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!)…
“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…
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…
(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…
“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…
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…
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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