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.
For more stories on Yiddishkeit, see Forverts in English, and for stories written in…
Yiddish
The Latest
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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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News A Brash Poet Who Started a Movement
Yankev Glatshteyn (Jacob Glatstein) was born in Lublin, Poland, in 1896 to a religious family. In 1914, he immigrated to the United States under the pretense of enrolling in law school but almost immediately dropped out and became involved with the burgeoning Yiddish poetry scene in New York City’s Lower East Side, where he would…
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The Schmooze Yiddish Cell Phones Unveiled
Like my new klingen? How about this cool schirm verteidikung? Ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel might be asking those questions this week — about their ringtones and screen-savers, respectively — after an Israeli telecom company launched a new “kosher” cell phone with a Yiddish interface. Reuters reports that “Israel’s second largest mobile provider, Partner, [has] introduced…
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