Leonard Cohen once denounced Yiddish. Why did he perform this Yiddish folk song?
It may have been a way to work out his Holocaust trauma.
Ruth Wisse
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Yiddish World Pessimism About Iran, Clashes Over Campus Anti-Semitism Dominate Jewish Review Of Books Conference
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. As midrash has it, the righteous spend eternity in heaven studying Torah. On January 14, the Jewish Review of Books brought a little piece of comparable heaven to Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, featuring seven influential Jewish thinkers at its Third Annual Conference. Abraham Socher, the magazine’s…
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Culture Mystery Pre-Holocaust Photo Trove Depicts Family of Yiddish Scholar Ruth Wisse
(JTA) — When documentary photographer Richard Schofield stumbled upon a trove of unidentified prewar photographs in September 2013 in the storage room of the Sugihara House museum in Kaunas, Lithuania, he knew he had found something special. The photos, dating from about 1910 through 1940, were from a Lithuanian Jewish family’s album that had been…
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News The Remarkable Career of Ruth Wisse, Yiddish Scholar and Political Firebrand
On a cold day in late March, I sat in room 103 of Harvard University’s Sever Hall with about 60 undergraduates, listening to Ruth Wisse talk about Avrom Sutzkever. A partisan and a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto, Sutzkever was one of the 20th century’s greatest Yiddish poets. The reading that day was of his…
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Opinion Ex-Labor Pol, Ousted from Peace Now Panel, Cries ‘Intolerance’
Einat Wilf and Ehud Barak announce defection from Labor Party, January 17, 2011 / Wikimedia Commons A former Labor Party Knesset member, Einat Wilf, is complaining that she’s been dropped from the program of the third annual Conference of the Israeli Left, sponsored Peace Now, because of her pro-Israel views. In a Facebook post announcing…
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Culture What Makes a Jewish Joke Jewish?
● No Joke: Making Jewish Humor By Ruth R. Wisse Princeton University Press, 292 pages, $24.95 As a well-known Yiddish expression has put it, “A joke is a half-truth.” Ruth Wisse presents readers of her latest work, “No Joke: Making Jewish Humor,” with half-a-book. The effective half offers a general audience analysis of literature and…
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The Schmooze Chaim Grade at 100
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. One hundred years after his birth, the late, great Yiddish novelist and poet Chaim Grade can still draw a crowd. This was evident at an October 4 commemorative evening at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which featured fascinating literary analyses of Grade’s work as well…
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