Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Goodbye and oy vey, Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers, the pioneering online question-and-answer platform, will shut down permanently this May, forever erasing from the internet one of the original places for people to solicit unverified information from strangers.

What was once an actually useful and occasionally thoughtful place for users to ask questions ultimately became yet another internet punchline, with greatest hits including “How is babby formed? How girl get pregant?”

I took a spin through some of Yahoo Answers’ inquiries about Judaism, and found, as expected, a number of uninformed and offensive inquiries about Jews. But I also found earnest, and thought-provoking queries about the faith and culture of the Jewish people.

Below, I’ve compiled a few of the questions I found on Yahoo Answers. They’re plotted on a matrix — the Y-axis plots questions on a scale from “a shverer inyen” (serious subject) to “a narishkeyt” (silly subject), and the X-axis places them on a scale of “a klots-kashe” (ridiculous question) to “a gute kashe” (thoughtful question). You can roll over each point in the matrix to see the question and a featured response.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.