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Posts Tagged ‘national public radio’

The website Narratively just alerted me to something cool from StoryCorps, a feature I generally hear on National Public Radio (NPR).

According to the StoryCorps website, “The first-ever animated feature from StoryCorps, Listening Is an Act of Love, presents six stories from 10 years of StoryCorps, where everyday people sit down together to ask life’s important questions and share stories from their lives. Framing these intimate conversations is an interview between StoryCorps founder Dave Isay and his nine-year-old nephew, Benji.

Listening Is an Act of Love will be broadcast by public television stations nationwide. … on varying dates through February 2014. Can’t wait until the animated special airs on your local station? Watch on PBS Roku and Apple TV channels — available on DVD, too!” More here.

(At ny1.com, here, you can read how recording people’s stories caused Isay to take a permanent detour from his medical school ambitions.)

Do you have favorite StoryCorps stories? Have you ever created one?

I have a tape of my father reading the Kipling story “The Elephant’s Child” and poems he loved like “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” which always choked him up. But if you do a StoryCorps story, you get it archived at the Library of Congress — probably more permanent than my old cassette tape.

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In case you missed it (ICYMI, as they say on twitter), National Public Radio had a delightful story about Irish Jews last weekend:

“St. Patrick’s Day in New York now means parades and green beer. But 50 years ago, it also meant green matzo balls at the annual banquet of the Loyal League of Yiddish Sons of Erin. The league was a fraternal organization of Irish-born Jews.

“The major migration of Jews to Ireland started in the 1880s and ’90s, says Hasia Diner, who teaches history and Judaic studies at New York University. Thousands moved [to Ireland], primarily from Lithuania. …

” ‘Then the Irish Jews, as Jews historically did, they went to where there were better economic opportunities,’ Diner says.

“A lot of Irish Jews found those opportunities in New York. Like many immigrant groups, they kept their culture alive in the New World. And in the early 1960s, they formed the Yiddish Sons of Erin.

“According to member Rosalyn Klein, the whole thing started as a joke. … A restaurant took out a newspaper ad for a meeting of Irish Jews. Klein thinks they didn’t really expect people, but a lot of them showed up.

” ‘And most of them had lived in Dublin, so it was kind of this mishpocha getting together again,’ she says.”

For many years after, a big Jewish St. Patrick’s Day celebration was held in New York and was de rigeur for politicians and celebrities.

More here.

Photo: SmittenKitchen.com.
This is a normal matzo ball. I couldn’t find a green one.

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