Yiddish Literature, Translation, and Performance

Seating is first come, first served and requires general registration.

Yiddish translators and performers Caraid O’Brien, Zeke Levine, and Mikhl Yashinsky will perform their work in Yiddish and English, and discuss their translation process and the roots of Yiddish performance and literature. The program features excerpts from Sholem Asch’s drama On the Road to Zion, an excerpt from a translation of Yiddish actress Ester-Rokhl Kaminska’s memoir, and a new work musical performed by Levine and inspired by Yiddish text.

Caraid O’Brien has translated seven plays by Sholem Asch from Yiddish into English. She is a writer, performer, translator, and director. Her translation from the Yiddish of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance directed by Obie award winner Aaron Beall “set Show World aflame” according to the Village Voice and was produced by the Rorschach Theatre in Washington D.C. She is a three-time recipient of a new play commission from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture for her contemporary adaptation of Dovid Pinski’s Yiddish classic Jake the Mechanic as well as the first ever English translations of Sholem Asch’s underworld plays Motke Theif and The Dead Man.  

Zeke Levine is a doctoral student in musicology at NYU. He is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, Yiddishist, and musicologist, and combines his love of music, words, and the Yiddish language to craft songs, compositions, translations, and scholarship that look to the past to make sense of the present. 

Mikhl Yashinsky is a Manhattan-based theater artist, Yiddishist, and translator, and has worked as a stage director of opera at institutions, including the Vienna’s Theater an der Wien with his production of the Holocaust-era opera Brundibár. With the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, he starred in Di kishef-makherin (The Sorceress), and he is currently appearing on Broadway in the Folksbiene’s Yiddish-language Fiddler on the Roof, directed by Joel Grey. His forthcoming translations from the Yiddish include the memoir of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska. In 2019, Yashinsky was named to the “Forward 50,” the newspaper’s annual list of “influential, intriguing, and inspiring” American Jews. 

Co-presented by Yiddish Book Center and White Goat Press.