Have You Ever Heard "The Star Spangled Banner" in Yiddish?

Last week we posted a Canadian chorus singing O Canada, the Canadian national anthem, in Yiddish.

It's not a matter of competition, but we think it's only fair to point out that America's national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, was performed in Yiddish three years ago by the Jewish People's Philharmonic Chorus 

The Chorus is part of a modern Yiddish renaissance -- more than forty members strong, from students to retirees, a good number of whom speak or are learning Yiddish. Their repertoire spans a century -- exciting oratorios and operettas, labor anthems, folksongs, and popular tunes -- all in Yiddish. Committed to strengthening Yiddish as a living language, they have commissioned and premiered new Yiddish choral works by half a dozen composers.

The JPPC shares the rich legacy of Yiddish song by performing year-round for old and young of all faiths at community centers, universities, K-12 schools, museums and places of worship throughout NYC's 4-state region. They have also performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, at Ground Zero and the West Point Military Academy, as well as at the North American Jewish Choral Festival. 

Enjoy!

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Welcoming Shabbat with Adon Olam/Sound of Silence by Ottawa Cantor

Since we started Jewish Humor Central in 2009, we have posted 26 versions of Adon Olam, the hymn that ends the Shabbat morning service in most congregations. 

But we haven't stopped searching for more renditions, so here is a new one from Cantor Daniel Benlolo of Kehillat Beth Israel, a Conservative egalitarian congregation in Canada's capital of Ottawa.

Cantor Benlolo harmonizes with Michael Malek as Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence is intertwined with Adon Olam, accompanied by Aviva Lightstone and Ken Kanwisher.

The first 40 seconds are the original English words of Sound of Silence, and the Hebrew kicks in for the rest of the 3 and a half minute song. 

Enjoy and Shabbat shalom!

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Actress-Comedian Annie Korzen Opens Month-Long Comedy Show Tonight in California

If you'll be anywhere near Los Angeles between today and August 13, you should head over to The Braid, a performance space in Santa Monica which will be featuring Annie Korzen Famous Actress, a one-woman show by actress-comedian Annie Korzen. 

Annie, a childhood friend of ours from The Bronx, has been writing and performing one-woman shows about her life for many years. We have featured video clips from her solo show Yenta Unplugged, some of her storytelling performances, and a joke from Old Jews Telling Jokes.

Annie achieved national attention from her role as Doris Klompus, the annoying Boca Raton neighbor of Jerry Seinfeld's parents on Seinfeld.

As Broadway World Los Angeles reported last week about Annie's new show Annie Korzen Famous Actress,

The show begins when Annie learns of her son's plan to adopt a baby. The event is sure to be a disaster, plus Annie is not thrilled about being demoted from the "leading lady" to a "bit player" in his life. She then takes her audience on a hilarious journey through her resentment of the world's most neurotic mothers, to her "crap" acting career, to her rocky relationship with Judaism, and to her traumas with childbirth which led to a bizarre stay in in a Danish psych ward.

Annie guides us through her bumpy career where each audition leads to new anguish. She tells how one director was looking for "an Annie Korzen type," then hired a perky little blond. "I am too Jewish to play myself," she cries. "When they make a movie out of this show, my role will probably go to Reese Witherspoon!"

If we get video clips from this new show, we'll share them with you. In the meantime, here's a video clip from one of her previous shows, The Yenta Cometh. Enjoy! 

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Now There's a Haredi Orthodox Version of "Shark Tank" Online

ABC TV's Shark Tank features The Sharks -- tough, self-made, multi-millionaire and billionaire tycoons -- as they invest in America's best businesses and products. The Sharks give people from all walks of life the chance to chase the American dream, and potentially secure business deals that could make them millionaires.

Now there's an online version called BizTank aimed at the Haredi Orthodox Jewish community. 

As John Aidan Byrne wrote in the New York Post,

This unusual clone of the hit reality television series is Web-only — it can be seen online at biztankmoguls.com — and is the brainchild of Joel Klein, a former rabbi turned chief executive of Immediate Marketing & Business Consulting. And the purpose of his Brooklyn-based program isn’t to generate a mass audience, he says — it’s to connect entrepreneurs of the conservative Jewish Haredi community with mostly Jewish investors.

Launched last year, and hosted out of Klein’s offices in Williamsburg, “BizTank” brings in Jewish entrepreneurs who pitch a panel of seasoned investors, known as the “moguls.” The investments range from $50,000 to $5,000,000 — and so far $4 million in deals have been arranged.

Check out this video to see the moguls in action, and a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor and inventor who pitched his product to them.

Enjoy!

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"O Canada" Sung by 150 in Yiddish Choir to Celebrate Canada's 150th Anniversary

On Tuesday, June 6, 2017, Moses Znaimer, Founder of ZoomerMedia and Executive Producer of VisionTV, hosted a group of multi- generational and multi-cultural choristers in the singing of Canada’s national anthem, O Canada, in an unprecedented Yiddish version by Hindy Nosek-Abelson, a lyrical translator of Yiddish poetry and songs, lecturer and Yiddish dialect coach for stage and film.

As Dan Bloom wrote in the San Diego Jewish World,

”Yiddish was the first language of most Jewish immigrants to Canada from the late 1800s on,” Nosek-Abelson recently told San Diego Jewish World. “While it isn’t spoken as a daily language as frequently as it once was, there remains a powerful love for the language shared by many thousands of Canadian people for whom Yiddish was either their own mother-tongue or that of their parents and grandparents.

That explains the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response by a Jewish community eager to pay tribute to the Canada that welcomed them or their ancestors and gave them their very first taste of freedom from Nazi persecution.  To do it in the language they lived, loved, created and flourished in represents a particularly meaningful expression of the gratitude and love for this country that Jewish Canadians share.

Here is a behind-the-scenes video with interviews of some of the principals who were instrumental in the creation of the official music video of O Kaneda in Yiddish. The complete song is sung at the end of the video.

If you want to see just the resulting video of O Kaneda without the backstory and interviews, you can skip to the video at the bottom of this post.

Enjoy!

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THE MAKING OF "O KANEDA"


"O KANEDA"

A Joke to Start the Week - "Shmulie's First Date"

It's another Monday so here we go again with another Joke to Start the Week from the Old Jews Telling Jokes archives.

Today's joke teller is Adriane Berg, founder of Generation Bold, and a leading expert in marketing, consulting and sales training for companies seeking to reach the boomer and active senior markets. 

Here's the setup: Shmulie, a very young boy, going on his very first date, doesn't know how to act with a girl. So he goes to his mom and asks "Mom, what should I talk about?" And then...

Enjoy!

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A Surprise Wedding at the 2017 Maccabiah Games in Jerusalem

The 2017 Maccabiah Games are underway in Israel, having started on July 4 and running through July 18. 

The Maccabiah Games are open to Jewish athletes from around the world, and to all Israeli citizens regardless of their religion. A total of 10,000 athletes are competing, a Maccabiah Games record, making the 2017 Maccabiah Games the third-largest sporting competition in the world (after the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup).

The athletes are from 85 countries, also a record^. Countries represented for the first time include the Bahamas, Cambodia, the Cayman Islands, Haiti, Malta, Morocco, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and Trinidad. The athletes are competing in 45 sports.

At the games, Canadian ice hockey team member Avi Steinberg was asked to come to the stage together with his girlfriend Rachel Dixon, who just completed her year and a half of studies for her conversion to Judaism.

Rachel thought they would only be reenacting their engagement, but the event planners surprised her with a surprise wedding on international television! 

Mazal tov!

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Welcoming Shabbat with Shalom Aleichem by Yonina

Earlier this year we posted a version of Lecha Dodi by Yoni and Nina Tokayer, a married musical duo who live in the small town of Pardes Chana, Israel.

For the past half a year, they have been uploading home videos to Facebook and Youtube and reaching millions. They have both been singing and writing since they can remember, and have been making music together ever since they met.

The name Yonina is a combination of both their first names, Yoni and Nina.

The response to the Lecha Dodi video was so positive that we searched for and found another Shabbat song that they recorded. In this video, they sing the traditional erev Shabbat song, Shalom Aleichem from the Tel Aviv beach.

Enjoy!

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Throwback Thursday: When Billy Crystal Met Miss Piggy in a Re-creation of "I'll Have What She's Having"

When Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan performed the famous "I'll have what she's having" scene at Katz's Deli in the 1989 R-rated film When Harry Met Sally, it became a natural choice for parodies and spoofs.

One of the copycat versions that succeeded in adapting the scene for general audiences including children was aired in 1996 on Muppets Tonight, a continuation of Jim Henson's The Muppet Show.

To get a G rating, the writers of Muppets Tonight made a small but significant change in the dialog so the act that Miss Piggy was faking was...a sneeze. In all other respects the script  of the remake echoed the original dialog, including the final line, to which a short qualifier was added.

We hope you enjoy this Throwback Thursday video clip that takes us back 21 years.

Enjoy!

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Stand-up Comedian Gary Gulman on State Abbreviations and Contractions

Gary Gulman is a funny stand-up comedian who we featured here earlier this year. We got many requests to bring him back with other routines, so here he is again.

In an interview by the JDate editorial team published online, Gulman reflected on how he includes Jewish themes in his comedy. 

Judaism plays an enormous role in my life. It’s a great contributor to my identity. It’s common ground I share with many of my friends and a lot of the people I work with, partially by osmosis — being around people with certain values which my family shares, Jewish values and Jewish culture — as well as going to Hebrew school and reading and learning more about Judaism… going to Israel.

In this appearance on Conan O'Brien's late night talk show, Gulman tells a funny story about a 90 minute documentary that was made about the men and one women who abbreviated all 50 states down to two letters. He'll make you laugh about the crack outfit of abbreviators who got stuck after their first abbreviation of AL for Alabama.

Enjoy! 

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Fourth of July Comedy Shtick with Danny Lobell as Sami the Israeli

Sami the Israeli (Comedian Danny Lobell) is back, wishing all his American friends a happy Fourth of July (today).

In this satiric video, Sami takes aim at traditional Fourth of July elements and claims them to be scams. Particular targets of his Israeli caricature are fireworks, hot dogs, independence, taxes, and the price of coffee.

Wishing all our readers a happy Fourth of July - Independence Day.

Enjoy!

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Joke to Start the Week: "Thirsty Man"

It's the first Monday in July and we're lining up some classic jokes to liven up the summer. Our first July joke is another one from the Old Jews Telling Jokes collection.

Today's joke teller is real estate agent Malcolm Mason. Here's the setup:  A gentleman is out in the desert and he hasn't had any water for days. He doesn't know what to do. He sees a blue light and follows the blue light and knocks on a door. And then...

Enjoy!

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19 Types of Shoppers You Meet at the Supermarket - Which One Are You?

It happens almost every time you go to the supermarket. You can't help running into him or her. And it's always annoying. Who are we talking about? 19 typical shoppers who drive you nuts. 

There's the checklister, the calorie counter, the helpless husband, the snacker, the shopper blocker, the taste tester, the overstocker, and 12 more who test your patience while shopping.We hope you're not one of them.

Filmmaker Meir Kay created this video at Aron's Kissena Farms kosher supermarket in Flushing, Queens, New York. 

Enjoy!

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