To most people, Yiddish and German are closely related. The languages share many root words and grammatical structures, and most speakers of one language can at least understand an individual speaking the other. To early German Christian scholars, like to many laypersons today, Yiddish was seen as a corrupted and lesser form of German. But…
In my previous article, I wrote about the mysterious Jews of Italy, who seem to be neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi. So it was natural to turn to a neighboring West European country, France, where the history of the Jewish communities is also quite non-linear. These communities pose a similar difficulty to the simplistic and popular…
One often hears about two main cultural groups of Jews: Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Some also speak of a third group, Mizrahim, for the Jews who lived in modern Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Georgia and Uzbekistan. But these groupings can be more complicated than they at first seem. There are three main ways of approaching the…
After attending the New Waves Day 2018 concert in Dusseldorf, Germany last month, I took a train to Köln, or what we know as Cologne. It was the nearest big city, and I wanted to see if the waterfront along the Rhine was as spectacular as Dusseldorf’s. But what I saw there was even grander….
Manhattan’s legendary garment industry was the “welcome mat” for Jewish immigrants to the city for nearly fifty years. The jobs they found there, such as cutter, sewer and trimmings supplier, helped propel New York’s Jews into the middle class in the late 19th and early 20th century. In 2018, Manhattan’s garment industry is at risk…
I have an aunt named Malkah who I may never know, because she was kidnapped from a Jerusalem hospital in 1961. I didn’t even know that Malkah existed until two years ago when my grandmother, Aisha Biton, passed away, and a chapter of her life, hidden for most of mine, came into the open. Aisha…
In a previous piece in these pages, I discussed the importance of the semantics of traditional Jewish female names. In various countries, Jewish women have often had personal names with pleasant meanings in their local, everyday language. At first glance, that doesn’t seem to be the case for Jewish men. Indeed, since at least the…
The American Jewish Committee’s recent survey has already sparked considerable debate over the future of the Jewish people — indeed, whether there even is a single Jewish people. Most concerning to many is the finding that American Jews and Israeli Jews have diverged to the point that while a majority of both groups see the…
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