Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the Yiddish language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews in Europe and still spoken by many Hasidic Jews today.
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News Basya Schechter Sculpts World Music
Singer Basya Schechter, who for many years has led the band Pharaoh?s Daughter and who just released ?Songs of Wonder? (Tzadik), a collection of Yiddish songs based on the poetry of Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, is having a moment. And for good reason. Schechter makes music that is both appealing and intriguing. As an…
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The Schmooze ‘Agentn’ of Yesterday and Today
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. To perform Yiddish theater today, you need a lot of money, or a lot of ambition. The New Yiddish Rep theater company, led by David Mandelbaum, has the latter. Mandelbaum is an actor and director who also plays most of the other roles a theater company…
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Culture Looking Back: November 25, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward Nineteen-year-old Solomon Fruchtzweig and 20-year-old Leyzer Gleyzer, two known pimps from Sosnowiec, Poland, were arrested last week in Krakow for attempting to smuggle women from Germany to Egypt. After admitting their guilt, Fruchtzweig and Gleyzer fingered another resident, Chana Greenstein, who had promised the two men 100 rubles per…
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News Eldridge Street Shul Recalls Founding
Outside the Eldridge Street Synagogue, it was a regular Sunday on New York’s Lower East Side, as residents and tourists picked their way past stands piled high with Chinese greens and five-and-dime stores bearing signs written in Mandarin. Inside the historic sanctuary, visitors were transported back 125 years to the days when the signs were…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Down Home Brooklyn
Photo courtesy of Andy Statman The version of “The Lord Will Provide” on “Old Brooklyn,” Andy Statman’s virtuosic two-CD excursion through all manners of American and Jewish music, struck me as unusual, and not just because the voice and clarinet duet is spine-tinglingly powerful. It’s more because the 18th-century hymn, written by James Newton —…
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Culture How ‘Gay’ Lost Its ‘Shtick’ Over Time
Orin Hargraves, who describes himself as “an independent lexicographer and contributor to numerous dictionaries,” has sent me an Internet article whose point of departure is a June column of mine about the Yiddish word “shtick.” There I pointed out that “shtick” has acquired a new meaning in American English — that of a gripe or…
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Culture Looking Back: November 18, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward • West Point military academy student Joseph Izrael has been expelled for “poor behavior.” Izrael, who was born in Birmingham, Ala., and is the son of a tailor who served in the Civil War, claims he is a victim of anti-Semitism. He has a means of support in Adenauer,…
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Books An Actor Who Broke a Leg — or Two
From the Shtetl to the Stage: The Odyssey of a Wandering Actor By Alexander Granach, with a new introduction by Herbert S. Lewis Transaction Publishers, 304 pages, $29.95 Actor Alexander Granach performed in Yiddish as a member of Berlin’s Jacob Gordin Theatrical Society early in the past century. He went from his shtetl in Galicia…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish מחשבֿות פֿון אַן אַהיים־געקומענעם (אַ מלחמה־טאָגגבוך)Reflections of a soldier after returning home (a wartime diary)
דער מחבר איז אַ סטודענט אינעם ירושלימער העברעיִשן אוניווערסיטעט, אינעם צווייטן יאָר ייִדיש־לימוד
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