Episode
Yiddishland – David Mazower
- Podcast
- Ancient Futures
- Published
- May 20, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4183
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://ancientfutures.substack.com/p/yiddish-david-mazower
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/ancient-futures-6182152/episodes/yiddishland-david-mazower/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/ancient-futures-6182152/yiddishland-david-mazower.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
How might we be inspired by a worldwide community of Yiddish-speaking Jews, whose cultural identity was broadly internationalist? David Mazower is the author of Yiddish: A Global Culture , which accompanies an exhibit he curated at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. Our conversation explores the heritage and influence of Yiddish – the everyday language of East European Jews, which became a diaspora lingua franca and the medium for bold creativity, from avant-garde art and subversive writing to radical politics that shaped socialist and anarchist movements. David’s great-grandfather, Sholem Asch, was a pioneering Yiddishist writer and another of his ancestors – his father’s father Max – was a revolutionary in tsarist Russia, becoming involved with a socialist party called the Bund, whose deeply humanistic perspective has since been marginalised. As David observes, the impact of the Bund is now the focus of a book by Molly Crabapple ( titled Here Where We Live is Our Country ). And an outing of London Bundists from the early 1900s features on the cover of David’s book . Before joining the Yiddish Book Center as its research bibliographer and editorial director, David was a senior journalist with BBC World News and deputy curator of the Jewish Museum London. He writes for a range of publications on topics from Yiddish theatre and popular culture to British Jewish history. Selected highlights from the exhibit that accompanies his book are available here . There’s also a digital guide via the Bloomberg Connects app (see here for details). -- 🔭 For a comprehensive guide to yogic wisdom, join me on The Path of Knowledge 🙏 Your support makes this podcast sustainable – please consider subscribing or make a donation ... It's greatly appreciated! This is a public…