Rukhl Schaechter is the Yiddish editor of the Forward and the producer of the YouTube series, “Yiddish Word of the Day.” She loves cooking, Israeli folk-dancing and talking to her grandchildren.
Rukhl SchaechterYiddish/Forverts Editor
By Rukhl Schaechter
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Culture Remembering ‘Hair’ and The Tangle of the 1960s
Although no one celebrates it, a historic date in the American calendar was marked two weeks ago. On April 29, 1968, the musical that encapsulated the mood and spirit of the 1960s opened on Broadway. “Hair” both shocked and titillated its audiences with its in-your-face rejection of the values of the older generation, encouraging young…
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News Unusual Ingredients Make Social Group Simmer
Where can you find a lively venue these days in which more than a third of the attendees under the age of 30 are fluent Yiddish speakers? Every Thursday, from 10 p.m. until about 2:30 a.m., a group called Chulent meets on the third floor of the Millinery Centre Synagogue — an old building in…
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Culture Absurdity Returns to Chelm
Because Jewish folk humor depicts Chelm as a town inhabited by naive fools, few people realize that Chelm is actually a real town in Eastern Poland that was once home to 18,000 Jews and was highly regarded as a center of Torah study. Now, a half-century after nearly this whole population perished in the death…
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Culture Northern Exposure: Mameloshn’s Unexpected Fate – in Sweden
In the weeks leading up to Sweden’s national election this month, the government put out public service announcements in the press, encouraging its citizens to vote. But one feature was hardly standard issue: The bulletins informed the readers how to get voting instructions in Yiddish. The bulletins served as a reminder of — or, more…
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Israel News When the Anthem Was in Yiddish
The release last Friday of a Spanish version of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” sparked heated debate on radio talk shows and in the blogosphere. Some pundits took to calling the song “The Illegal Alien Anthem.” Even the president has weighed in on the matter. (He’s opposed.) But as one might expect in a country built…
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News Monthly Publication Sets Sights on Young Readers
most people agree that the future of yiddish depends on cultivating a new generation of young people who speak and read the language. In response to the glaring shortage of contemporary reading material for today’s students of Yiddish, the Forverts has begun publishing a monthly news supplement called Vayter (a synonym for “Forward”), written in…
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News Onetime Lubavitcher Creates New Life Out of Whole Cloth
On a recent Sunday evening at the height of New York’s Fashion Week, the Cafe Deville was bustling. Backstage, beneath the downtown bistro’s dining room, designer Levi Okunov’s latest line of coats hung from a set of racks. A hairdresser and a makeup artist were busy doing up the models according to this year’s theme:…
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News Keeping the Land of Milk and Honey Pollution-free
When the Jews of the first aliya arrived in Palestine at the end of the 19th century they found a natural, unblemished landscape. Fast-forward to today and Israel is, ecologically speaking, a mess. According to environmental activist Rabbi Michael Cohen, “the Dead Sea is disappearing, the level of air pollution is doubling every 10 years,…
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