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 Yiddish a Mixed Bag at Jewish Schools Worldwide
For some Jewish day schools, there is no teaching Yiddishkeit without Yiddish. Buoyed by the Yiddish renaissance of the past two decades, which has produced an increased interest in university Yiddish programs, a renewed interest in Yiddish theater and even the advent of Yiddish heavy metal bands, these schools have held steadfast to their Yiddishist…
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Books Yiddish Icons, Portrayed in Cartoons
Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & the New Land Edited by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle Abrams ComicArts, 240 pages, $29.95 People don’t admire paintings they haven’t seen, or dance to music they haven’t heard, but they do all sorts of crazy things with languages they don’t speak. This is what Rutgers University scholar Jeffrey Shandler described…
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Culture Chilik Frank Brings Soul of Hasidism to Klezmer
For my bar mitzvah, my great-uncle gave me a cheap GPX stereo system. Despite the fact that it was a piece of junk from the bargain retailer Jamesway (remember Jamesway?), given by a self-proclaimed audiophile who had promised to get me something good, that stereo had a huge impact on my musical life. That year,…
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The Schmooze On Getting Sholom Aleichem’s Name Wrong
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree I’ve been called many things in my day: Jocelyn, Jennifer, Jen, Joselit Weissman and on occasion (and hopefully in jest) even Gender Weissman Joselit, a name designed to highlight my stalwart embrace of feminism in matters large and small. Little wonder, then, that I sympathize with the fate that…
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Culture August 19, 2011
100 Years Ago in The Forward Recently a group of hooligans perpetrated a pogrom on a group of Jews standing in the train station in the Catskills. Suddenly, as a few dozen Jews waited for a train on the platform in Fallsburg, N.Y., a yell was heard: “Death to the enemies! Death to the Jews!”…
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Culture August 12, 2011
100 Years Ago in The Forward Strange things are afoot at the synagogue on Lombard Street, in Philadelphia. One day, after the cantor’s choir rehearsal, the shamus was closing up the place when he heard a knocking noise in the sanctuary. Calling out to see what it was, the caretaker suddenly heard a loud voice…
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The Schmooze When It Comes to Gay Rights and Klezmer, the Musical Is Also Political
Photo by Angela Jimenez. At a July 26 concert at 92YTribeca in celebration of New York’s first legal same-sex marriages, the singer-guitarist Nedra Johnson struggled to find the words to describe the relationships between love, politics and the blues. In an age in which sex and marriage are subjects of legislative debate, she reasoned, performing…
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The Schmooze Israel’s Only Secular Yiddish Publication Celebrates 60 Years
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. In May 1951, a group of immigrants to Israel, mainly Holocaust survivors, founded a social, political and cultural group based on the model of the General Jewish Labour Bund of pre-war Poland. That group, which became the Israeli branch of the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring, bought a building…
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