This is the Forward’s coverage of the Yiddish language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews in Europe and still spoken by many Hasidic Jews today.
For more stories on Yiddishkeit, see Forverts in English, and for stories written in…
This is the Forward’s coverage of the Yiddish language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews in Europe and still spoken by many Hasidic Jews today.
For more stories on Yiddishkeit, see Forverts in English, and for stories written in…
100 Years Ago in the Forward One of the most important witnesses in the trial of Triangle Waist Company bosses Max Blanck and Isaac Harris is rag dealer Louis Levin, who would buy cloth scraps from the factory regularly. Levin informed the court that the last time he visited the factory was about two months…
For decades, readers of the Forverts have been delighted by Miriam Hoffman’s wry, literary vignettes. Fresh and personal, historic yet contemporary, Hoffman tells stories of family lives as they intersect with history. Beginning with this story, first published in 1987, her vignettes with be translated into English and published on the forward.com web site. Translated…
75 Years Ago in the Forward Testimony to the Peel Commission on Palestine indicates that during the years 1934-1935, no fewer than 25,000 Arabs entered Palestine from neighboring countries. The reason so many of these illegal immigrants have come to Palestine is because conditions in their countries of origin ? most came from Syria and…
Marvin Kastenbaum has a question inspired by my column of October 21, which dealt with the practice, common among American Jews, of saying “l’Shana tova,” “For a good year,” instead of simply “Shana tova,” “A good year,” at Rosh Hashanah time. The column pointed out that l’shana tova is a shortening of l’shana tova tikateyvu,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
100% of profits support our journalism