This program is part of Village Preservation’s Semiquincentennial series of programs celebrating our Revolutionary Village. Revolutionary Village not only celebrates the founding of our country, but the exceptional role our neighborhoods played in its development and the realization of its ideals over the last 250 years and beyond.

Join us for this book talk with Henry Sapoznik and his new book on the history of New York’s Yiddish popular culture from 1880 to the present.

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, a great of which was centered in the East Village and along the Bowery and the Lower East Side. Henry H. Sapoznik-a Peabody Award-winning coproducer of NPR’s Yiddish Radio Project-tells the story in over a baker’s dozen chapters on theater, music, architecture, crime, Blacks 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 lush Ashkenazic past and present, showcasing the culture’s persistent resiliency.

Henry H. Sapoznik is an award-winning producer, musicologist and performer, and writer in the fields of traditional and popular Yiddish and American music and culture.

He is a native Yiddish speaker and child of Holocaust survivors, grew up in an Orthodox home and attended Lubavitch Yeshiva and Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin. Sapoznik is a five-time Grammy-nominated producer/performer of over fifty recordings and author of the award-winning book Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World.