The point that has been missed in the great knaidel (knaydel? kneidel? kneydl?) controversy is that the real problem isn’t the spelling of Yiddish words in Latin characters. It’s the spelling of English words in Latin characters. In the Hebrew characters that are native to it, Yiddish has been, for the most part, ever since…
Had Jack Lebewohl of the legendary 2nd Ave Deli been competing yesterday in the final round of 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee, he would have lost to the winner, 13-year-old Arvind Mahankali. The Jewish food maven would have misspelled the winning word: ‘knaidel’. “The thing is, we spell it k-n-e-i-d-e-l,” the deli man said in…
An Indian American boy from New York won a national spelling contest thanks to his ability to correctly spell the word knaidel, a Yiddish-derived word for a traditional Jewish dumpling. Arvind Mahankali, 13, of Bayside Hills, N.Y., beat 10 other finalists at the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee held Thursday in Oxon Hill, Md. He…
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