"Every Boy Should Have a Jewish Mother" - Music and Funny Lyrics by Leonard Lehrman

Leonard Lehrman has had quite a musical career as a singer, composer, conductor, chorus leader, organist, pianist, performer and teacher.

As Olga Livshin wrote last month in the Vancouver Jewish Independent,

He has founded music theatres and festivals, written books and articles, and performed in various religious institutions. Music in all its aspects has dominated his life since he was eight years old.


Choral music and opera have been Lehrman’s passion for decades, but his particular interest was reserved for Jewish composers. He was close to his composition teacher Elie Siegmeister and was a personal friend of Leonard Bernstein. “When Bernstein yelled ‘Bravo!’ after one of my performances, that was the best moment in my life,” Lehrman shared.

But what we found most interesting about Lehrman is his sense of humor and his tongue-in-cheek original lyrics to music that he wrote, in a style that evokes Tom Lehrer.

Last month Lehrman and his wife, soprano Helene Williams, who have given more than 500 concert performances, appeared at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture in Vancouver. They sang songs in English, Yiddish and Ladino, and spoke about their experiences in Jewish music and opera.

We thought you'd enjoy this short selection in which Lehrman credits the success of Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, Sigmund Freud, and Leonard Bernstein to their Jewish mothers.

As the refrain goes,

Every boy should have a Jewish mother who pushes him to immortality.
Who strives for perfection with motherly direction
And does it so lovingly...

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Pizza Bagel - A Short Comedy Film From the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

What happens when a traditional Italian father prepares a Kosher dinner for his son's Jewish girlfriend and mother?

Pizza Bagel takes a comedic look at intercultural dating while poking fun at Mediterranean cuisine and unabashedly patriotic soccer celebrations. The short film is being distributed online as a preview of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which takes place from July 25 through August 12. 

The other films on the festival program have not been announced yet. When they are, if there are any funny ones, we'll bring them to your attention.

In the meantime, enjoy this light comedy short.

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Seinfeld in Yiddish: The Bar Mitzvah

A YouTube uploader named A Mishel has done a big favor for Seinfeld fans who want to learn Yiddish.He or she collected excerpts from a few popular episodes of Jerry Seinfeld's long-running sitcom and posted them with the dialogue dubbed in Yiddish and with English subtitles. 

We didn't want to have a problem with copyright violations, but the poster seems to have avoided these by stating that the clip is being used for education purposes and should fall under the fair use provisions of copyright law. If you listen carefully and read the translations, you are likely to pick up a fair amount of conversational Yiddish.

In this episode, The Bar Mitzvah, Elaine is invited to a young man's Bar Mitzvah and brings a game of Boggle as a gift. At the reception, the boy's father tells him that now he is a man. Hearing this, the boy plants a French kiss on Elaine. He brags about it to his friends and soon Elaine gets invitations to six other Bar Mitzvahs. From this point on, the issue of what it means to be a man triggers a sequence of funny situations.

A lot of Yiddish expressions are tossed about, and the boy's father and even the rabbi get into the act.

Enjoy!

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Jewish Traces in Unexpected Places: Moses Parts Traffic and Spilled Coca-Cola in Film Festival Commercials

Jewish Film Festivals are popping up all over the world. Just about every major city, and some minor ones, are presenting new films to eager audiences. In reviewing lists of the films that are being shown, we noticed that most explore serious themes, and very few are true comedies. When we find a comedy, we try to bring it to your attention.

The lack of comedy in Jewish film doesn't stop the festival promoters from indulging in humor, sometimes irreverent, in calling attention to the festivals themselves.

The scene of Charlton Heston as Moses parting the Red Sea in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments was just too powerful an image not to inspire comedic copying in commercials for Jewish Film Festivals in Mexico and Canada.

In the first clip below, a couple is driving through busy Mexico City traffic, trying to get to a movie theater before the film starts. When traffic comes to a standstill, they despair and ask for a miracle.

Moses appears atop a van in full DeMille regalia, raises his arms and extends his staff. The cars split into two rows, allowing the couple's car to pass through.

In the second clip, a couple buys a large cola at a movie theater concession stand, and the guy spills it all on the floor. Enter Moses, actually a janitor with a mop, who raises his arms and with a mighty roar splits the cola puddle and lets the girl pass through on dry land. 

When she passes through, the Moses character lowers his arms. Her date tries to follow her, but fails as the cola spill returns to its original form as the Moses character says "Loser!"

Enjoy!

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A Joke to Start the Week: "Dinner in London"

It's Monday, Memorial Day. Not everyone is working today, but it's still a good day to start the week with a joke. Here's an oldie but goodie about a dinner in London. The joke teller is Paul Cohen, a 70-year-old salesman in printer management and veteran contributor to Old Jews Telling Jokes.

He says that his grandfather tried to come to America in 1912, but arrived late and missed the boat. Turns out this was a good thing. It was the Titanic.

Here's the setup for today's joke: A Jewish couple living in England happened to hit a very big lottery, and they bought the largest mansion they could in the highest-rent district of London. 

They hired a staff of the most Anglo servants they could possibly have. One night they were leaving the house and told one of the staff, "James, could you make sure the table is set for four..." And then...

Enjoy!

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25,000 Hasidim Attend Second Biggest Wedding Ever in Jerusalem

Photo: Reuters

Last week, the Jerusalem neighborhood of Kiryat Belz was the scene of the second biggest wedding ever held in Israel. On Tuesday evening, under a chuppah built for the occasion in the center of the sector, Shalom Rokeach, the 18-year-old grandson of the Belzer Rebbe, leader of the Belz Hasidic dynasty, married Hanna Batya Penet, his 19-year-old bride in the presence of 25,000 guests (no, that's not a misprint.)

In this video you can see the bride, completely veiled, escorted by two female relatives holding candles, circling the groom seven times. After the chuppah, the men adjourned for an all-night celebration at the Belz synagogue. The women had their own celebration a mile away at Binyanei Ha'Uma, Jerusalem's large convention center.

In the last half minute of the video, the camera pulls back from the chuppah so you can see the magnitude of the crowd and the setting.

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If you're wondering why 25,000 guests didn't make it the biggest wedding ever, The Times of Israel reported that the wedding of Rokeach’s parents in 1993 was the largest in the city’s modern history, drawing 30,000 people, who gobbled down 3.1 tons of potatoes, 1.5 tons of gefilte fish and 39,000 gallons of soda in celebration.

Members of various Hasidic sects, the national-religious world and Sephardi Judaism also attended the wedding.

The leader of the Gur Hasidic sect, the biggest in Israel, and the Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodox community each received a special welcome from the Belz Rabbi, as did Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.

For a close-up view of all aspects of the wedding, click here to check out the photo album posted by the Haredi web site Vos iz Neias. 

The Belz Great Synagogue is the biggest synagogue in Jerusalem, with an ark that is so huge it has been included in the Guiness Book of World Records. This imposing monolith of a building is located in northern Jerusalem and was built by the Belz Hasidim, a Hasidic sect dating to the nineteenth century. The Belz Great Synagogue is also significant for its uncanny resemblance to the Holy Temple built by Herod thousands of years ago.

Like the original Belz synagogue in Europe that was destroyed by the Nazis, the Belz Great Synagogue in Jerusalem took 15 years to build. The building was dedicated in 2000 and now towers imposingly in the Jerusalem skyline, rising above the surrounding apartment complexes like a new incarnation of the Holy Temple. The project was financed by the Belz community as well as by philanthropic donations.

The main interior of the synagogue can house up to 6,000 worshipers—an unheard of number for most synagogues, which usually seat hundreds or less. The record-breaking ark is 12 meters high, weighs 18 tons, and can hold 70 Torah scrolls. (In contrast, most synagogue arks can hold about six or less.)

Nine chandeliers gracing the synagogue are each strung with 200,000 pieces of Czech crystal, lending the sanctuary a lofty ballroom splendor. Since it is so huge, the building is utilized not just for prayer, but also for weddings, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, and communal events. Smaller study halls and communal facilities are included in the building.

The original Belz synagogue, located in the Ukrainian town of Belz, was similar in size to the new Jerusalem version. The building was destroyed in 1939 by the Nazis, who first attempted to burn it down. When the synagogue proved too huge to be destroyed by such means, the Nazis forced the Jews of the community to dismantle the synagogue one stone at a time.

Now it has been rebuilt in Jerusalem and stands as the center of a thriving Belz community.

A Vegetarian Gefilte Fish Recipe from the Forward's Yiddish Chefs

So you're having guests for Shabbat and of course you're serving gefilte fish, the Ashkenazi national dish. But wait a minute, some of your guests are vegetarian -- not only vegetarian, but vegan, and they won't eat your gefilte fish, whether it's your bubbe's original recipe or whether it came from a jar.

Fear not! The Yiddish chefs at the Jewish Daily Forward, Eve Jochnowitz and Rukhl Schaechter, will show you how to make a vegetarian version whose main ingredients are cauliflower and parsnip.

And while they're mixing, cooking, and tasting, they're bantering inYiddish, so we can pick up some new words and phrases, getting another lesson in mamaloshen, the mother tongue, that is, if your ancestors hailed from Eastern Europe.

Here are some new words that we learned while previewing the video:

Pasternak = parsnip root
Calefiore = cauliflower
Vilshene nis = walnuts
Lopatkele = spatula
Igerkes = cucumbers
Knubble kvetch = garlic press
Tsin-shtecker = toothpick
Zeneft = mustard
Ibergeblibben = leftover
Kratz = scrape
Opgekocht = cooked

Enjoy! Shabbat Shalom!

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"President Obama" Is Guest Speaker at Sheva Brochos in Boro Park

Two months ago there was a Sheva Brochos (post-wedding dinner) in Boro Park for the daughter of Shloime Bochner, Executive Director of Bonei Olam, an organization that provides funding for all aspects of infertility treatments.

The host of the evening, Chaim Ziegler, seemed nervous as he asked the audience to calm down and take their seats. And then he introduced the guest speaker, the President of the United States, who entered with two secret service agents to the strains of "Hail to the Chief" and took his place at a podium emblazoned with the presidential seal.

We'll let you be the judge of how good a job Reggie Brown did as he delivered one joke after another, touching some Jewish bases in addition to the expected political humor.

Some of the best lines:

"My administration is out there creating jobs every day. I'm fighting for people like Mary Grady, from Tallahassee, Florida. Mary worked for Tropicana for 22 years until she got canned. It turns out she could never concentrate."

"For the first time in the history of the United States, 75 percent of the people in this country make up three-quarters of the domestic population."

Enjoy!

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FOUND AT LAST! Mel Brooks' Lost Five Commandments

One of Mel Brooks' funniest bits is a scene from his 1981 film A History of the World: Part 1, in which Brooks, in the role of Moses, comes down from Mount Sinai carrying three tablets containing 15 commandments, only to drop one of the tablets, losing the last five commandments as the tablet shatters into bits.

The scene is short, and the third tablet containing the five lost commandments is visible for only a few seconds. We always assumed that the writing on the tablet was some random Hebrew letters, because we never got a good look at them.

On Monday night we watched the PBS tribute to Brooks on American Masters, on which they played this clip. Seeing it on a 55 inch screen in high definition, all we had to do to read the words on the tablets was to push the pause button. And there they were -- the long lost shattered five commandments.

Here's a translation of the five: You can interpret them any way you want -- that's what we've been doing to the surviving Ten Commandments for thousands of years. But our favorites are Lo Tatzkhik or Lo Titzkhak - obviously an inside joke by the Brooks crew, Lo Tikneh - perhaps the basis for not buying retail, and Lo Teshaber - irony of ironies - as the tablet fell to the ground and broke into tiny pieces.

11. Lo Ta'avor - You shall not pass.
12. Lo Tatzkhik - You shall not make people laugh or Lo Titzkhak - You shall not laugh.
13. Lo Tikneh - You shall not buy.
14. Lo Talunu - You shall not stay. (But the third letter may be a resh, which makes translation difficult.)
15. Lo Teshaber - You shall not break. 

COME ON, ALL YOU HEBREW LINGUISTS. THIS IS A FIND THAT RIVALS THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS.

LET'S SEE SOME MORE CREATIVE INTERPRETATIONS! POST THEM AS COMMENTS.

Here's the full clip. Enjoy!

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P.S. If you missed the PBS Mel Brooks special, it's being shown nine more times during the next week. Here are the listings for Cablevision in the New York-New Jersey metro area. Check your local listings for dates and times on your networks.

• Wed 5/22 5:00AM - 6:30AM, CH 13 13HD
• Sun 5/26 11:30PM - 1:00AM, CH 13 13HD
• Sun 5/26 11:30PM - 1:00AM, CH 713 13HD
• Thu 5/30 11:00PM - 12:30AM, CH 8 NJTV
• Sat 6/1 5:00AM - 6:30AM, CH 8 NJTV
• Sun 6/2 12:00AM - 1:30AM, CH 132 21WLD
• Sun 6/2 5:00AM - 6:30AM, CH 132 21WLD
• Sun 6/2 11:00AM - 12:30PM, CH 132 21WLD
• Sun 6/2 7:00PM - 8:30PM, CH 132 21WLD

"There Is Nothing Like a Lox" - Another Allan Sherman Lost Song Treasure

Last month we previewed Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman, Mark Cohen's new biography of the king of musical parody. In the preview that included 76 Sol Cohens, a spoof of 76 Trombones from "The Music Man", we promised that we would share more of the lost gems that Cohen discovered during the research that he did for the book. 

Here is another item from the collection. There is Nothing Like a Lox, another one of his "Goldeneh Moments From Broadway," is a parody of There is Nothing Like a Dame from Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific (Sherman joked that it should be from South Passaic).

And just in case you don't remember the Rodgers and Hammerstein original, the Shermanesque version is followed by a clip from the 1958 film starring Rossano Brazzi and Mitzi Gaynor.

Enjoy!

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A Joke to Start the Week: "Social Security"

It's Monday, and you know what that means. Another week, another joke. This one also comes from the files of Old Jews Telling Jokes. Today's joke teller is Sara Ross, a 66-year-old retired CPA. 

After telling the joke, she explains that her mother, a Holocaust survivor, could never tell a joke. But she went to the Catskills and picked up this one which she retold perfectly and taught it to her daughter, who tells it now as a tribute to her mother.

Here's the setup: Her husband turns 65 years old and wants to go to the Social Security office, but he can't find his birth certificate. But he goes anyway, and then...

Enjoy!

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Jewish Traces in Unexpected Places: Vienna Hosts First European Jewish Choir Festival

Hundreds of singers from across Europe convened in Vienna on the banks of the river Danube last week for the first European Jewish Choir Festival. The festival culminated last Sunday in a gala concert titled “Shir LaShalom - A Song for Peace” at the Austria Center Vienna, where 400 vocalists from Jewish choirs from 16 European cities presented their repertoires. 

The event, which drew some 1,500 spectators over the weekend, was sponsored by the European Jewish Parliament, the European Jewish Union, the Jewish Community of Vienna and the Austrian state. 

In addition to concerts, the festival’s Jewish and non-Jewish singers participated in workshops to increase cultural exchange, an element which Roman Grinberg, choirmaster of the Vienna Jewish Choir, described as “extremely important” for organizers. 

“The excitement here is enormous, and it shows in the beaming faces of participants,” said Joel Rubinfeld, co-chair of the European Jewish Parliament.Rubinfeld said singers and musicians from the festival turned an informal dinner on Thursday at Vienna’s Alef Alef kosher restaurant into an impromptu klezmer and song concert. 

The event is to become an annual festival. Next year’s gathering is scheduled to take place in Rome and, the following year, in Paris.

Here is JN1's video report on the festival. Enjoy!

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Mel Brooks Fan Alert: Don't Miss Monday Night PBS American Masters Documentary

Attention all Mel Brooks fans: Don't miss the PBS American Masters special Mel Brooks: Make a Noise, premiering nationwide at 9 pm Monday night, May 20, 2013 on PBS (check local listings).

After 60 years in show business, Mel Brooks has earned more major awards than any other living entertainer; he is one of 14 EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) winners. Yet, the comedy giant has energetically avoided a documentary profile being made, even issuing an informal gag order on his friends … until now. Brooks agreed to throw himself into a new documentary about his storied career, giving American Masters exclusive interviews and complete access to his film and photo archives. 

American Masters Mel Brooks: Make a Noise features new interviews with Brooks, his friends and colleagues, including Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, Cloris Leachman, Joan Rivers, Tracey Ullman, and his close friend, with whom he created The 2000 Year Old Man more than 50 years ago, Carl Reiner. A DVD with bonus material will be available Tuesday, May 21 from Shout Factory.

Showcasing the Brooklyn native’s brilliant, skewed originality, American Masters Mel Brooks: Make a Noise journeys through Brooks’ early years in the creative beginnings of live television — with Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows — to the film genres he so successfully satirized in Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, and Spaceballs — to the groundbreaking Broadway musical version of his first film, The Producers. The documentary also delves into his professional and personal ups and downs — his childhood, his first wife and subsequent 41-year marriage to Anne Bancroft — capturing a never-before-heard sense of reflection and confession.

“There are a few singular voices of genius in film comedy; Mel Brooks joins the ranks of Chaplin, Keaton and Woody Allen, creating a genre unto himself,” said Susan Lacy, creator and executive producer of American Masters. “This project has been a joy. Mel can make anything funny — he even had me in stitches during a conference call about distribution contracts. His humor is truly instinctive — and constant!”
 
Here's a trailer promoting the documentary:

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And here's a short clip from the American Masters tribute: Rob Reiner tells about the time that his father, Carl Reiner, and Mel Brooks were writing a six minute segment with the 2000 Year Old Man for the Ed Sullivan Show. Rob suggested a joke to his father about how applause was invented (by Sol), and he was thrilled when Carl and Mel actually used it in the show.



Enjoy!

Shavuot Starts Tonight. What's Your Favorite Torah Story? The Children of Boston Speak Out

Tonight is the start of the holiday of Shavuot, the celebration of the giving of the Torah. In the diaspora the holiday lasts for two days, and in Israel just one day. But what observances everywhere have in common is the Tikun Leil Shavuot, the study of Torah all night, commemorating the anticipation by the Jewish people of receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai about 3,500 years ago.

In Jewish communities around the world, young and old attend lectures and study sessions in synagogues and homes that start around midnight and last as long as the participants can stay awake, usually fortified by coffee and cheesecake.

Everyone has his or her favorite part of the Torah, whether it's in the Chumash or in the Prophets. The Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston made this clear with a video showing 16 children from Kindergarten through eighth grade telling what their favorite story is. The kids do not disappoint, and they are very cute.

We will be listening and learning tonight (well, maybe not all night) and catching up on lost sleep Wednesday and Thursday. We'll be back with our usual Jewish humor mix on Friday.

Enjoy the video, and have a Chag Sameach.

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A Joke to Start the Week: "Out of Toilet Paper"

This is a week of holidays. Yesterday was Mother's Day and now we're getting ready to celebrate Shavuot on Tuesday night, Wednesday, and Thursday. Our friends and family in Israel get shortchanged on the cheese cake with Shavuot ending on Wednesday night. 

But we're back in the USA so we won't be posting on Wednesday and Thursday. There's still enough time to laugh, so we're starting the work week with the usual Monday joke, and we'll have something for Shavuot tomorrow.

Bea Osher, a 93-year-old Domestic Engineer, is another member of the Old Jews Telling Jokes troupe. In this video, she tells what happened when Mr. and Mrs. Cohen, who are in the shmatte business in Los Angeles, changed their name to Chippendale and had an elegant party in their mansion. And then the butler burst in to tell Mrs. Chippendale that they are out of toilet paper. And then...

Enjoy!

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My Yiddishe Mamme - Cantor and Rock Star Join In Mother's Day Tribute From Australia

Today is Mother's Day in many countries, including the United States and Australia.

One of the best loved musical tributes to Jewish mothers is the song My Yiddishe Mamme, written by Jack Yellen and Lew Pollack in 1925. It was first recorded by Willie Howard, and was made famous in vaudeville by Belle Baker and by Sophie Tucker, and later by the Barry Sisters. 

The song has been sung and recorded in many languages since then. In 2009, Cantor Yitzhak Meir Helfgot, one of the greatest and most important cantorial voices of the 21st century, sang it in a concert at the Central Synagogue in Sydney, Australia. He was joined by Jimmy Barnes, Australia's most successful Rock & Roll singer, in an English/Yiddish duet.

Writing in J-Wire, Jewish Online News from Australia and New Zealand, Henry Benjamin reported:

Barnes later took to the stage by himself to sing a solo version of “What a Wonderful World”. But before he performed he told the audience that he had telephoned his mother yesterday to ask her why she had given him a Star of David when he was about 18.

He told the crowd that his mother had said: “My mother gave it to me and her mother had given to her so I thought I would give it to you.” He then said that he had asked his mother if her grandmother was Jewish and she replied that she was and that her name was Esther.

Barnes continued: “If I get this right, my great grandmother was Jewish, my grandmother was Jewish, my mother is Jewish so I must be Jewish.”  If he was expecting a welcome home, he got it in spades as the crowd applauded the story rapturously.

We hope you enjoy the Helfgot/Barnes rendition of My Yiddishe Mamme and we wish all of our readers a happy Mother's Day.

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A Mother's Day Spoof: Neglected Jewish Mothers Paired With Surrogate Sons

Just in time for Mother's Day (this Sunday) Adopt a Jewish Mother, a charitable organization, has been created to match Jewish mothers whose sons have left the nest with surrogate sons that they can continue mothering.

The video begins "Every year thousands of Jewish mothers are neglected by sons they've driven away with their constant and neurotic nagging. 

Fortunately, there's a lifeline. Adopt a Jewish Mother pairs up nagging moms with volunteers who serve as surrogate sons for them to needle to no end."

Of course it's a gag video, produced by Landline TV, an internet startup that produces funny skits.

Enjoy, Shabbat shalom, and Happy Mother's Day!

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Storyteller Peninnah Schram: Humor in Jewish Folklore - "A Detour Through Chelm"

Last Sunday the historic Provincetown Playhouse in New York's Greenwich Village was the scene  of a visit to Chelm, the fictional Eastern European town of fools, presided over by internationally renowned storyteller Peninnah Schram. 

In a program of tales from Jewish folklore, Schram presented folklore from the Sephardic and Ashkenazic oral traditions that included intrigue, clever wit, and chokhma (wisdom). 

A few of these stories were captured on video and today we're sharing one of the classic Chelm stories, The Debate Over the Sun and the Moon.

In 1970 Peninnah Schram started recording books for the blind at the Jewish Braille Institute. That experience inspired her to begin to teach Jewish storytelling as a separate subject, and in 1974 she taught her first course on Jewish storytelling. In the same year she started several other groundbreaking projects: She became "storyteller-in-residence" at The Jewish Museum, and she recorded three record albums and broadcast two storytelling series on radio. Some of this recorded material is now in the National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting. 

Schram is the Founding Director of the Jewish Storytelling Center. She has told stories in America, Canada, England, and Israel, at synagogues, festivals, conferences, colleges, organizations, camps, and schools. She is also a catalyst, sparking ideas, inspiring others to tell stories, and creating places for other storytellers to gather and share stories. 

Several of her collections of folktales have been published by Jason Aronson Inc.: Jewish Stories One Generation Tells Another; Eight Tales for Eight Nights: Stories for Chanukah; and Tales of Elijah the Prophet. She is the editor of Chosen Tales: Stories Told by Jewish Storytellers, a collection of the works of 68 storytellers.

In the coming weeks, we'll share some more of Peninnah's stories. In the meantime, enjoy this one!

(A SPECIAL NOTE FOR NEW EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS:  THE VIDEO MAY NOT BE VIEWABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE EMAIL THAT YOU GET EACH DAY ON SOME COMPUTERS AND TABLETS.  YOU MUST CLICK ON THE TITLE AT THE TOP OF THE EMAIL TO REACH THE JEWISH HUMOR CENTRAL WEBSITE, FROM WHICH YOU CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON IN THE VIDEO IMAGE TO START THE VIDEO.)

Shane Baker, Episcopalian Comedian and Actor, Starts New Yiddish Series, The Sheyn Show

Shane Baker, a comedian and actor who was raised Episcopalian, is one of the most prominent proponents of Yiddish theater, language and culture in New York. He is a member of the New Yiddish Repertory Company, one of the two major Yiddish theater companies left in New York City, along with the more traditional Folksbiene theater group. 

Baker, after starring in a production called The Big Bupkis: A Complete Gentile’s Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville, created a series of internet videos for the Jewish Daily Forward titled The Sheyn Show.

Baker was profiled in The New York Times last year. As Corey Kilgannon reported in the Times,

It’s not easy being the top non-Jew in the Yiddish theater. There are those letters to “Miss Sheyna Baker” and the constant questions about why he would want to steep himself in Yiddish.

“It’s funny — it’s always Jews who ask me this,” he said. “But anyone who knows anything about Yiddish theater knows that I’m onto something great.”

“Some people assume I’m going to convert, but I tell them, ‘I already have a religion that I’m not very good with,’ ” Mr. Baker said.

What did he know from Yiddish? Growing up in Kansas City, Mo., he was an altar boy at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. He heard his first Yiddish word around age 5 watching Groucho Marx in “Animal Crackers” sing “Hooray for Captain Spaulding.” Marx rhymed “schnorrer” with “African explorer,” but young Shane could not find anyone who knew what it meant.

As a teenager, he learned that it meant freeloader, and that it came from this language called Yiddish. By then, he was a young actor and magician who admired a retired neighbor who had been in vaudeville. He began learning Yiddish and was visited, according to a bit in his show, by the ghost of a Yiddish vaudevillian named Ludwig Zats, who urged him to become a star of Yiddish theater in New York, where, Mr. Baker assumed, there was “Yiddish vaudeville on every corner.”

Here is Episode 1 of The Sheyn Show, in which Shane Baker reflects on meditation and Jewish troubles with wry Jewish humor. The entire episode is spoken in fluent Yiddish, with English subtitles.

Enjoy!

(A SPECIAL NOTE FOR NEW EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS:  THE VIDEO MAY NOT BE VIEWABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE EMAIL THAT YOU GET EACH DAY ON SOME COMPUTERS AND TABLETS.  YOU MUST CLICK ON THE TITLE AT THE TOP OF THE EMAIL TO REACH THE JEWISH HUMOR CENTRAL WEBSITE, FROM WHICH YOU CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON IN THE VIDEO IMAGE TO START THE VIDEO.)
 

Jerusalem of Gold: The True Story of How it Came To Be Israel's Second National Anthem

Tonight Jews all over the world, and especially in Israel, begin the celebration of Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day), an Israeli national holiday commemorating the reunification of Jerusalem and the establishment of Israeli control over the Old City in June 1967. 

The Chief Rabbinate of Israel declared Jerusalem Day a minor religious holiday to thank God for victory in the Six-Day War and for answering the 2,000-year-old prayer of "Next Year in Jerusalem."

The informal anthem of the day is Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold), the song written in 1967 by Naomi Shemer and first performed by Shuly Natan, who was then a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces teaching Hebrew to new immigrants from Morocco in Israel's Negev desert.

Most people think the song was written to commemorate Israel's victory in the Six Day War, but it actually was written shortly before war broke out. It was commissioned by Teddy Kollek, mayor of Jerusalem at the time, as a background song to be sung while the votes were counted for a radio song competition, similar to today's American Idol. It has grown in popularity over the years and is now second only to Hatikvah as Israel's national anthem.

We know the story because Shuly Natan told it to a Jewish National Fund national conference in 2010. We think you'd like to hear her tell the story herself, so we're sharing a video of her speech at the conference. 

But before this story video, here's a beautiful rendition of Shuly Natan singing the original version of the song, which has since been covered by Ofra Haza and many other singers. 

The music video is an exceptional piece of editing by Brian Vinik, who describes himself as a college student with a passion for video editing. It is a montage of video clips of Natan singing the song from 1967 to the present day, without losing the synchronization of video and audio.

Enjoy, and best wishes to the State of Israel on Yom Yerushalayim!

(A SPECIAL NOTE FOR NEW EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS:  THE VIDEO MAY NOT BE VIEWABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE EMAIL THAT YOU GET EACH DAY ON SOME COMPUTERS AND TABLETS.  YOU MUST CLICK ON THE TITLE AT THE TOP OF THE EMAIL TO REACH THE JEWISH HUMOR CENTRAL WEBSITE, FROM WHICH YOU CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON IN THE VIDEO IMAGE TO START THE VIDEO.)