Barack Obama Gets All ‘Verklempt’ at Barbra Streisand Medal of Freedom Ceremony
Image by Getty Images
By Anne Cohen November 25, 2015
Barack Obama got his Yiddish on during a Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony for Barbra Streisand.
Honoring the iconic singer/actress, Obama noted her “chutzpah” as a young Jewish-American Broadway star and for selling more albums in the United States than any other woman.
“I’m getting all verklempt just thinking about it,” the president said, using the Yiddish expression for “choked up.”
Our girl Babs was also verklempt — but for a very different reason.
“What if that was Donald Trump up there, I couldn’t help but think, ‘what would he say?’” she told . “The president [Obama] is so eloquent, so dignified.”
“I probably would’ve choked,” she added. “It’s terrifyingly scary, but it’s funny.”
Babs, a long time Hillary Clinton supporter, added that she would find a Clinton/Trump election race riveting. It would be “one of the greatest moments in television history.”
“Everybody would watch,” she said. “I can’t even imagine. I mean, I’m not worried about her.”
16 people received the Medal of Freedom alongside the actress and singer, including fellow members of the tribe Steven Spielberg, Stephen Sondheim and Itzhak Perlman, musician James Taylor, Maryland Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski, and baseball Hall of Famer Willie Mays.
With Reuters
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
