The Frieda Vizel Podcast

Link to the video version: https://youtu.be/uvwSkTZbjOo

You can buy kugelech here:
https://amzn.to/3YbJPTH
Can you play this game? Do you know these chants?
In this video, I explore kugela (plural: kugelach)—a simple game of five stones that carries centuries of history. With Yiddish singer Riki Rose, we try to play, reminisce about childhood games, and uncover a whole world of “oldies” that once shaped how children everywhere played.
Before toy stores, before screens, children made their own fun—on stoops, in streets, with whatever they could find. Many of those games have faded from mainstream culture. But in Hasidic Brooklyn, they’re still alive.
We talk about:
– How kugela (five stones/knucklebones) is played
– The culture of homemade play before modern toys
– Street games, chants, and clapping rhymes
– Why Hasidic communities preserved these traditions
– The strange, funny, and sometimes dark songs we all grew up with
This is part nostalgia, part cultural anthropology, and part me failing at a children’s game.
Watch more videos with Riki Rose:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhW2QoO54ycwpngXudOzA5as9MfS4Ss6A
Riki Rose:
--} YouTube:  @riki_rose  
--} Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/riki_rose/
If you grew up with any of these games or chants, tell me in the comments—I’m collecting them.
Frieda

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Video version of this segment: https://youtube.com/live/_5ZJi2noZOg?feature=share

Naomi Seidman shares about her research on Jewish love and romance, her own marriage and the loss of her beloved pet. We discuss her book "The Marriage Plot" which you can get here:
https://amzn.to/4vIkgtb

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A 26-year-old collector opens his personal library to reveal the dramatic, human stories hidden inside antique Jewish Talmuds.

In this video, Samuel Marks takes us through his personal collection of Talmuds from different eras, using each volume to tell a larger story about how the Talmud was printed, censored, altered, and preserved under extraordinary historical pressure. Samuel is a self-taught collector whose engagement with Jewish texts grew out of immersive learning in Hasidic spaces, particularly within the Satmar community in Williamsburg.

Raised in a secular Jewish family in Boston, Samuel later reconnected deeply with Jewish learning and history. He is currently a student at the University of Michigan Law School and is not a professional academic, historian, or dealer. His knowledge comes from close study of primary texts, printing history, and the material culture of postwar Hasidic life in America.

This Talmud tour explores not only rare editions, but the human, political, and emotional forces that shaped them. Among the stories discussed:

• How expensive and technically complex it once was to print the Talmud, including the challenges of typesetting its dense, layered layout
• How Jewish owners signed their Talmuds, turning them into personal historical documents
• The dramatic saga of Christian censorship, which led to missing passages, partially removed pages, and forced insertions of Christian propaganda
• Copyright disputes that shaped competing editions and caused the text to evolve differently across printings
• The forgery of the so-called lost Yerushalmi Talmuds
• The story of a young girl named Ella who helped typeset a Talmud and signed her name inside, noting that she was looking for a husband
• Talmuds printed in the Shanghai Ghetto during World War II
• Talmuds produced in displaced persons camps in Germany immediately after the war, often on discarded or reused paper
• Which tractates were printed most, when, and why, including postwar demand for laws dealing with loss of a spouse and the special status of Bechorot
• How printing errors entered the Talmud, were copied forward, and later identified and addressed
• Why Talmuds ended up so oversized

For more on Samuel’s background as a collector, watch our first interview:
https://youtu.be/qjtlgrLe92w

You can also find a related playlist where I read a 1977 Yiddish book that Samuel scanned for me:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhW2QoO54yczFq9JWHjYsS9xMpgmK7GiS

Thank you to the Youtube channel members for supporting this work and helping make these in-depth projects possible.

Find me here:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/friedavizel/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/toursbyfrieda/
Website: friedavizel.com

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-frieda-vizel-podcast--5824414/support.

Video link to this conversation: https://youtu.be/qjtlgrLe92w

Meet Samuel Marks, a young collector whose passion for rare Judaica brings overlooked corners of postwar Hasidic history vividly to life.

In this first interview, we get to know Samuel through the objects he studies, preserves, and loves. Raised in a secular Jewish family and now a law student, Samuel has built a remarkable collection of Judaica, with a particular focus on postwar Hasidic materials. His collection includes rare texts and objects related to the Satmar Rebbe - Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, postwar intra-Hasidic disputes, broadsides, early American Hasidic publications, prewar Talmuds, and clothing from before the war.

Because Samuel is currently a student and only has a limited portion of his collection with him, this conversation offers a taste rather than a full survey. Among the items he shares is an old Hasidic hat, which he uses to compare earlier styles with contemporary Hasidic fashion, showing how tradition both holds and shifts over time.

We also discuss a unique Yiddish book from 1977 that Samuel found inexpensively and later scanned in high resolution to preserve it for posterity. One striking page depicts a television labeled “not allowed,” a small but revealing snapshot of a moment before the internet, when communal anxieties centered on large, stationary media rather than the constant, portable screens of today.

Through these objects and stories, we come to understand Samuel’s eye as a collector, the joy he takes in rare finds, and the quiet urgency he feels to rescue fragile materials from being forgotten.

In the following segment, Samuel walks us through his favorite collection of antique Talmuds and explains which editions he deliberately refuses to collect. You can watch that discussion here:
https://youtu.be/jt_AwGwu-_4
Find me here:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/friedavizel/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/toursbyfrieda/
Website: friedavizel.com

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-frieda-vizel-podcast--5824414/support.

Video of this interview: Melissa Weisz grew up in Hasidic, Yiddish-speaking Boro Park and left the fold well before the OTD phenomenon became famous. I believe she left the fold before me, and I'm of the old timers now! I have been waiting for the opportunity to share her story with my viewers. Here, we finally get Melissa's story live. Please come if you would like to see this live and ask questions. It will also be available for view later. Follow Melissa on her socials! https://www.instagram.com/melissaweisz/ https://www.melissaweisz.com/about Here's a trailer to this interview: https://youtube.com/shorts/oiWlef1AHVk?feature=share

Melissa Weisz grew up in Hasidic, Yiddish-speaking Boro Park and left the fold well before the OTD phenomenon became famous. I believe she left the fold before me, and I'm of the old timers now! I have been waiting for the opportunity to share her story with my viewers. Here, we finally get Melissa's story live. Please come if you would like to see this live and ask questions. It will also be available for view later.

Follow Melissa on her socials! https://www.instagram.com/melissaweisz/ https://www.melissaweisz.com/about Here's a trailer to this interview: https://youtube.com/shorts/oiWlef1AHVk?feature=share

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-frieda-vizel-podcast--5824414/support.