MJH | “The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City” Book Talk

The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City offers a new look at over a century of New York’s history of Yiddish popular culture. Henry H. Sapoznik – a Peabody Award-winning co-producer of NPR’s Yiddish Radio Project – tells the story in over a baker’s dozen chapters on theater, music, architecture, crime, Black Americans and Jews, restaurants, real estate, and journalism. 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 impossible-to-overstate influence of Yiddish culture on New York City. Containing fifty images, many of which have never before been published, the book is complemented by an online interactive Google Map linked to over one hundred of the historic locations discussed in the book, with additional graphics and resource materials. The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City is a vivid, entertaining, and accessible compendium of both New York’s and New York’s Ashkenazic past and present, showcasing the culture’s persistent resiliency.

Sapoznik will be in conversation about his book with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

Henry H. Sapoznik is an award-winning author, radio and record producer, and performer of Yiddish and American traditional and popular music. A child of Holocaust survivors and a native Yiddish speaker, Sapoznik was one of the architects of the 1970s klezmer revival and in 1985 founded and directed the internationally renowned event “KlezKamp” which he ran for thirty years. Sapoznik was nominated for five Grammy awards as a performer and producer on over 50 recordings. He co-produced the Peabody Award-winning NPR series The Yiddish Radio Project in 2002 while his collection of over 1,000 Yiddish broadcasts is now housed at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Sapoznik is currently recording the audiobook of The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City and writing The Stations That Spoke Your Language: A Century of Yiddish American Radio for MacFarland Press for 2027.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University and Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw. Her books include Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); and They Called Me Mayer July: Painted and Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt). She was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for her contribution to the creation of POLIN Museum. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences served as Vice-Chair of ICMEMO International Committee of Memorial Museums in Remembrance of the Victims of Public Crimes. She advises on museum and exhibition projects in Germany, Vienna, Lithuania, Belarus, Albania, Israel, New Zealand, and the United States.

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