Limmud China 2013 – Recovering Lost Jewish Lives in China: Yiddish Tears on the Bubbling Well Road – April 4th

Limmud is an organisation dedicated to Jewish learning in all its variety, apparently. Anyway, they’re coming to Shanghai for a Limmud China event. A ton of Jewish and China related stuff going on over the 4/5th of April – Qingming Festival – all out at Qibao Watertown near Shanghai. I’m speaking on the 4th on Recovering Lost Jewish Lives and some of the mad, bad and murdered Jews of old China that have got a bit lost over the years…more details here.

The memorial to the Jewish Ghetto of Shanghai in Wayside Park (now Huoshan Park)

Recovering Lost Jewish Lives in China: Yiddish Tears on the Bubbling Well Road, Paul French
Hardoon, Sassoon, Kadoorie, Ezra… all familiar names whose histories are well documented. But what of those less dramatic Jewish lives, what of those Jews in China who remained largely anonymous or lived on the fringes, in the margins or among the underbelly? Longtime Shanghai resident and NYT bestseller author Paul French will tell stories of those Jews in China, including where they danced all night in the 1940s Shanghai Ghetto; how Eliza Shapera was trafficked from a Bessarabian shtetl to a Shanghai bordello — and then murdered; how Mr. Kahn ended up in the Russian-Jewish slum of Yang-I-Hutung in Peking; who killed Sammy Weingarten in the Red Rose Cabaret, how Joe Farren ran away from Vienna’s Jewish ghetto, nearly became Shanghai’s biggest gangster and married Shanghai’s “Josephine Baker”; and why grown men cried when Lily Flohr sang in Yiddish on the Bubbling Well Road.