Marvin Zuckerman: A Revisit Since LA Fires

This week, we present our second interview in the past year and a half with Marvin Zuckerman. Our first took place in his warm and welcoming home in LA’s Pacific Palisades, where the walls were adorned with beautiful paintings and lined with bookshelves holding thousands of volumes. Unfortunately, that house was destroyed in the LA fires of January 2025. Marvin and his wife, Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, have since relocated to a rental apartment in Santa Monica, where we conducted this follow-up interview on June 26, 2025. In this conversation, Zuckerman reflects on the devastating fire and shares further insights from his remarkable and multifaceted life.

Zuckerman was raised in the Yiddish-speaking milieu of the Jewish Labor Bund in the Bronx, New York. He later became a professor of English at a Los Angeles college and co-authored the well-regarded Yiddish textbook Learning Yiddish in Easy Stages as well as several other works in the field of Yiddish. He also translated the memoir of prominent Bundist Bernard Goldstein, Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund: A Memoir of Interwar Poland (Purdue University Press, 2016). His latest book is Dickinson in Yiddish & Other Essays & Translations (Brass Tacks Press, 2024).

• Music:
  • Sveta Kundish & Patrick Farrell: Ikh un di Velt (words by Avrom Reyzen)
  • Ida Gillner & Livet Nord:Mayn heym – Mitt hem (words by Anna Margolin; Swedish translation by Beila Engelhardt Titelman)
  • Levyosn: Fisher-Lid (words by Aliza Greenblatt)
  • Levyosn: Fun der Khupe / Moh Rabu / Kleyne Printsesin
  • Intro instrumental music: DEM HELFANDS TANTS from Jeff Warschauer: The Singing Waltz

Air Date: July 15, 2025