JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
A version of this piece appeared in Yiddish here. Sociolinguist, Yiddish scholar and advocate for endangered languages Joshua (Shikl) Fishman died March 1 in New York. He leaves behind his wife of more than 60 years Gella Schweid-Fishman, three sons, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He is predeceased by his sister, the Yiddish poet Rukhl…
Forward reader David Wexler calls my attention to an article in the October 10 issue of this newspaper about Greg Wall, a saxophone-playing, shofar-blowing, Talmud-teaching rabbi from Norfolk, Connecticut. “In addition to being a Talmud khokhem, or smart man,” the article’s author, Jon Kalish, wrote, “Wall… knows a mainsail from a jib, having taught at…
Not too long ago I found myself in an argument — civilly conducted, I must say — with a friend of one of my daughters, a young man of emphatically liberal views who teaches sociology at a college in Israel. In the name of gender equality, he said, he was careful to address his classes…
Recently, as Scotland’s independence vote began to loom large in the media, someone asked me if I had ever heard of Scots Yiddish. “I canna say that I have,” I answered, only to be told that there was an entire chapter on the subject in David Daiches’s autobiographical “Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood.” Scots…
The New York Times, which no one could accuse of being overly sympathetic to Israel, has hit a new linguistic low. In a September 3 report from the Erez checkpoint between Israel and Gaza, Times reporter Jodi Rudoren quotes an Israeli official as telling her that “this is a secret crossing — this is Gaza,…
Beth Kissileff writes: “A rabbi recently said to me that there is no word for ‘fun’ in any Jewish language because Judaism is purpose and goal oriented. I said, ‘But there is keyf in Hebrew,’ and he said, ‘No, that’s from Arabic.’ Was the rabbi right?” On first thought, he would appear to be. If…
The American-born Paul Wexler, now retired from the University of Tel Aviv, where he taught for many years, remains to this day the enfant terrible of Yiddish linguistics. Looking back, I wish the conversations I had with him when we inhabited adjacent tents while doing our basic training in the Israeli army in 1974, after…
In last week’s column dealing with two recent articles about the origins of Eastern European Yiddish, I dwelled more on the first — Cherie Woodworth’s account of the “standard theory” most systematically worked out by the great Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich (1894–1969) and of some of its problematic aspects that have led to the adoption…
