The Cockney Yiddish Podcast
Stories of a forgotten London subculture
The Cockney Yiddish Podcast explores the unknown Yiddish popular culture of London’s East End through an array of newly discovered stories and songs from the 1880s to the 1950s. Historians Nadia Valman and Vivi Lachs share their passion for the tunes and words of Jewish Londoners encountering the Cockney culture of music halls, street markets and rhyming slang. They discover a rich landscape of music and interviews from the archives and chat about hidden histories, family stories, lost connections and real and imagined places with special guests and readers including Michael Rosen, Miriam Margolyes, Alan Dein and David Schneider. Join Nadia and Vivi on their journey and hear East London’s long forgotten songs and stories brought to new life by contemporary musicians and actors.
Listen to the podcast via the links below and click on the episode pages to find out more about the writers, to hear the stories in the original Yiddish and download the story and song texts in Yiddish and English.
Episodes
1. Now You’re Talking Cockney Yiddish
How did London change the lives of Yiddish-speaking immigrants? How did the English language turn Yiddish into Cockney Yiddish and how did Yiddish infiltrate Cockney?
2. Forverts! Politics and Protest
Explore East End Jewish radicalism from the union protests of the 1880s through to fighting fascism in the 1936 Battle of Cable Street.
3. When You Go to a Yiddish Theatre
Discover Yiddish theatre and music hall from its Victorian beginnings in popular theatre with its cheap songs and audience misbehaviour to performances of Shakespeare and opera in Yiddish. The webpage for episode 3 will go live together with the podcast.
4. Oy! Who are You Laughing at?
Hear about the outrageous adventures of an East End Jewish wife in a Yiddish music hall, favourite Jewish jokes and Cockney-Yiddish rhyming slang. The webpage for episode 4 will go live together with the podcast.
5. Khanike oder Krismes
How did interwar immigrant and second generation Jews manage pressures to assimilate? And in particular the dilemma of what to do about Christmas. In Yiddish with English transcript. The webpage for episode 5 will go live together with the podcast.
6. Look Back in Shmaltz
Wallow in nostalgia with a song yearning for old Whitechapel and find out how postwar Yiddish and English-language writers remembered and reinvented the East End. The webpage for episode 6 will go live together with the podcast.
7. The Mystery of Solomon Levy
Go down an extraordinary rabbit-hole of East End history, investigating the mysterious figure of Solomon Levy, immortalised in Yiddish East End street songs. The webpage for episode 7 will go live together with the podcast.
The Cockney Yiddish Podcast is written and presented by Nadia Valman and Vivi Lachs
Produced by: Natalie Steed at Rhubarb Rhubarb for Queen Mary University of London. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Grant reference AH/Z505614/1.
Big thanks to: Adam Corsini at the Jewish Museum London; Tamsin Bookey and Sanjida Alam at Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives; Ru Dannreuther, Silke Boettcher and Kaptan Miah at Queen Mary University of London; Ashraf Al-Hawrani, the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre, London, the Yiddish Sof-Vokh, Sima Beeri and Barry Smerin. Especially big thanks to Olivia Warren at Queen Mary University of London for her brilliant work on the website.
Website image: Front cover of the weekly magazine published in London, Der fonograf The Fonograph, 1909. Courtesy of Jewish Miscellanies.com
Podcast image: © Jeremy Richardson.
Featured music: Klezmer Klub and Katsha’nes.
Translations: Vivi Lachs and Barry Smerin.
The Cockney Yiddish Podcast 