Deutschlandfunk Kultur: “Hebrew? Yiddish? Berlin?” (2024, radio interview in German with the writer Mati Shemoelof about the symposium of the same name that the two of us co-curated)
Forward: “You can now hear people speaking Yiddish in bars all over Berlin” (Article about the Yiddish social club I coordinate, Shmues un Vayn, 2024)
“One of the most striking effects of these get-togethers is its influence on members’ casual use of Yiddish in everyday life — something that’s rare now outside of the Hasidic community and small Yiddishist circles.”
Forward: “A Yiddish Weekend in the English Countryside” (Article in Yiddish by Osian Evans Sharma about the UK Yiddish Sof-Vokh retreat, for which I serve on the organizing committee, 2023)
“A lecture about ‘Queer Yiddish’ sparked surprise and laughter when the presenter [Jake Schneider] demonstrated that a scene from the well-known film The Dybbuk also has a queer subtext.”
Afn Shvel: “Only the Melody Remained: Scheunenviertel, Berlin’s Jewish Neighborhood” (Article in Yiddish by Sheva Zucker, Winter 2022–23 issue)
“Our tour guide Jake Schneider … had warned us that on this tour we would need … to imagine the unseen for ourselves. And indeed with his well-researched narration, with pictures and with music, he brought that neighborhood and that era to life for us.”
Proste Yiddish Podcast: “Shmues & Vayn in Berlin mit Jake Schneider” (Interview in Yiddish, 2023)
“You can do whatever you like [at Shmues un Vayn gatherings]. As I see it, it should be almost exactly the same as if you were going to a bar with friends and speaking your native language, except if you speak Yiddish as a second language, you can try to come twice a month and hang out with us – in Yiddish!” (Yiddish transcript here)
Berliner Tagesspiegel: “No Fear” (Interview in German, 2022)
“As a member of Yiddish.Berlin, I organize a conversation group that meets twice a month. We chat and sing and shoot the breeze in Yiddish. That is one of the many treasures of Jewish culture that people in Germany don’t get a chance to hear or see because so much of the attention centers on antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Israel.”
LOLA: “The Evolution and Philosophy of SAND” (Interview, 2020)
“Simply by publishing in our native English, we find ourselves heir to a dark legacy of British and US cultural imperialism. Resisting that legacy, we try to use our platform – and our language’s huge audience – to amplify voices that publishers and curators have often erased or marginalized.”
Exberliner: “German Lit That’s Not German” (Interview, 2019)
“The language barrier makes it harder to integrate into the community of an artform that is still very national. Every country holds up its national poet or playwright, and when you’re publishing in one language and ordering coffee in another, this disconnectedness kind of violates people’s ideas of who literature belongs to.”
Lambda Literary: “Publishing Queer and International Voices in Berlin” (Interview, 2018)
“As queer people, unlike religious or ethnic minorities, we generally start out alone and discover we’re part of a community later. Call it our ‘You’re a wizard, Harry’ moment. And that community is very international. Sadly internationalism, like queerness, is viewed with suspicion everywhere. The best cure for suspicion is empathy, and the best source of empathy is literature.”