anthony russell
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mordkhetzvi.bsky.social
anthony russell
@mordkhetzvi.bsky.social
the other day your bubbe was kibitzing about some black guy who sings in yiddish. it's still me.

he/him - half of yiddish songwriting duo Tsvey Brider - Mandel Institute Cultural Leadership Fellow 2023-25 - afrojudeopessoptimist

anthonyrussellbass.com
Looking forward to my upcoming conversation with @emilyctamkin.bsky.social in the second installment of our 2-part @workerscircle.bsky.social interview, CRITICAL CROSSROADS:
September 12, 2025 at 4:07 PM
There are so many things I’m dying to share with you about this book, mainly: that the stories, backgrounds, social & cultural phenomena that formed every American Jew I’ve had the pleasure (and even occasionally displeasure) of knowing is accounted for here, in straightforward and engaging prose.
September 5, 2025 at 5:24 PM
Second: Having finally reverted to my US Regional Factory Setting (California), I am pleased to announce my participation in KLEZCALYIDFEST, in my present incarnations as a performer *and* a lecturer!

KlezCalifornia Yiddishfest
Friday Sep 12-Sunday 14
September 2, 2025 at 4:35 PM
This conversation will be an incisive look at state of the American Jewish community through the lens of her two books, Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities and The Influence of Soros: Politics, Power, and the Struggle for an Open Society.
September 2, 2025 at 4:35 PM
I'm finally back from Limmud South Africa, and just in time, too, because I've some fascinating places and spaces to be stateside in the coming weeks:
September 2, 2025 at 4:35 PM
VERY pleased to announce CRITICAL CROSSROADS, my 2-part @workerscircle.bsky.social interview with contributing @forward.com columnist and regular contributor at @slate.com and @washingtonpost.com—Emily Tamkin [email protected]!
August 5, 2025 at 3:59 PM
RIP Mahler, you would've loved the pre-concert lecture I gave about you at the Atlanta Symphony last month
July 7, 2025 at 10:06 PM
HBO’s The Gilded Age
June 29, 2025 at 11:31 PM
greetings from Vienna
June 20, 2025 at 11:46 AM
always wondered about this passage from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), namely: what were the “rudiments” of Hebrew for a couple of Napoleonic-era young British ladies and who exactly had done the rudiment-ing for them
June 11, 2025 at 1:09 AM
and then there's this:
June 8, 2025 at 6:07 PM
same, brother
June 8, 2025 at 5:45 PM
literally just gave a pre-concert lecture that was, in part, about this kind of guy
June 7, 2025 at 1:05 PM
from last night's lecture: 1) discussing how Gustav Mahler jumped so Leonard Bernstein could soar and 2) the baleful presence of Richard Wagner
June 6, 2025 at 3:25 PM
Pleased to announce that I'll be joining Shtetl Fest Berlin next week in conversation with Alan Bern about how historical parallels of Black and Jewish experience combined to create culture of enigmatic richness, dynamism and influence—and how that history has informed my own work.
June 6, 2025 at 2:52 PM
Shavuot is not going to observe itself...gut yontef!
June 1, 2025 at 2:45 PM
:::clears throat in yiddish:::

("Der Emes Vegn Henri Ford"/The Truth About Henry Ford, D.L. Meckler, 1924)
May 26, 2025 at 4:02 PM
...more of an Abbé Prévost guy myself, tbqh
May 8, 2025 at 10:19 PM
will there be memes? maybe...
May 6, 2025 at 5:28 PM
the average american has three friends (in theory)
May 2, 2025 at 3:12 AM
In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Bennet states, “A fortnight's acquaintance is certainly very little. One cannot know what a man really is by the end of a fortnight.” A fortnight, in this passage, is:

⚪️ a video game
⚪️ a Taylor Swift single
⚪️ two weeks
April 28, 2025 at 8:12 PM
that said, this story mentions Yiddishkayt, an org that sent me on an ethnographic trip to Belarus and Poland in 2017 via their Helix Fellowship, an experience that changed the entire trajectory of my career in Yiddish:
April 23, 2025 at 8:29 PM
image from previous post, now with alt text:
April 20, 2025 at 8:15 PM
this phenomenon, intersecting in interesting ways w/ the Harlem Renaissance and the rise of the Depression-era Left, is explored in my project-in-progress, “Wild Burning Rage and Song: Replies to Scottsboro”, about cultural response to one the most infamous miscarriages of American jurisprudence:
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April 20, 2025 at 8:09 PM
a couple of years ago I wrote a nifty little article about der driter seder, the third seder, a tradition I encountered in my earliest days as a performer of Yiddish, here at the Yiddish Artists and Friends Actors' Club in the East Village in 2012:
April 16, 2025 at 10:54 PM