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 How Far Will Grandmothers Go To Look Out For Granddaughters? In Borscht Belt Joke, Maybe Too Far.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The Yiddish Forward is producing a series of classic Yiddish jokes presented in Yiddish by Leana Jelen, a young Yiddish-speaking sign-language interpreter. This joke shows the drastic measures some Jewish grandmothers will take to protect their granddaughters — or at least their own sanity.
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Opinion No, Yiddish Is Not A Corruption Of German
To most people, Yiddish and German are closely related. The languages share many root words and grammatical structures, and most speakers of one language can at least understand an individual speaking the other. To early German Christian scholars, like to many laypersons today, Yiddish was seen as a corrupted and lesser form of German. But…
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Culture October 11: Boulder, Colorado: Rukhl Schaechter Discusses Yiddish In The Digital Era
Times have changed, and so has the Forward. Founded in 1897 as a Yiddish newspaper for Jewish immigrants, it has adapted over the years to appeal to its changing demographic. Rukhl Schaechter, editor of the Yiddish Forward (still lovingly called Forverts), will visit the University of Colorado Boulder on October 11 to discuss how the…
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Fast Forward WATCH: Sigmund Freud’s Favorite Joke — Told In Yiddish
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The Yiddish Forward is producing a series of classic Yiddish jokes presented in Yiddish by Leana Jelen, a young Yiddish-speaking sign-language interpreter. This joke was the favorite of none other than Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychoanalysis who spent years collecting and studying Jewish jokes. While…
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Yiddish World Calling all Chicagoans: Here’s Your Opportunity to Learn Yiddish
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It can be tough to find a Yiddish class irl (in real life) if you aren’t a college student or a New York resident. But now it’s easier for Chicago folks to learn Yiddish: the Chicago YIVO has announced a new series of courses to be launched…
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Culture WATCH: A Yiddish Version of ‘The Sound of Silence’
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Paul Simon has been prominent in the zeitgeist recently. Ever since the legendary folk-rock singer announced his pending retirement, numerous musicians have paid tribute to the songwriter who has provided a soundtrack to three generations of American life. The small world of contemporary Yiddish-language pop music is…
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Yiddish World WATCH: Have You Ever Heard This Yiddish Song About Swallowing Goldfish?
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Aaron Bendich, a young reader of the Yiddish Forverts, spends a lot of time hanging out with his 103-year-old grandfather Max. Max Bendich, a child of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and a WWII-veteran, remembers a plethora of rare Yiddish songs, including novelty songs that were popular on…
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Yiddish World Study Yiddish In Greece? Yes, Really.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Although Greece has a venerable 2,400-year Jewish history, it’s certainly not the first place that comes to mind when you think of Yiddish. Although Yiddish was spoken a bit in Thessalonica before World War II, the Ashkenazi community there had, as in Cairo, a small and short-lived…
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