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.
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Yiddish
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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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The Schmooze Henry Winkler Shows Off His Yiddish Vocabulary
Who would have predicted that Henry Winkler, who became a household name in America as Arthur Fonzarelli (“The Fonz”) on “Happy Days” over 40 years ago, would be one of the most charming men in America in 2018? In an interview last week with People, the 72 year-old Winkler went on to quietly prove, as…
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Culture WATCH: Yiddish Writer Yechiel Shraybman Describes His Moldovan Shtetl
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A squeaky well, an old Jewish judge who refuses to open his eyes — these are the images that the writer Yekhiel Shraybman brings to life in vivid vignettes about his Moldavian hometown, Rashkev. In this video Shraybman describes his years in the Yiddish theater in Bucharest,…
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Culture Rukhl Schaechter Discusses Judaism, Feminism And Yiddish
Rukhl Schaechter, editor of the Yiddish Forward will be appearing at the Own It summit 2018 on Sunday March 25. Schaechter, the first female editor and the first American-born editor of the Yiddish Forward, will be appearing on two panels: Jewish Women and Feminism and Interfaith Dialogue: Spirituality and Feminism Connection. Read about the event…
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The Schmooze Joel Grey Will Direct The First Yiddish Production Of ‘Fiddler On The Roof’ In the US
As the brilliant Shalom Aleichem wrote in “Tevye The Dairyman,” the book of stories upon which the musical “Fiddler On The Roof” is based, “You see how it is, my dear friends. There’s no pleasing everyone. It’s hopeless to even try, and the more you play the peacemaker, the less peaceful things become.” But is…
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Yiddish World I miss those secular Jews who led traditional seders
My Uncle Yoyne didn't keep kosher or the Sabbath but when he led the seder, he sounded like an Orthodox Jew
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