What is the common denominator when it comes to the melodies of Jewish klezmer music and African-American gospel music? Soul.

It is the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Yiddish writer whose characters argue with God about life's tragedies and disillusionments and whose stories of faith in the midst of flux have universal appeal.

It’s not a surprise that America as an ideal offered such possibilities for Sholem Aleichem, even when it disappointed him in its details, because it was a place of reinvention, of transformation.