Josh Waletzky, Dovid Braun on Yiddish New York; Meet Harry Schneider, a Child Holocaust Survivor

Yiddish New York preliminary events start this week, and our
first two guests are here to talk about it!


Josh Waletzky is on the organizing committee
of Yiddish New York and is leading many sessions. He is a
leading contemporary Yiddish songwriter and an award-winning
documentary filmmaker. He co-produced the Grammy-nominated
album of Jewish songs of resistance, Partisans of Vilna (1989),
and performed his own Yiddish song compositions on his albums
Crossing the Shadows (2001), and PASAZHIRN / Passengers (2017).
His notable film credits include director of Image Before My
Eyes (1981), Partisans of Vilna (1986), and Yonia Fain: With
Pen and Paintbrush (2017), and editor of the Emmy Award-winning
documentary Itzhak Perlman: In the Fiddler’s House (1995).


Dovid Braun, specialist in Yiddish language
and linguistics, is a regular participant in Yiddish New York’s
language and folklore offerings. He is currently Academic
Director of the intensive U. Weinreich Summer Program in
Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture of the YIVO Institute
for Jewish Research. He is teaching Yiddish at Columbia
University and previously taught at Harvard, U. of Penn.,
Hebrew U. of Jerusalem, and elsewhere. A long-time regular
contributor to the Yiddish Voice radio show, he also serves as
Co-President of the Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center (Bronx).


Harry (Hershl) Schneider, a resident of
Squirrel Hill (Pittsburgh), PA, born in Lomzhe, Poland, in
1937, talks about his childhood in Poland and Russia during the
Second World War, and also a bit about his Pittsburgh Jewish
community. (Recorded in West Palm Beach, FL, at the 2018
conference of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of
the Holocaust & Descendants.)