Reporter Robin Estrin:  

I’d like to tell you how I found out that Yiddish — the historic language and culture of Jews in Europe nearly decimated by the Holocaust — is experiencing a resurgence in Los Angeles today. 

Longtime KCRW fans may remember: Each December for more than two decades, our station’s founder Ruth Seymour hosted a Yiddish music program called Philosophers, Fiddlers, and Fools. Curious to learn more about Ruth after her passing, as well as my own roots, I started listening to some of the available episodes.

Ruth occasionally mentioned Hatikvah, a Jewish record store in the Fairfax District specializing in Yiddish music. A quick Google search revealed the shop closed in 2006 after half a century, but I found a website with a phone number and gave it a ring. 

Imagine my surprise when owner Simon Rutberg answered and invited me to his upcoming talk on Yiddish music at a community center in Pico-Robertson. There, I met him and several Angelenos committed to keeping Yiddish alive — the ones who helped me bring you this story.

Angelenos learn to schmooze, kvetch, and kvell in Yiddish

Yiddish is a linguistic blend of German with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic, and other European influences. Currently, 361,000 people worldwide are learning Yiddish on the language app Duolingo, and roughly half of them are under 30, according to the company’s PR director Monica Earle.

At Der Nister Downtown Jewish Center, a hybrid bookstore and synagogue in LA, and other parts of this city, young enthusiasts are screening Yiddish horror films, hosting Yiddish cabarets and klezmer bands, starting Yiddish conversation groups, and translating works of Yiddish literature into English. They are building on a lineage of Yiddish cultural contributions in LA that began with a wave of Jewish immigration from Europe around 1900. A prominent secular and progressive Yiddish mutual aid and social justice organization started at that time, called the Workers Circle, still operates in Pico-Robertson. In the 1990s, a local organization called Yiddishkayt picked up the torch, hosting Yiddish language classes, festivals, music, and film programming for a new generation. 

Now, Angelenos in their 20s and 30s are the keepers of Yiddish culture.

The reasons behind the resurgence are complex. For a growing community of ultra-Orthodox Jews in the U.S., Yiddish is still the language of daily life, though “it’s not a literary language,” says Jonathan Brent, director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Other Yiddish learners are less religious but “hungry to reconnect with their heritage,” he adds. “They wonder what they missed. What was actually going on with their grandparents? What was that history all about? Where did they actually come from?”

Angeleno explains tough decision to sell scorched dream home in Altadena

Dina Ament owned a historic Tudor-style cottage, constructed 100 years ago, that was leveled by the Eaton Fire in Altadena. When she initially bought the property, she spent about four years remodeling it.

After the Eaton Fire, she wanted to rebuild, then realized the enormity of that task: “Everything's gone, and so you have to wait for them to clear the lot. You have to wait for them to restore utilities, and then you have to find resources, architects, engineers, contractors. And then they have to find supplies. … It just gets so overwhelming, the phone calls. Calls every day that you're dealing with. And after doing that for about six weeks, I was exhausted. … They're telling me now that it may take two to three years to get back into a home. Well, by that time, I'll be over 80 [years old], and who knows if I'll even still be here.”

She adds, “I've spent the last five years battling cancer, and I thought that was going to be the biggest battle of my life. And yet, the last two months have been much harder than cancer was. … I have nightmares. And ultimately, when I went up there, I looked around, I thought, I don't think I'll ever feel safe. Even if I build a brand new house here, anytime the wind comes up, it's going to scare me.”

Ultimately, Ament sold the property to an architect and his wife, and now she’s living in Arizona but plans to relocate to Pasadena and buy another house.

To build more housing in LA, get the city out of the way: Nithya Raman

More than 75,000 people are experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County, according to the 2024 count by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). Billions of dollars have been dedicated to housing people. However, a new court-ordered audit says LAHSA has failed to account for how much taxpayer money was spent and where it went.

LA City Councilmember Nithya Raman says LAHSA is poorly structured for its current role, and LA needs to restructure it or move away from it.

To address homelessness and the affordability crisis, she says LA needs more housing construction, and rezoning and cutting red tape would make that easier.

“We have to do everything possible in the city to make it faster, cheaper, and easier to build housing. And in many cases, that means getting the city out of the way. … I put forward, after the fires, a city-wide self-certification or professional certification process, which means that the very cumbersome process where someone has to take an approval … from department to department, parts of that very long process could actually be certified by licensed architects and engineers who can verify that a particular building meets the building and zoning codes.”

Potential cuts to science research grants hurts everyone, says UCLA professor

The Trump administration has taken an axe to federal agencies, including the massive National Institutes of Health, which announced it would sharply reduce the size of its grants. The NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, with an annual budget of nearly $48 billion. Most of that money is given to universities, medical schools, and research institutions. These cuts and policy changes are leaving scientists scrambling to figure out whether they can continue their work.

Carrie Bearden, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCLA, leads a lab focused on risk factors for serious mental illnesses, particularly psychotic disorders like schizophrenia. About 80% of their funding currently comes from the NIH, she says, and they haven’t been told specifically that they’ll lose the money, but there’s constant uncertainty.

“Science is a really fragile ecosystem,” Bearden says. “So even these really short-term disruptions are really undermining the infrastructure, the teams, the projects. … And the thing that really is so devastating to me is that these are young people who really, really care so deeply about what they're doing. … So to just be told summarily that their work is not important, or just to see their colleagues’ … grants terminated just arbitrarily, just the callous disregard for people who have really dedicated their lives to this work — is really devastating.”

TOKiMONSTA on friendship, aphasia, being a ‘boundary-pushing’ LA artist

Dance music producer and Torrance native Jennifer Lee, aka TOKiMONSTA, is out with her first album in five years — Eternal Reverie. It’s a tribute to her best friend Regina Biondo, who received a cancer diagnosis and died at age 42 last October. 

One of the songs on Eternal Reverie is “Enjoy Your Life,” a remix of a 1980s track by Nigerian artist Oby Onioya. “All of the music of the past shaped how we hear music today and how people approach music. … Music is a representation of culture and experience and whatever people were going through,” says Lee. 

She recalls that in the 2010s, producers played “weird beats” every Wednesday at Lincoln Heights’ The Airliner bar. “We were just excited to make beats. And then other people from other communities started noticing the beats that we're making in LA. And that's when I saw my music getting played on the BBC or in Japan or in France. … And it really shifted, I think, the landscape of electronic music from that point forward, because prior to that, other than house, techno, maybe drum and bass, there wasn't a version of electronic music that was as highly based on traditional hip-hop beats as ours.”