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
The Latest
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Culture Philologos: What’s That On Your Head?
Helen Hill of Miami writes: “My mother, who grew up in a Polish shtetl, used the word perukha in Yiddish to describe a lady’s head covering such as a sheytl or turban. Presumably, this came from perruque, which I believe is French for a wig. But how did French get into shtetl Yiddish?” A sheytl,…
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Culture June 24, 2011
100 Years In The Forward Hundreds of furious women from Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side nearly started a riot when Elias Birnbaum attempted to open the vegetable store he owns with his wife. The angry women, who live on the block where the vegetable store is located, were upset with Birnbaum, who recently…
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The Schmooze Traveling the Length and Breadth of ‘Yiddishland’
Photo by Spencer Ritenour In his 2006 study “Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture,” Rutgers University professor Jeffrey Shandler noted the strange phenomenon in which musicians have become some of the most well-known authorities on Yiddish culture. “Marginal figures in East European Jewish society before World War II, klezmorim are now prominent cultural spokespeople,…
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The Schmooze Jerusalem Gets Its Own American Academy
The American Academy in Jerusalem — newly established by the Foundation for Jewish Culture and modeled after the American academies in Rome and Berlin — will host four American artist fellows to help pioneer a cultural renaissance in the holy city. A fifth fellow, filmmaker Barbara Hammer, dropped out of the program yesterday for personal…
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The Schmooze Jewish Identity at the Crossroads of Race, Religion and Revolution
Trish McCall, Dan Bielinski and Marcus Naylor in ‘Under the Cross.’ Photo by Louis Zweibel. This summer New York remains the center of Yiddish theater. Audiences looking for a lighthearted romp can go see Hershele Ostropolye (in Yiddish) at the Folksbiene. Those looking for a grittier Yiddish theater experience can head to Midtown and see…
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The Schmooze Lev Berinsky, a Poet in Exile Between Time and Eternity
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. Lev Berinsky is poet who cannot be bounded by easy definitions. He writes in Russian and Yiddish, and lives in Israel, but is best known in Germany. A poet to his core, he is also a gifted translator, journalist and essayist. Though his work is scattered throughout…
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News New Square: Where Tradition and the Rebbe Rule
Residents of this Hasidic enclave a mere hour north of Times Square do not live like people in most of the state or, indeed, like most of the country. Among other things, New Square residents must walk streets strictly divided by gender, with women on one side and men on the other, as Yiddish signs…
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News Labor Leader, Forward Writer Gus Tyler
Uncle Gus is gone, and with him, some sense that there’s any order to the universe. To readers of the Forward, Uncle Gus was Gus Tyler, whose association with this newspaper stretches back to 1932, the year he graduated from New York University and was hired to be the assistant to labor editor Louis Schaefer….
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