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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Culture Former Folksbiene CEO quits 6-figure job after résumé-padding investigation
The former CEO of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, who was recently found to have padded his résumé with fake jobs and professional honors, is resigning from his post at the University of Utah’s Pioneer Theatre Company, citing mental illness. “Despite many good things that have happened over the last two years under my direction,…
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Books How classic Yiddish tales are being brought back to life — and in English too!
David Forman’s newest book is an old one. Rich with tales of giants, the Tudor court and highwaymen besieging a humble Jewish village, “The Clever Little Tailor” is the first English translation and bilingual edition of Yiddish writer Solomon Simon’s 1933 collection of stories about Shnayderl the tailor. The book is noteworthy for having the…
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Yiddish World ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’ Facebook group is launched
Since the Forward launched its YouTube series, “Yiddish Word of the Day” in April 2020, a number of viewers have asked how they could sign up for it. In “Yiddish Word of the Day,” Forverts editor Rukhl Schaechter gives viewers a daily Yiddish mini-lesson, consisting of words, idioms and proverbs centered around a certain theme….
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Yiddish World The Yiddish professor and female Orthodox rabbi sharing Yiddish children’s literature with the world
Read this article in Yiddish A jack of many trades is sometimes a master of them all Speaking with Miriam Udel, the Yiddish professor at Emory University in Atlanta who is reacquainting the world with Yiddish children’s literature, you quickly notice something remarkable. In one moment she sounds like a literary scholar and in the…
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Yiddish World Reclaiming my great-great-grandfather’s prayer book and the Yiddish world he lived in
Read this article in Yiddish June 2020 through August 2021 was supposed to be a gap year for me as I moved from my undergraduate to graduate studies. I didn’t plan for the pandemic, let alone its impact on my Jewish, scholarly and music communities. We were all forced to adapt to online formats, reshaping…
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Culture In this classic Jewish children’s book, a Yiddish-speaking dog learns to reject racism
As America continues its intensified reckoning with questions of racial justice, parents and educators are keenly aware of the need to speak to children about race in ways that feel authentic and relatable. The Jewish community can look to Yiddish literature for models of antiracist storytelling that took shape long before the storied alliances of…
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Yiddish World How this NYC high school student came to Yiddish
Read this article in Yiddish To be honest, I was never interested in learning Yiddish. Before the pandemic, it was a dead language to me, something that my parents and grandparents spoke, and before that – my great-grandparents. I have Israeli family, so Hebrew is familiar to me. Yiddish is not. I could understand enough…
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Books Feeling at home in my Yiddish-speaking bubble
The ten students in my Yiddish class are of differing political persuasions but we're united in our love of the language.
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