Stories about Jewish American Heritage: From The Shmooze

May is Jewish American Heritage Month, and to honor that we’ve curated a collection of episodes from The Shmooze related to the Jewish American experience—Jewish American writers, mah-jongg, comics, food, name changing, and more. Have a listen!

“in a dark blue night”: two song cycles on Yiddish/Jewish New York

Alex Weiser visits with The Shmooze to talk about his latest work, “in a dark blue night,” consisting of two connected song cycles. The first, “in a dark blue night,” sets to music modernist Yiddish poetry about New York City at night, all written by Jewish immigrant poets at the turn of the 20th century. The second, “Coney Island Days,” transforms an oral history with his late grandmother, Irene Weiser, into a musical exploration of Jews becoming Americans and the way that humble, individual stories can capture the sweeping breadth of history.

The Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project

On a visit with The Shmooze, photographer Marisa Scheinfeld talks about her work on the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project. The resulting work will create a series of markers to commemorate the Borscht Belt era.

American Comics: A History with Jeremy Dauber

Jermey Dauber joins The Shmooze to talk about his recently published American Comics: A History, a book that tells the sweeping story of cartoons, comic strips, and graphic novels and their century-long hold on the American imagination.

Bam, Crack, Dot: Mah-Jongg and Its Jewish-American Roots

Melissa Martens Yaverbaum, executive director of the Council of American Jewish Museums and curator of Project Mah Jongg, chats with us about mah-jongg, a game more widely known than played or understood. The game made a surprisingly lasting impression on American audiences, including a generation of Jewish women in the 1920s and ’30s, and has endured as a cultural touchstone ever since.

A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America

Kirsten Fermaglich, author of A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America, visits The Shmooze to discuss the groundbreaking history of the practice of Jewish name changing in the 20th century.

Re-Reading Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Ozick, and Other Great Jewish Writers

Editor and author Stephen Shepard joined The Shmooze to talk about his literary memoir A Literary Journey to Jewish Identity: Re-Reading Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Ozick, and Other Great Jewish Writers. Over the course of our conversation, we consider his encounters with a few writers who influenced his sense of Jewish identity, the idea of the Jewish American writer, and what it’s like to reread some of these authors.

Dr. Pamela Nadell on America’s Jewish Women

Lisa Newman talks to Dr. Pamela Nadell about her book America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today. Dr. Nadell talks about the historical experiences of Jewish women in the United States and the long tradition of American Jewish women’s activism.

American Jews and America’s Game: Voices of a Growing Legacy in Baseball

Larry Ruttman is the author of American Jews and America’s Game: Voices of a Growing Legacy in Baseball. Selected by Sports Collectors Digest (among others) as the #1 baseball book in America for 2013, the work has been adapted into the musical play Jews on First. In this episode we learn about Larry’s love of the game and hear a few stories of his most memorable interviewees.