Sometimes a seemingly trivial etymological question can lead to a long linguistic chase. Such a query was recently sent to me by Raymond Henkin, who asked: “In Uriel Weinreich’s Yiddish dictionary, the Yiddish word shmergl is translated as ‘emery.’ A search shows the origins of ‘emery’ to be either Greek or Latin. How say you?”…
People like tough puzzles that are easily solved. That’s why in every language there are riddle songs that pose tough, seemingly unanswerable questions that somehow, with a touch of humor, are easily answered. One such is a Jewish folk song entitled, “Du Meydele, Du Sheyns.” What follows is this charming folk song from a volume…
‘Every day brings something new,” says DJ Handler, the impresario behind Modular Moods, an independent record label whose first releases hit the stores this past April. The 24-year-old Handler — ne Erez Shudnow — lives this credo. In addition to running his own record label, he is a DJ who spins at art installations and…
Charming Kerry: Seeking to show an important Jewish communal group how his experiences visiting Israel had affected him personally, John Kerry told a number of stories during a speech Monday at the annual conference in Washington of the Anti-Defamation League. Before a crowd of more than 500, Kerry spoke about his trips to Israel and…
Dr. Barnett Zumoff, who in addition to being a prominent doctor and a motivating spirit in the world of the Forverts and the Workmen’s Circle, is also a prolific translator of Yiddish poetry into English. For some time now, he has been working on an anthology of Yiddish writings by women and about women, titled…
SAN FRANCISCO — The Trader Joe’s supermarket chain recently decided to pull the products of the world’s largest kosher poultry provider and distributor, Empire Kosher, off the shelves of some 150 West Coast stores. Officials from both companies declined to say why Trader Joe’s, a 216-store boutique grocery chain, decided to cease selling fresh Empire…
A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples By Ilan Pappe Cambridge University Press, 333 pages, $22. * * *| Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians By Baruch Kimmerling Verso Books, 234 pages, $22. * * *| There is a growing corpus of Israeli responses to the collapse of the peace process of…
An irate e-mail to the Israeli Embassy in Washington may have cost Jilian Redford her job as the leader of the Jewish student organization on her campus, but it transformed the 20-year-old into a darling of Jewish peace activists nationwide. Since her ouster in February as president of the Hillel at the University of Richmond,…
An astonishing 100 operas are set in Seville — and not just any operas, mind you, but some of the greatest: Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and “Marriage of Figaro,” Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino,” and Rossini’s “Barber of Seville.” But the one chosen to kick off the first Seville International Music Festival in September…
Among the cherished family memorabilia in the home of Inez Tenenbaum, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in South Carolina, is a signed letter to her father-in-law from Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. “It’s written on this tiny little piece of notebook paper,” Tenenbaum told the Forward in a telephone interview. The note hints…
Harold Nebenzal of Beverly Hills, California has a question “designed to give the rabbis cardiac arrest.” It is: If in Hebrew we say [using the masculine plural ending –im] mayim, ‘water,’ while in Arabic one says [in the singular] may; and if in Hebrew [again using the plural ending] we say shamayim, ‘sky,’ while in…
