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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Yiddish
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Books The Last Great Yiddish Modernist Poet
The Yiddish poet Yirmiye (Jeremiah) Hesheles died on October 16, 2010. When he celebrated his 100th birthday a group of dedicated Yiddishists, myself included, celebrated the occasion by paying him a visit at the New York State Veterans Home in St. Albans, Queens. A herd of geese, as if out of an Eastern European legend,…
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The Schmooze Dance, Drink and Mayhem at Moscow’s Purim Bacchanale
For all of its charitable mishloach manot-giving and passive-aggressive gragger-shaking, Purim is hardly the tamest Jewish holiday. At its best (worst?) the celebration follows a sort of Bakhtinian carnivalesque disorder, with masks, public denunciations of the villain Haman and booze — lots of booze. With that in mind, one would expect Moscow, surely a world…
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The Schmooze Shifra Lerer, 95, Yiddish Star of Stage and Screen
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. On March 12 the Yiddish theater lost one of its most beloved stars. Shifra Lerer, an Argentine-born actress who toured the world and who later appeared in films by Woody Allen and Sidney Lumet, died in Manhattan at the age of 95. I met Shifra during my…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Klezmer That’s Coming and Going
Although they’ve had a number of earlier releases, “Where we come from… Where we’re going,” a challenging CD that is almost equal parts avant-garde jazz and klezmer music, was my introduction to Klezmokum, an Amsterdam-based band (Mokum is the old Jewish name for Amsterdam) led by Burton Greene, a pianist with a long history and…
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The Schmooze Dreams and Disillusion: ‘Mayn Rue-Platz’ by Morris Rosenfeld
Something happens to the human psyche when an event reaches the 100 year mark, as is the case this month with the Triangle Factory Fire. It’s as if it can finally be relegated to the “dust bin of history” or tales of “long, long, ago.” But we can choose to remember, and we can read…
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The Schmooze Being a Jewish Musician in Belarus
Image by Ivan Dribas. Courtesy of Minsker Kapelye. There is a story in my family about my paternal great-grandfather Yosl (Yeysef), who served as a clarinetist in the Russian Army military band. During World War I, he was captured as a prisoner of war and was held in Germany until a year after the war…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Shakin’ That Melancholy With the Afro-Semitic Experience
Jewish and African-American cultures have met on musical ground on many occasions — just think of Cab Calloway’s forays into Yiddish, Nina Simone’s covers of Hebrew folksongs, or most recently, the collaboration of Fred Wesley, David Krakauer and Socalled as Abraham Inc. David Chevan’s Afro-Semitic Experience, however, is different. The project unapologetically focuses on religious…
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The Schmooze The Return of Mark Epshtein, a Forgotten Master of the Yiddish Avant-Garde
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. The name Mark Epshtein (1899-1949) no longer occupies a prominent place in Yiddish cultural history, but a current exhibit in Kiev brought the artist back to the city where he created his most important work. “The Return of the Master,” which runs until February 20 at the…
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