Translation

I have nearly 20 years of experience translating Yiddish. This includes: 
  • books (from Yisker bikher to modern-day retail texts)
  • old letters
  • newspaper articles
  • postcards
  • film and audio footage
  • memoirs
  • medical (and other types of) interpretation


My experience has led me in many fascinating directions... 
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Who Do You Think You Are?  I recently conducted genealogical research that entailed translating both Yiddish and Hebrew documents for TLC's, the BBC's, and NBC's hit show, “Who Do You Think You Are?”  These episodes focused, respectively, on actresses Lea Michele, Jane Seymour, and Gwyneth Paltrow, who hails from a long line of rabbis on her paternal side, originally, "Paltrovich.”  
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Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950. I took part in translating a fascinating Hebrew document about a Sephardic conversion. This translation was later incorporated into the book Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950 by Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, winner of the 2014 National Jewish Book Awards.  
Voices of the Holocaust Project.  I translated and transliterated Holocaust testimonies that are now part of the Voices of the Holocaust Project, under the aegis of the Illinois Institute of Technology.  Listen to actual recorded testimonies from the postwar period.
Kleynkunst.  I provided Polish [Warsaw] Yiddish dialect coaching to Rebecca Joy Fletcher for her theater act, "Kleynkunst," which premiered in NYC in 2007 to many favorable reviews.  I also translated Yiddish song lyrics for her.
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Man Plans, God Laughs.  I conducted research for and provided translations of Yiddish proverbs for a book called Man Plans, God Laughs.  This 185-page book includes a collection of Yiddishisms, or traditional Yiddish sayings, and magnificent photographs. 
Mame-Loshn, Kinder-Loshn.  I participated in the making of a film called Mame-Loshn, Kinder-Loshn, which examined the state of Yiddish in contemporary-day Israel.  Learn More. 
Experiences such as the above only continue to bolster my longtime conviction that Yiddish is truly a beautiful and valuable language – and on so many, often unrealized levels.  Unfortunately, there are many people who have only come to realize this in recent times.  Many of us have pieces of the puzzle, but they lay hidden or unrecognizable.  My job is to help you put these pieces of the puzzle together, and thereby, pass on my love for both Yiddish and the world from which it came.