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…
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…
It’s hard to beat Yiddish Princess’s own self-description (as per their MySpace page): “Melodramatic Popular Song” “Kick Ass Yiddish Power Ballads” “Influences: Kate Bush, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Mina Bern, Molly Picon, Pat Benatar, Suki & Ding” “Sounds Like: Celine Dion (if she went to Kheder)” Not all of this is strictly true —…
John Star, a Yiddish-speaking Nigerian national, has jumped bail after being charged with mortgage fraud, the New York Daily News reported today. Star learned Yiddish as a child from his adoptive parents who were Orthodox Jews and raised him in Switzerland. Apparently his Yiddish came in handy when committing mortgage fraud in New York. “He…
Paul Rudd and Steve Carell will be united once again in bro-mance in the upcoming “Dinner for Schmucks,” due out this July, according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times. The movie, which will be directed by Jay Roach of “Meet the Fockers” and “Austin Powers in Goldmember,” is inspired by the 1998 French…
Last summer brother and sister Yiddish enthusiasts Shaul and Shulie Seidler- Feller decided they wanted to spread their love of the mameloshn, so they started the Yiddish Word-of-the-Week project. Mainly a listserv, but also a Web site in development, the project includes weekly mailings that feature a word of the week with an English translation,…
It’s Passover time, and a heady mix of liberation, freedom and matzah fills the air. While we recount the tale of the Children of Israel’s escape from Egypt, a strange inversion of this story unfolds in France. In this nightmare exodus, the Israelite (a non-Jewish klezmer clarinetist) flees Egypt (Moldova) and makes it to the…
On March 22, I went to a “Serious Night” party at B’nai Emet synagogue, in St. Louis Park, MN where the bar mitzvah scenes as well as some others in the Coen brothers film “A Serious Man” were filmed. One of the audience members recounted his query to one of the Coen brothers asking why…
Robert Alter discussed “tough Jews” with Michael Chabon on March 18 as part of the Berkeley Seminars in Modern Jewish Culture Lecture, but there seemed to be a gap in the Jewishness. Alter, the Berkeley professor and great critic of Jewish writing, interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon and asked about the author’s exuberant style, the…
In the English-speaking world, psychoanalyzing Yiddish, and the way it is spoken, is often done with a dollop of humor, as in “Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods” by Michael Wex, appreciatively reviewed by the Forward. French Jews, on the other hand tend to approach the subject comparatively soberly, as…
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