the seventh generation,” she said. “And it really struck me. It made me realize how connected I still am. Writing about it is one way that I maintain that connection. Sometimes it feels like I am there even when I’m not.” And even though she doesn’t want to move back, she said she can’t imagine…
Does the presidential candidacy of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman have a Jewish problem? Some folks seem to think so. The Hartford Courant took its home-state senator to task last week for what it called his “dismal” first-quarter contribution filing, saying there was a “Jewish wrinkle” to Lieberman’s lackluster showing: The senator’s centrist values are out…
A recurrent feature in the Forverts runs under the title of “Mishpokhe Kheyndlekh” (“Household Humor”). The suggestion is that while sometimes the humor is nutty, it is never smutty. But occasionally there is a bit of borderline humor with a hint of sexual impropriety as in the first of the following selections. (The original pieces…
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is a poet, librarian and translator living in Brooklyn, N.Y. His Yiddish poems have been published in Der Bavebter Yid, Lilliput review, Tsukunft and the Yiddish Forward, and his poem “questions of dress” was nominated by the Adirondack Review in 2001 for the Pushcart Prize. This poem, “landscape: obscured, silver,” is taken…
Tribute Poets on Postwar Poetry: Prolific poets Edward Hirsch, Alicia Ostriker and Gerald Stern read their own work and the work of Holocaust survivors in “Solace, Affirmation, Renewal: American Poetry After the Holocaust.” The reading is presented in commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Museum of Jewish Heritage–A Living Memorial to…
In 1995, the documentary filmmaker Pearl Gluck traveled to Hungary on a Fulbright grant to work on a film on the power and origins of Yiddish storytelling in the chasidic tradition. In the end, instead of making a documentary about storytelling, she produced “Divan,” a chasidic story in the form of a documentary — about…
Publishing one’s own zine allows one to kvetch and kvell, rant and rave, race from one sentence to the next from high- to low-brow, sacred to profane then back again. Between 1995 and 2002, Barbara Rushkoff — Barbara Kligman until she married author Douglass Rushkoff — did just that, publishing 16 issues of her zine…
It’s been more than a decade since I first submitted a piece to Partisan Review — it was a review of Sidney Hook’s letters — and received a typed note from William Phillips, the journal’s co-founder and longtime editor, telling me that, with some minor changes, he’d print it. I was overjoyed, partly because any…
A student of Yiddish in Tokyo, a Yiddish songwriter in Greenwich Village and a chasidic newspaper writer in Boro Park all have one book in common — Uriel Weinreich’s “Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary,” which celebrates its 35th birthday this month. Its story starts with a question: What makes a minority language — a language that’s…
The proud and beautiful city of New York is known worldwide as one of the most important centers of the Jewish Diaspora. In fact, nowadays it is true to say that it is the most important city in the entire world. But as a Pole who lives and was born in Poland’s capital city, Warsaw,…
ANTWERP — All hell broke loose on Jews here in mid-February. It was not antisemitism. It was not Iraq. It was merely the largest robbery to hit this Belgian port city in decades. Armed robberies are not usually issues that preoccupy Jewish communal defense experts. The problem this time was that the daring, $120 million…
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