Harry Schwartzman

Harry Schwartzman was born and raised in New York City. His father, an American Jew, and his mother, a Japanese emigrant, taught Schwartzman and his brother Yiddish and Japanese as children. He attended McGill University in Montreal, Canada for an undergraduate degree and later returned to New York City, where he worked at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

"I grew up speaking Yiddish and Japanese, and a lot of people find that exotic and different, and I guess as exotic and different as growing up in New York. To me, it’s normal."