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 The Jewish Underworld in Song
On the Yiddish Song of the Week blog, Forverts associate editor Itzik Gottesman writes about “Din Toyre,” a song that deals with the question of Justice, in both the mundane and cosmic senses. The performance was “recorded by Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman in the Bronx, 1980s. The singer was a neighbor, M. Bauman, from either Lodz or…
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The Schmooze A Disappointing Dybbuk
It’s a pretty familiar theme — the Jew as a perpetual wanderer, forever a foreigner, friendless and reviled by all. Is there anyone else so existentially homeless, utterly without place on the planet as the Jew? Who, besides the Jew, is so intolerable to his host that he becomes the target of violent threats, which…
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The Schmooze ‘To Be a Matchmaker Is a Good Thing…And You Don’t Have to Work Too Hard’
Over on the Yiddish Song of the Week blog, Ethel Raim discusses “Der shadkhn” (“The Matchmaker”) “a humorous song describing the special skills that a shadkhn needs for his trade”: The performer, Clara Crasner, was a truly marvelous singer who possessed a vast repertoire of Yiddish songs. I only regret never having met her or…
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The Schmooze I.L. Peretz Comes to the Fringe Festival
In attending “A Gilgl Fun A Nigun” (“The Metamorphosis of a Melody”), which opened its five-performance run at the New York International Fringe Festival on August 14, I was charged with answering a single massive question: Can Yiddish theater appeal to a mainstream audience? As a lifelong theater lover and gentile, I had never been…
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The Schmooze The Night of the Murdered Poets
On August 12, over 100 people gathered at New York’s Center for Jewish History to mark the 58th anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Poets, commemorating the Stalin-ordered execution of 13 prominent Soviet Jews, including five Yiddish writers. Among those murdered were novelist David Bergelson and poet Peretz Markish, who was awarded the Stalin…
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The Schmooze A Classy Yiddish Writer Sings ‘Oy Vey Mame’
In this week’s Yiddish Song of the Week blog, Forverts managing editor Itzik Gottesman writes about Yiddish writer Ita Taub and “Oy Vey Mame” a song she remembered from her shtetl. Ita (or Eta) Taub (1908 – 2003) was born in the Ukrainian town of Stidenitse on the Dniester river. She immigrated to Montreal and…
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The Schmooze How to Get a Klezmer Record in Amazon’s Top Ten
The short answer? Get Nat Hentoff to review it in the Wall Street Journal. In Saturday’s paper, the eminent jazz critic published an appreciation of “Cantors, Klezmorim and Crooners 1905-1953,” a three-disc box set of remastered archival Yiddish music that was released in late 2009. Hentoff had only good things to say about the remastered…
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The Schmooze Café Culture in Weimar Berlin
In the 1920s, Yiddish was more than just a lingua franca for East European Jewish émigrés; it was also a language of high culture, as demonstrated by a brilliant new book, “Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture” (Legenda Books), edited by New York University Yiddish scholar Gennady Estraikh and…
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