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 Yiddish World, and for stories written in Yiddish,…
Yiddish
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Culture Looking Back: January 13, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward A fire occurred at New York City’s Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society, a Jewish orphanage on 151st Street and Broadway. More than 700 children live in the orphanage, and they were all on different floors when the fire, which started at a construction site next to the orphanage, broke out….
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Culture Sorcerer for the Goose and Gander
A reader who may prefer to remain anonymous sends me an email in which he describes recently hearing his sister call his elderly mother a “machashefer,” a term with which he was not familiar. The letter continues: “I asked my sister what she meant by ‘machashefer,’ and she said it’s a witch. She then told…
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News Adrienne Cooper’s Musical Life
The legendary Yiddish musician and music teacher Adrienne Cooper, who died December 25 at age 65, was remembered at a New Year’s Day memorial service on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Jon Kalish reports from the event, and speaks with Cooper’s friends and colleagues about the life, career, character of the woman who, as fellow musician…
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Fast Forward Memorial Services Planned for Adrienne Cooper
A memorial service for famed Yiddish singer Adrienne Cooper is planned for Sunday, January 1 at Ansche Chesed in Manhattan at 12:00pm. The memorial will begin with a kriah, the ceremonial tearing or ripping of garments, and will celebrate the life of Cooper who died on December 25 at the age of 65. Cooper, who…
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Culture Bintel Briefs Way Ahead of Times
The explosive popularity of the Yiddish advice column published in the Forverts from 1906 paved the way first for a genre and then an entire industry. Although it seems self-evident to us now, writing to a newspaper for advice was a revolutionary idea. Click to view a slideshow. The Bintel Brief (literally “bundle of letters”)…
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Culture Saved by Kvass
Translated by Miriam Hoffman and Beverly Koenigsberg This story originally appeared in the Forverts of August 30, 1985. In addition to the 200 major languages currently in use, new forms of expression continue to emerge. These new means of communication deal for the most part with specialized professions — such as linguistics, psychology, statistics and…
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Culture Adrienne Cooper Embodied Progressive Spirit
It is hard to imagine the world without Adrienne Cooper, a friend said to me on learning that she was near death. As she did for so many others, she enriched my life for decades with thrilling song, wise words, and trenchant humor. She is perhaps best known as a concert and recording artist, one…
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Books Sweet and Sour
On Monday, Stanley Ginsberg wrote about the meaning of a Jewish bakery. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: In my grandparents’ homes, as in the shtetlakh from whence…
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Yiddish פֿאָרשונגען פֿון וויכטיקע היסטאָריקער אויף ייִדיש — איצט אַרויס אויף ענגלישResearch studies in Yiddish by noted historians, now in English
דער באַגריף, ייִדישע אױטאָנאָמיע אין גלות — הײַנט פּאָפּולער בײַ קריטיקער פֿון ציוניזם — איז היסטאָריש ניט געװען קײן דערפֿאָלג.
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Culture In the course of his 104 years, he resisted the Nazis, fought against blood libel and became a towering Jewish intellectual