More in ‘Molly Picon’

When we think about Yiddish culture, sex isn’t usually the first thing that springs to mind. But the folks behind this week’s conference “Sex and the Shtetl,” held at the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, put the spotlight on the prurient.
Discussions included what the Jewish Telegraphic Agency calls ...

In the 1930s and ’40s, airwaves in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other major cities were filled with Yiddish-language shows which offered a mix of news, advice, cantorial music, and radio plays. They gave foreign-born listeners, many of them refugees, a chance both to learn about life in their new country and to be entertained. Ari Y. Kelman, a professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States, talks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about how Yiddish programming both mimicked and deviated from its English-language counterpart—and about its family-centered melodramas, rabbi-adjudicated court shows, and performing lady cantors.

Speed-walking in the frigid cold to the opening of “Pages from a Performing Life: The Scrapbooks of Molly Picon,” an exhibit at New York’s Center for Jewish History, I don’t once regret my recent return from the sunny coast of California. At every corner, my own history winks back at me, superimposed on top of ...