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.)