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
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Yiddish World The 20 best Yiddish words for discussing 2020
Click to hear this article read aloud. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought us many challenges. But ironically, it’s also helped make 2020 a great year for learning Yiddish. The annual YIVO Yiddish summer program had so many registrants this summer — 60% more than last year — that administrators had to scramble to schedule more…
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Culture Celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday with ‘Ode to Joy’ in Yiddish
Read this article in Yiddish. This week marks the 250th anniversary of what is believed to be the birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the most influential composers of all time, and a favorite among the Jews in Eastern Europe. Beethoven’s popular “Moonlight Sonata,” for example, is the topic of a wonderful children’s tale…
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Yiddish World A new look at the Yiddish literature that flourished in Weimar Berlin
Read this article in Yiddish Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism Marc Caplan Indiana University Press, $40, 394 PP The brief but lively and productive Berlin period in the history of modern Yiddish culture is a special source of interest for contemporary researchers. Out of a melting pot of various languages, styles and…
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Yiddish World Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s zeyde was noted Yiddish writer
Read this article in Yiddish. Sure, you might have known that Antony Blinken, President-elect Joe Biden’s selection for U.S. Secretary of State, has a band — but did you know that his great-grandfather, Meir Blinken, was a Yiddish writer? The Ukraine-born elder Blinken, whose Yiddish nom de plume was B. Mayer and who was buried…
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Yiddish World WATCH: A powerful song by a young woman who left the Hasidic world behind
Read this article in Yiddish. Although there have been a number of new Yiddish songs recorded in the past couple of years, it‘s rare to see songs written by women who have left the Hasidic community. Hannah Gee was raised Hasidic but decided early on that this wasn’t the life for her. Yet, in contrast…
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Yiddish World Why the exhibit on the Warsaw Jewish quarter, Muranow, is so good
When I first heard that Warsaw’s Polin Museum had an exhibit about Muranow, the former Jewish quarter of the Polish capital, my first instinct was to buy a ticket to Warsaw – until I remembered that we’re in the midst of an epidemic. Although I live in Israel, Muranow has become very familiar to me…
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Yiddish World Podcast: A Jewish revolutionary tells her story
Read this article in Yiddish The Yiddish Book Center recently launched a unique podcast in which the actress, translator and Yiddish theater scholar Caraid O’Brien reads her own translation of the memoirs of a Russian revolutionary. The program, “The Last Maximalist,” recalls the extraordinary early years of Klara Klebanova, a Jewish girl who left her…
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Books Yiddish culture barely touched upon in ‘The New Jewish Canon’
Read this article in Yiddish What were the most important Jewish texts of the last 40 years? What did the Jewish opinion-makers have to say about the most important issues of Jewish survival? Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire Sufrin attempt to answer these questions in a collection of 70 selected documents called “The New Jewish Canon:…
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