Iran’s Jewish languages are dying. Can intrepid linguists save them before it’s too late?
The Jewish Language Project is racing the clock to preserve a rapidly disappearing heritage
The Jewish Language Project is racing the clock to preserve a rapidly disappearing heritage
Bintel says: What some see as interrupting, others call being Jewish
The earliest sentence found in Israel petitions the gods, but not to rain down good fortune or extirpate the foe
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,…