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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Yiddish World YidLife Crisis comedy show, ‘Pandemish,’ streaming soon
When people today use the term “Yiddish comedy”, they usually mean a standup act or film in English with Yiddish words tacked on for comic effect. The online comedy web series, “YidLife Crisis”, created and starring Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, is completely different. As many of you saw with their hilarious clip on Jewish…
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Yiddish World VIDEO: Cantor’s jazzy remake of Yiddish song of hope
Yisroel Leshes, assistant cantor of New York’s Orthodox Lincoln Square Synagogue, has released a cool, jazzy version of Morris Winchevsky’s Yiddish song, “Di Tsukunft” (“The Future”), which dreams of the day when “di velt vet vern frayer, shener, yinger, nayer” (“the world will be freer, lovelier, younger and newer”). The music video, accompanied by English…
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Yiddish World My touching – and funny – moments with Forverts obituaries
When I first began working at the Forverts in the year 2000, I had already missed out on the old traditions of typesetting and printing; the reign of the digital world had begun. But tucked away in the corners of the hall where the typesetters once worked, remained artifacts of yesteryear: the telegraph ticker tape…
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Yiddish World Recalling the revolt against a Yiddish theater in Buenos Aires
In Buenos Aires, where I spent the first 30 years of my life, every public school student has heard of Boulogne Sur Mer, a small town in France, where the Argentine national hero Jose San Martin spent the last years of his life. Boulogne Sur Mer is also a street in Buenos Aires where even…
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Culture Yiddish porn, Einstein’s letters and Rabbi Schneerson’s sermons united in ‘largest single remnant of Jewish life’ in Europe
In 2014, Jonathan Brent discovered something he didn’t know he was missing. Walking into the Wroblewski Library in Vilnius, he saw a long table covered with boxes. Inside were documents belonging to the organization he heads, YIVO, the Institute for Jewish research, which was founded in Vilna and moved its operations to New York in…
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Yiddish World VIDEO: Toddler’s take on the burning bush – in Yiddish (with subtitles)
To see subtitles in English, start playing the video, then press the CC button. To see subtitles in Yiddish, press the Settings button (looks like a wheel), then Subtitles, then Yiddish. My two-year old grandson, Leyzer, loves listening to Bible stories. Last week his parents, Naftali and Jessye Ejdelman, quizzed him on the scene where…
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Yiddish World How a Yiddish folksong appeared on a 1967 American pop album
At the height of his success in 1967, Jay Black, lead singer of the pop band, Jay and the Americans, recorded a popular Yiddish folk song and managed to convince his record label, United Artists, to include it on the B-side of their album, “Try Some of This!” The story, first published by the Forward…
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Culture What Yiddish (and the Forward) are doing in the new ‘Spider-Man’
Everytime Spider-Man flirts with the fickle multiverse he encounters a couple of constants. The first is that a version of Spider-Man exists in every reality. The second is that Jews do too. Even, it would seem, the Jews who write for this very Jewish paper. In “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” Jews are everywhere. As David…
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