Through blog posts, podcasts and videos presentations of public programs and concerts, you can learn more about the American Folklife Center's collections directly from folklorists, specialists, and performers.

Highlighted Blog Posts

The highlighted blog posts below focus on the topic of Jewish communities and culture, and offer entry points into related materials in the American Folklife Center collections.

Highlighted Podcast

Below is a selection from the AFC Folklife Today and America Works podcasts featuring Jewish-related traditions and practices, as documented in the American Folklife Center collections.

Highlighted Public Programs

Below are two recordings of American Folklife Center lectures, part of our Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series. This first recording of the lecture, "Hear, O Israel: Yiddish-American Radio 1925-1955," is a wonderful introduction to the work of Henry Sapoznik, and his related AFC Collection "Henry Sapoznik Collection, circa 1920-1960" (AFC 2010/003), a collection of Yiddish radio broadcasts on transcription discs and audio tape, sheet music, manuscripts , correspondence, and photographs documenting Yiddish culture, theater, and music, primarily in the New York City area. This collection of materials collected by Sapoznik also includes documentation from other parts of the United States, from the 1920s to circa 1960.

The second lecture, "Collecting Jewish Cultural Treasures in a Post-WWII New York Lobby," is connected to our "Ben Stonehill Duplication Project Collection" (AFC 1966/005). The collections of Benjamin Stonehill at the AFC include field recordings of songs of European Jewish immigrants, described by Stonehill as "containing almost a thousand songs collected from Jewish refugees in N.Y. City in 1948 that they brought with them from concentration camp, ghetto and hearth." Audio was originally recorded on wire in New York City by Ben Stonehill, 1948. Additionally, two reels include a lecture delivered by Ben Stonehill at YIVO on January 8, 1964, with an introduction by Sh. Katcherginsky. 

While all other aspects of Yiddish culture existed wherever Ashkenazic Jews lived, it was only in America that radio realized its greatest and most fulfilling use by and for Jews. Yiddish scholar Henry Sapoznik discusses and shares some of the most memorable and powerful moments in this nearly lost world of ethnic American broadcasting. By exploring amazingly broad category of Yiddish radio shows -- from rabbinical advice programs to live Yiddish theater acts, from man-on-the-street interviews to the news of the day in verse -- we encounter a vibrant and vital Jewish-American popular culture at its creative apex and on the eve of its terrible devastation. 

Henry Sapoznik is a record producer with four Grammy nominations, a radio documentarian, an author, and a performer of traditional Yiddish and American music. He received a 2002 Peabody award for his ten-week National Public Radio series on the history of Jewish broadcasting, The Yiddish Radio Project, the 2000 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Music Scholarship for his book Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World, and an Emmy nomination for his score to the documentary film, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg. He founded the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, as well as Living Traditions' annual KlezKamp: The Yiddish Folk Arts Program.

(Event date: October 14, 2009)

During the summer of 1948, only three years after the end of World War II, Ben Stonehill, a man devoted to Jewish culture, recorded recently arrived Jewish survivors of the war who were temporarily housed in a hotel in upper Manhattan. The singers included men, women, and children. Stonehill collected over a thousand songs of many kinds: joyful as well as sad, mainly in Yiddish but also in Hebrew, Polish, and Russian. These songs are musical testimonies to the resilience of the survivors, a direct link to pre-war Jewish life in Eastern Europe, and a cultural treasure. The music and chatting that went on in between the songs tell not only of the singers' terrible traumas but also of their hopes, and reflect the sheer pleasure of reconnecting with others through song. In this talk, Miriam Isaacs describes the role of the Library of Congress in preserving this unique musical treasure. She plays some of these almost forgotten recordings and talks about the collector, the singers, and their times.

Isaacs is retired affiliate visiting associate professor of Yiddish Language and Culture, University of Maryland College Park. She received her Ph.D., M.A. in Linguistics from Cornell University. She is a native speaker of Yiddish and has language skills in English, French, German, Modern Hebrew and Russian. While in residence in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Dr. Isaacs worked on her project entitled, "Oral Culture in Transition: The Legacy of the Benjamin Stonehill Collection."

(Event date: November 13, 2013)