Book Talk – The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City

Join The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City author Henry H. Sapoznik in conversation with Senior Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at YIVO, Eddy Portnoy. The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City offers a new look at over a century of Yiddish culture in New York City. Author Henry H. Sapoznik focuses on theater, music, architecture, crime, Black-Jewish cultural interactions, restaurants, real estate, and journalism to tell the history of New York’s Yiddish popular culture from 1880 to the present. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles of the period, and thanks to new research from previously inaccessible materials, the book reveals fresh insights into the influence of Yiddish culture on New York City and showcases the culture’s persistent resiliency.

This program is hosted by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and co-sponsored by the American Jewish Historical Society.

Henry H. Sapoznik is an award-winning producer, musicologist, performer, and writer in the fields of traditional and popular Yiddish and American music and culture. Sapoznik, a native Yiddish speaker and child of Holocaust survivors, is one of the founders of the klezmer revival, the founder of the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings, and a five-time Grammy nominated producer and winner of the 2002 Peabody award for his 10 part NPR series “The Yiddish Radio Project.” The collection upon which it was based contains over 10,000 unique items and is housed at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

Eddy Portnoy is the Senior Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The exhibitions he has created for YIVO have won plaudits from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, VICE, The Forward, and others. He has written numerous articles on topics relating to Jewish popular culture and is also the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017).

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.