Yoel Matveyev, the Forverts’ correspondent in Russia, was sitting alone in a Moscow train station in the middle of the night, when he suddenly got the inspiration to translate the Russian song, “Nadezhda” , about two lovers separated by a long and difficult journey, into Yiddish. Although the song was written in 1971, it remains hugely popular in Russia. Matveyev never imagined that just a year later, his translation would be performed on national Russian television by a choir from Birobidzhan, a city near the Russian-Chinese border, that has a Soviet-Yiddish heritage. Still heard on the radio fifty years later,...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
