African American opera singer revives the songs of the shtetl
c. 2015 Religion News Service
BERKELEY, Calif. (RNS) Three years ago, when Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell took the stage at a Jewish vaudeville celebration and said he was going to sing in Yiddish, people laughed.
As a six-foot-plus African-American with one golden earring, he didn’t look like the typical Jew fluent in the language of the pre-World War II shtetl.
