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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Fast Forward The First Word Of The Day At The Scripps Spelling Bee Was ‘Yiddishkeit’
The first word posed in competition this morning on the first day of the storied Scripps National Spelling Bee was “yiddishkeit,” a beloved phrase from Yiddish that sums up Ashkenazi Jewish culture in a manner akin to the term Americana. More technically, the word means “Jewish character or quality,” “Jewish way of life” or “Jewishness,”…
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Yiddish World Five Centuries of Yiddish Poetry, Written by Women
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A remarkable history of women’s poetry in Yiddish was recently published by Joanna Lisek, a scholar of Polish literature. The book is currently available only in its native Polish, but it’s imperative that it be translated into English as well. The monograph, “Kol Ishe: The Voice of…
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Culture How I Learned To Speak Yiddish And Love The Forverts
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It is part of a series on Forverts memories written by and about present and past Forverts writers and editors. Just a few months after I began studying Yiddish, I bought my first copy of the Forverts at a newsstand in midtown Manhattan. The headline on the…
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Yiddish World The Forward Was A Boys’ Club, And I Broke In
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It is part of a series on Forverts memories written by and about present and past Forverts writers and editors. More than thirty years ago, at the beginning of the 1980s, Forverts assistant editor David Matis, who also happened to be a friend of my father’s, invited…
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Culture The Extraordinary Life Of Leopold Kozlowski, The Last Klezmer Of Galicia
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Leopold Kozlowski, the last active musician to have grown up playing traditional Jewish music in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, died March 12 in Krakow at the age of 100. A world-renowned expert on Jewish music and a teacher who trained generations of klezmer musicians and Yiddish…
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Yiddish World In Israel, Yiddish Is Surprisingly Trendy
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Last month, I embarked on a dream of mine: a 10-day Hebrew immersion in Israel with the aim to finally become fluent in the language. For years, I’ve been studying Hebrew, both through classes and on my own. Every Shabbat afternoon I get together with my friends…
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Yiddish World She Survived The Holocaust. This Week, She’ll Turn 100.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. This week, Henia Ragol, a Holocaust survivor and loyal reader of the Yiddish Forverts, will celebrate her hundredth birthday. (As we say in Yiddish: May she live 120 years!) During an interview with the Forverts, Ragol (née Kotton), a resident of a moshav in northern Israel who’s…
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News Yiddish Kindergarten May Be Coming To A New York City Public School
Three generations ago, before the Holocaust decimated European Jewry, tens of thousands of students studied at more than a thousand secular Yiddish elementary schools dotted across Eastern Europe. Today, there is only one secular Yiddish school in the world, and it’s in south Australia. Next year, that could change, and in a dramatic way: Secular…
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