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 SoCalled Movie at SXSW
It’s hard to articulate what makes Canadian artist SoCalled special. To say, as I did in a recent article, that he blends klezmer with hip hop, hardly does him justice. To add that he plays the accordion and performs magic tricks makes him sound like something of a sideshow. None of this conveys the way…
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Life The ‘Mitzvah Girls’ of Borough Park
Fordham anthropology professor Ayala Fader is the author of “Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn” (Princeton University Press, 2009), which has just been named the winner of the Jewish Book Council’s 2009 Barbara Dobkin Award in Women’s Studies. The Sisterhood’s Rebecca Honig Friedman recently interviewed Fader about her fieldwork…
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Life The Jewish-American Lexicon
American Jews speak their own language. This is the thesis that Professor Sarah Bunin Benor is working under as she gathers up phrases and words for her project “Jewish English: Distinctive Lexicon.” I spoke with Benor recently and she explained that while it is not like Yiddish or Ladino, American Jews have a specific vocabulary…
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Life McWhorter Questions Efforts To Save Dying Languages
In an essay in the recent issue of the World Affairs Journal, linguist and Columbia literature professor John McWhorter questions the effort to save dying languages: What makes the potential death of a language all the more emotionally charged is the belief that if a language dies, a cultural worldview will die with it. But…
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Film & TV Jews are Clever, Make Different Movies
Brazil is not only home to the Jules Rimet trophy, Copacabana beach, Carnaval and the frighteningly militarized favelas portrayed in “City of God,” it’s also the location of an old and respected Yiddish community. Now Jose de Abreu is making a Yiddish-speaking film — “Where Pigs Eat Oranges” — about Jewish immigration from Czarist Russia…
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Life Waxman to Weiner: ‘Speak English’
A little mameloshn came spilling out of the mouth of Rep. Anthony Weiner (aka the future Mr. Huma Abedin) during a discussion of health care reform. New York Daily News blogger Michael McAuliff reports: “We’re not going to take hundreds of billions of dollars a year and give it to insurance companies who give us…
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Life WikiHome for the Jews: Where To Go and Where Not to Go
Visitors to the main page of the English language Wikipedia today were treated to a short history of New York’s Beth Hamedrash Hagadol synagogue. Every day Wikipedia features a short article that they think might interest their readers which, on the English site, is always an article in English. There are however 267 different languages…
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Life Offbeat Israel: The Great-Great Grandfather of Jewish Law
A broad alliance of people, from politicians to market traders, are worried for the heath of Israel’s less well-off, as reported in today’s edition of the Forward. Just as that row brews, we learn that the health of a staggering number of Israelis is suffering due to financial factors. According to research released by the…
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Yiddish World A photo of my bubbe when Jewish stores still had Yiddish signs
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