Would a real mensch wear a ‘mensch’ T-shirt?
I had to practically force the husband to wear it. But then I went down several satisfying rabbit holes.
Mensch
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Opinion There Are No Adults In The White House. Worse, There Are No Mensches
The meaning of the Yiddish word “mensch” can scarce be conveyed in English. Literally a man, mensch means so much more than that. But it means so much more than that. A mensch is a good man, someone who can be relied upon to do the right thing. A mensch has integrity. He (or she!)…
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Community How Israeli Culture Killed The Mensch
“Be a mensch,” a person of integrity, is a phrase one will likely hear frequently growing up Jewish in the United States. Striving for moral goodness is a quintessential feature of Judaism in America. Israeli Jews live by a completely different dictum: “don’t be a freier” — a sucker. A freier is easily exploited, something…
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Life Can a Woman Be a Mensch?
What does the word “mensch” really mean? Of course, everyone knows its connotations of decency, kindness and humility; these are not gendered qualities. Yet in common usage, the word is often applied more to men than to women: There’s the children’s toy, a male doll named “Moshe” wearing a prayer shawl, the Mensch on a…
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Fast Forward Mensch on Bench Sells Fast as Hanukkah Nears
(Reuters) — The toymaker who funded his sold-out Mensch on a Bench toy through a Kickstarter campaign last year is ramping up production of the plaything in time for Hanukkah next week. A Jewish version of the wildly popular Christmas Elf on the Shelf toy, the doll and book set retells the Hanukkah story and…
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The Schmooze James Bond, The Mensch?
“What is that?” “They’re guns, James.” “I know but so many? I mean I’m one guy. How many guns does a person need?” The opening of Funny or Die’s new video says it all: 007 goes mensch. The comedy site’s new video offers a solution to a recent comment by Harvey Weistein deploring the amount…
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The Schmooze Hans Bethe: Great Scientist and Mensch
Must a great scientist also be a mensch? The historian of science, Silvan Schweber, who teaches at Harvard and Brandeis, has offered some ideal examples in such previous books as “Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius” from Harvard University Press and “In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of…
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The Schmooze Nigerian Yiddish Speaker Charged With Fraud Jumps Bail
John Star, a Yiddish-speaking Nigerian national, has jumped bail after being charged with mortgage fraud, the New York Daily News reported today. Star learned Yiddish as a child from his adoptive parents who were Orthodox Jews and raised him in Switzerland. Apparently his Yiddish came in handy when committing mortgage fraud in New York. “He…
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