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.
Episodes released every Monday.
Go to our website for more information about the music and texts we discuss.
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, Kaptan Miah and Olivia Warren at Queen Mary University of London; Ashraf Al-Hawrani, the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre, London, the Yiddish Sof-Vokh.
Podcast image: © Jeremy Richardson.
Featured music: Klezmer Klub and Katsha’nes.
Translations: Vivi Lachs and Barry Smerin.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.
Episodes released every Monday.
Go to our website for more information about the music and texts we discuss.
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, Kaptan Miah and Olivia Warren at Queen Mary University of London; Ashraf Al-Hawrani, the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre, London, the Yiddish Sof-Vokh.
Podcast image: © Jeremy Richardson.
Featured music: Klezmer Klub and Katsha’nes.
Translations: Vivi Lachs and Barry Smerin.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Who is the gramophone man? In the final episode of the series Nadia and Vivi go down an extraordinary rabbit-hole of East End history. They investigate the mysterious figure of Solomon Levy, immortalised in Yiddish East End street songs. But what is his connection with the ubiquitous gramophone man who haunted Petticoat Lane market with his clapped out gramophone on a rusty pram playing old Yiddish songs? This iconic figure featured in the famous 1955 film A Kid for Two Farthings as well as photographs, drawings and is our podcast image. What is fiction and what is real in the history of the Jewish East End? To help us answer this question, we invite broadcaster Alan Dein for an East End musical tour.
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
Guest: Alan Dein
Contributors: Monty Bixer, Nat, Charles Fox, Sylvie Reid, Alice, Hannah Grant, Naomi, Emanuel Litvinoff
Reader in English: Miriam Margolyes
Featured story: Moshe Domb, ‘Petticoat Lane’, translated by Barry Smerin. From East End Jews: Sketches from the London Yiddish Press (Wayne State University Press, 2025).
Featured songs:
Theme music: Klezmer Klub, ‘Vaytshepl mayn vaytshepl’ (trad) and ‘Yiddisher Honga’ (trad). From the CD Whitechapel mayn Vaytshepl (Klub Records, 2009)
Podcast image: © Jeremy Richardson
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.