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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Culture May 27, 2011
100 Years In The Forward Charles Cohen, a resident of Manhattan’s Orchard Street, was found dead in his bed from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Cohen suffered from rheumatism and was practically paralyzed by the disease. Just three years earlier, he was newly married, healthy and working in an ice factory. But after he came down…
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The Schmooze Q&A: A ‘Dybbuk’ of Her Own
S. An-sky’s “The Dybbuk” is arguably the most famous play and film in the cannons of Yiddish theater and cinema. Written in 1914 and first produced by the Vilna Troupe in 1920, “The Dybbuk” is an otherworldly tale, based on Jewish folklore collected by An-sky during a three-year ethnographic expedition through Russia and Ukraine. In…
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The Schmooze A Picture Out of Focus
Is Broadway ready for dancing girls in the Warsaw ghetto? Can an American musical high kick through the darkest moments of Jewish history and still avoid giving offense, or worse, falling into kitsch? “The People in the Picture,” a new musical playing at the Roundabout theater until June 19, raises this question, treading where even…
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Books Blowing the Whistle on Illegal Internships
Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy By Ross Perlin Verso, 2011, $22.95 Every year, hundreds of thousands of interns in the U.S. work without pay or for less than minimum wage. Many of these unpaid or underpaid internships are at for-profit companies and closely resemble regular work:…
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Books The Furrier, the Psychoanalyst and the Assassin
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. As one unravels the history of the 20th century, it becomes apparent how deeply individual lives were woven into the larger fabric of world events. From the shtetls of Eastern Europe a new generation of Jewish youth emerged whose exploits shook the entire world. Now, after the…
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News A Poet of Jewish Spiritual Life and World Literature
Maybe it’s a sgule — a remedy prescription, for long life — to become a Yiddish writer. Itche Goldberg and Mordkhe Tsanin both died at the ripe old age of 102 a few years ago; poet Avrom Sutskever died in 2010 at 96. Now the New York Yiddish world has lost another wonderful poet, Jeremiah…
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News Shtume Shprakh (Mute Language)
Shtume Shprakh (Mute Language) (originally in sonnet form) I looked around — and saw that half of my years are fading on the dirt road; that over my life, there closes, from my burial shroud, the first pale fold. So I doubled up like a swallow, that no longer finds her nest under the roof….
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News Whitman In Yiddish, Soon Posted Online
Perhaps the greatest American poet ever to have lived, Walt Whitman was not always regarded as such. Thanks, in part, to the emergence of modernist forms in poetry toward the end of the 19th century, Whitman’s work did not attract critical attention until after his death in 1892. But for Jewish immigrant poets living in…
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