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 From brawls over Zionism to rabbis playing favorites: life in 19th-century yeshivas
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. When reading about the lives of secular 19th- and 20th-century Yiddish and Hebrew writers, you will undoubtedly learn that many of them had studied in yeshivas before adopting a secular lifestyle. Chaim Grade, for example, was a student in the Navoraduk Yeshiva, which taught its students a…
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The Schmooze Mandy Patinkin Sang Pop Hit In Yiddish On The Late, Late Show
Well, it’s been a big week for Irving Berlin. Berlin, the master songwriter who immigrated to America with his family at the turn of the century to escape pogroms, was named on Tuesday in a national conversation about whether our president knows the lyrics to his song “God Bless America.” On the very same day,…
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Culture Philip Roth And The Yiddish Tradition
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the course of their ongoing debate, the literary critic Irving Howe used to complain that Philip Roth’s writing suffered from a weak connection to the Jewish tradition and that he was a writer with a “thin personal culture.” What strikes us more than 40 years later,…
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Opinion 24 Yiddish Curses For Jared Kushner Now That He Has A Security Clearance
Editor’s note: The following is a satirical piece. Dear Jared, Mazel tov on finally getting your security clearance after 18 months of working in the administration and despite myriad conflicts of interest! When I told my bubbe about it, she began to curse in Yiddish — and asked me to translate her thoughts. May every…
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Theater Why We Need Hanoch Levin Now, And Maybe In Yiddish
Going to see an intense, absurdist Hebrew play performed in Yiddish for 20 people in Manhattan’s West Village may not be the most esoteric entertainment I’ve enjoyed in my decade at the Forward (though it surely comes close), but explaining its significance presents a challenge. And yet, just like Hanoch Levin’s “The Labor of Life”…
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Culture How The Vilna Troupe Took Yiddish Theater Global
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The world-famous Yiddish theater that eventually became known as the Vilna Troupe had its beginnings under remarkable and completely unexpected circumstances. Before World War I, Vilna had a high-quality Russian theater that attracted a mostly Jewish audience, in part due to the Polish intellectuals’s boycott of Russian…
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Yiddish World Yiddish Parody Of Israeli Eurovision Song Goes Viral
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Israel, together with the entire European continent, loses its collective mind every May when Eurovision rolls around. The internationally televised singing contest, which passes by nearly unnoticed in the U.S., is a big deal in the Jewish state. Every performance in the run-up to the garish spectacle…
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Culture First Step To An All-Yiddish ‘Fiddler On The Roof’? Dance Auditions.
During the cherry-blossomed blush of the first proper week of spring, on the same day Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced which musicians would accompany 2018’s most hotly-anticipated nuptials, a group of men across the pond from Kensington Palace rehearsed for another famous wedding. “Hot toe! Hot toe! And heel,” choreographer Staš Kmieć yelled at…
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