In the city of glitz and glamour, Yiddish is suddenly becoming all the rage. Trendsetters in Hollywood — and Los Angeles more generally — are notorious for their irreverent attitude toward tradition, but a new project is trying to change that. It aims to appeal to the young, hip crowd and convince it that the…
Romanian Pol Apologizes A Romanian presidential candidate with a history of antisemitic and Holocaust-denial statements has offered an apology for his past, pledging to organize a pilgrimage to Auschwitz as part of his repentance. “I am asking for forgiveness from all Jews,” wrote Corneliu Vadim Tudor, head of the Greater Romania Party, in an open…
Alyssa Quint regularly contributes to the Forward. Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories By Sandra Bark Warner Books, 352 pages, $14.95. * * *| According to Fanya Glants’s husband, the celebrated American-Yiddish poet A. Leyeles, she was a genuine artist whose bond with literature was both intimate and…
SAN FRANCISCO — After Andy Birnbaum came out in 1995, his mother switched to a Reform congregation to find a spiritual home more accepting of her son’s homosexual orientation, while his father remained in their old Conservative congregation, determined to effect change from within. His father’s only request at the time was that Andy find…
For one devoted group, this so-called “dying language” is forever young. These Yiddish speakers are not ultra-Orthodox Jews sequestered in Williamsburg or Eastern European immigrants speaking the tongue of their yidishe mames. They are Jews in their 20s, 30s and 40s building a bona fide community of Yiddish speakers. Yugntruf, “Call to Youth,” is celebrating…
For a while there it looked as if the Democratic Party was committing suicide on television. A dozen or so aspirants repeatedly made public appearances during which they assailed one another with words that could come back to haunt their party’s ultimate candidate for president. The format in which they appeared encouraged such a bloody…
Marc Caplan teaches comparative literature at Indiana University Bloomington. Plutsemdiker Regn (Sudden Rain) By Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath Israel Book Publishing House, 128 pages, $15. * * *| The chasidic master Reb Borekh of Mezbizh once offered the parable of two strangers who, because neither of them knew the people around them, came to love one another….
Edwards Opportunity?: The surprising late surge of North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the Wisconsin primary Tuesday makes the March 2 New York primary more interesting, but probably does not give Edwards the momentum he needs to take the Empire State, some local analysts said. Surveying the local landscape for where Edwards could harvest votes…
During her tenure as the director of the Yiddish language summer program at Columbia University, Adrienne Cooper was surprised to discover her students’ motivations for attending. “Some people were looking for a way of connecting themselves to Jewish history through the language,” she said. “They wanted to connect themselves to Eastern European working-class activism. They…
Sara Mlotek Rosenfeld, one of Canada’s leading Yiddish cultural activists for two generations and a member of a family of Yiddish culture icons, died in Montreal last month at 83. Rosenfeld was honored last year with the Order of Canada by the governor general for her contributions to sustaining Yiddish culture in Canada. Honored with…
Senator Joseph Lieberman may have given up the presidential ticket, but some of his Jewish admirers have a new mission for him: leader of a major Jewish organization. It’s a mission that his closest friends and relatives says he’s highly unlikely to accept. “No way, no how,” said one close associate of Lieberman’s. Leaders of…
