The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City, with Henry Sapoznik

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The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (State University of New York Press, 2025) offers a new look at over a century of New York’s Yiddish popular culture. Henry Sapoznik tells the story in chapters on theater, music, architecture, crime, Blacks and Jews, restaurants, real estate, and journalism. Culled from more than five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles, and a wealth of previously inaccessible materials, the book offers fresh insights into the enormous influence of Yiddish culture on New York City. Profusely illustrated, it is a vivid, entertaining, and accessible compendium of New York’s lush Ashkenazic past and present, showcasing the culture’s persistent resiliency.

A native Yiddish speaker and child of Holocaust survivors, Henry Sapoznik is an award-winning producer, musicologist and performer, and writer in the fields of traditional and popular Yiddish and American music and culture. He was the founding director of the sound archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research from 1982 to 1995, and in 1985 founded KlezKamp: The Yiddish Folk Arts Program, which he would direct for the next thirty years. A five-time Grammy-nominated producer/performer, Sapoznik has been on more than fifty records, and has reissued more than thirty musical anthologies documenting a wide range of musical traditions. He co-produced the Peabody Award-winning ten-part NPR series The Yiddish Radio Project. His books include Klezmer! Jewish Music From Old World to Our World, which earned the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music History.