This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. “In the 1890s, writers of Yiddish melodramas simply took famous, successful American popular songs and set Yiddish texts to their melodies,” N.B. Minkov wrote in “Pionern fun der Yidisher Poezye in Amerike,” or “Pioneers of Jewish Poetry in America” (1956). “This was a big hit with the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Whenever I see an announcement for the latest exhibit at the Neue Galerie, a New York museum of German and Austrian Art, I’m reminded of the nearly four decades (1955-1994) when the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research had its home in that same Upper East Side townhouse….
Editor’s Note: During the Peekskill riots, in late August, 1949, a violent KKK and fascist mob attacked attendees of a planned concert by Paul Robeson in Westchester County, New York. The violence spread outward, and a number of black and Jewish residents of New York City and Westchester were injured. The following is a translation…
Dr. Hershl Glasser, a Yiddish scholar, lexicographer and Forverts contributor, visited the Forverts’ studio to discuss the history of standard Yiddish pronunciation and to explain why he champions it despite objections from many Yiddish speakers.
Leana Jelen, a native Yiddish-speaker who works as a sign-language interpreter, visited the Forverts’ studio to talk about her love of languages and what she enjoys about sign language interpretation. Last fall Jelen starred in a series of Yiddish joke videos produced by the Forverts.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Elie Wiesel’s novel “Night,” the original Yiddish title of which translated to “And the World Remained Silent,” is the single best-known book about the Holocaust. It’s studied today in American schools, and for many readers it’s the only source they have on Holocaust history. But in the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. On a recent Tuesday evening, more than 2,200 fans of the Israeli television show “Shtisel” streamed into Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-el to watch a lively stage discussion with three of the series’s leading actors and its producer. The Israeli drama about an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem, which…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Tzina Schulman, daughter of Yiddish educator Asya Vaisman Schulman and literary translator and KlezKanada director Sebastian Schulman, will soon turn seven. A child with many talents, she not only speaks Yiddish, English and Russian, but is also learning French and Hebrew at a Jewish day school in…
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