, Itzik Manger, Morris Rosenfeld, Leyb Naydus, David Edelstadt, Avrom Sutzkever, Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, Rokhl Korn, and many others.
This event includes live music, readings, and archival recordings, featuring leading voices of the contemporary Yiddish music renaissance, including Tony Award nominee Eleanor Reissa, Sarah Gordon, and Tsvey Brider, a duo composed of Anthony Mordechai Zvi Russell and Dmitri Gaskin.
The evening is hosted by Ilan Stavans, publisher of Restless Books and co-editor with Josh Lambert of the new anthology How Yiddish Changed America. Published in collaboration with the Yiddish Book Center and gathering together a rich array of essays, poems, cartoons, stories, and interviews from across the hemisphere, it’s a powerful testament to the enduring vitality and beauty of Yiddish culture and language.
The event is presented as part of the Yiddish Book Center’s Decade of Discovery. Copies of How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish will be available for sale.
When: Wednesday, April 1, 8–9:30 PM
Where: Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre at Symphony Space
Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast.
Edited by Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert
2020 Foreword INDIES Silver Award for Anthologies
Winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award (Yiddish)
A momentous and diverse anthology of the influences and inspirations of Yiddish voices in America—radical, dangerous, and seductive, but also sweet, generous, and full of life—edited by award-winning authors and scholars Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert.
Hardcover • ISBN: 9781632062628
Publication date: Jan 21, 2020
Paperback ISBN: 9781632062260
Publication date: Apr 25, 2023