
Jordan Kutzik is the deputy editor of the Yiddish Forward. Contact him at [email protected].
Jordan Kutzik is the deputy editor of the Yiddish Forward. Contact him at [email protected].
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Although the sheer brutality of the pogroms has been largely overshadowed by the Holocaust, the massacres of Jews in the Russian Empire before WWI and especially in the postwar chaos surrounding its dissolution (1917-1922) were so well-orchestrated that some modern scholars consider them to have constituted a…
In a previous article I explained how people misuse Yiddish and Yiddish curses in American English. Though written to accurately reflect the correct form of Yiddish curses, the following are not meant in any way to poke fun of or make light of the sad events and tragedies of the past twelve months. Rather they…
As often happens when a popular Yiddish-related article is making the rounds, I received multiple Facebook messages asking what I thought of Gersh Kuntzman’s article in the New York Daily News declaring “farkakt” the best word to describe 2016. I wasn’t impressed. Kuntzman’s article is a pretty typical example of what I, for lack of…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. When Hirsch Lewin was deported from Germany in 1940 after six months of suffering in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he could not have imagined that seventy-six years later, musicians in Berlin would release an album of the music he had produced. Even when Lewin founded his record…
Leonard Cohen died exactly a year ago on November 7, 2016. In honor of his yarzheit, or the anniversary of his death, the Forward is proud to reprise this story and video of an amazing version of ‘Hallelujah’ in Yiddish. The Berlin-based singer-songwriter and “punk-Klezmer” musician Daniel Kahn is one of the most innovative performers…
One day, Jessye Stein, a computer teacher on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, was trying to persuade a student to return to his Lakota language class when the young man suddenly posed an unexpected question. “He asked me where I come from, where my people come from and what my ancestral language…
Last year Yiddish Soul was the highlight of the Folksbiene’s Kulturfest, a festival that featured hundreds of performances over eight packed days and attracted tens of thousands of attendees. At the time, I wrote in the Yiddish Forward that this high-profile concert of Hasidic and cantorial music, presented as part of SummerStage in Central Park,…
Imagine that you’re walking in Manhattan a few days before Holocaust Memorial Day and see five airplanes skywriting in massive letters that the Holocaust was a hoax. How would you feel? Imagine that you later find out that a full-page advertisement had run the same day in the Washington Post explaining that although some Jews…
100% of profits support our journalism