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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The Schmooze At Long Last, Montreal Gets a Jewish Music Festival
Montreal is a city with a packed music calendar. From the Montreal International Jazz Festival to Pop Montreal to Francofolies, the city has something for every kind of fan. While Jewish bands and artists have cropped up at all of these events, until now the city has been missing its own full-fledged Jewish music festival….
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The Schmooze These Breslov Tunes Were Saved by Rock ‘n’ Roll
My musically sophisticated Orthodox friends often tell me that they are not interested in Jewish music. It’s not hard to see why. If you take the material produced by the Orthodox pop industry, it’s often just the frum equivalent of Justin Timberlake, or over-produced boys choirs backed up by obnoxious electronics and phony string arrangements….
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The Schmooze Its Bookstore May Be on the Rocks, But All Is Not Lost in Yiddishland
The Central Yiddish Culture Organization (CYCO), a Manhattan based non-for-profit outfit dedicated to the promotion and development of Yiddish literature, is in trouble. CYCO, and its inventory of 55,000 Yiddish books is being kicked out of its current home. Given that the income from book sales could not possibly pay market rent on a new…
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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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