Kiss Me Where the Jews Reposed: Hebrew in Yiddish, with Michael Wex

In Michael Wex’s fourth presentation for KlezCalifornia, we’ll look at number of Yiddish idioms and expressions drawn from day-to-day life and activities to discover various ways in which words, phrases and idioms from the Bible, Talmud and other classical religious texts find their way into Yiddish. Sometimes they come in unchanged, sometimes recast or translated into Slavic or Germanic words, and often with new meanings that don’t have much to do with their original context. No knowledge of Yiddish or Hebrew required.

The event begins 11am Pacific DAYLIGHT Time (please use this time zone converter for other areas to check your local time). NOTE: Daylight saving time begins in some parts of the world the day of the event. If you neglect to take this into account, you will miss the first hour — and you don’t want to do that!

The presentation is co-presented by the Jewish Community Library.

About Michael Wex: Author of three books on Yiddish, including the bestselling Born to Kvetch, Michael Wex, born in Lethbridge, Alberta, has taught the language at the University of Toronto and the University of Michigan and is a mainstay of the contemporary Yiddish scene. A native-speaker whose Yiddish songs have been recorded by such bands as the Grammy-winning Klezmatics, Wex has translated material ranging from classical Yiddish literature to testimony for war crimes trials. He has also translated The Threepenny Opera from German into Yiddish. His most recent book, Rhapsody in Schmaltz, a study of Ashkenazi food that did for Yiddish food what Born to Kvetch did for Yiddish speech, was published 2016 by St. Martin’s Press only a few months before the world premiere of Bobe Mayses, a collaborative spectacle by Wex, Jennifer Romaine and Alan Bern developed and produced at Yiddish Summer Weimar. His project, Baym Kabaret Yitesh, an all-Yiddish cabaret show, premiered at Yiddish Summer Weimar in 2019.

In 2021, Wax performed Estragon in Stockholm, Sweden, in a sold-out Yiddish production of Samuel Beckett’s existential masterpiece, Waiting for Godot. Among the attendees were Sweden’s Minister of Culture and Israel’s Ambassador to Sweden.

Registration

To reserve a space, scroll down and complete the registration form. Registration ends four hours before the event, i.e. at 7am Pacific DAYLIGHT Time. After that time, write nu@klezcalifornia.org. We cannot promise to notice your email if you write after the deadline.

Registrants will receive sign-in instructions and Zoom suggestions by 8:10am Pacific Time that day. If you have not heard by then, first check your junk/spam folder, then write nu@klezcalifornia.org. Please do not wait until just before the event begins to notice whether you have the sign-in info.

Registering includes giving KlezCalifornia permission to take still and video images and use them for educational or other organizational purposes. If you do not agree to such use, please turn off your video when you join the event. To keep you informed of future events, we enroll registrants in our free monthly newsletter which includes klezmer and Yiddish culture events in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. You may unsubscribe at any time. KlezCalifornia does not share its lists with other organizations.

Donations

This event is FREE. However KlezCalifornia relies on donations from participants to cover the costs of all our events. Donations of $18, $36 or $108 (or whatever you can afford) are needed to enable us to continue to connect you with Yiddish culture and to assist presenters who have lost most of their income during the pandemic.