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
The Latest
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Yiddish World WATCH: In This Classic Yiddish Joke, A Maybe-Atheist Confronts God
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. In this joke famed Jewish folk-hero and alleged atheist Hershele Ostropoler gives a unique answer to a friend questioning his piety.
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Opinion How Old Is Yiddish? It’s Not As Old As You Think.
The question of how old Yiddish is has long preoccupied Yiddishists. And as it turns out, it’s a question that’s deeply connected to the nature of Yiddish as a language. On the one hand, you have the Jewish-oriented approach, advocated by Max Weinreich, a 20th century Yiddishist, which sees in modern Yiddish an inheritor of…
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Life Anonymous Hasidic Writer Speaks Out On Failing Schools
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. People close to me know that I’ve always felt a kinship with the Hasidic community. Part of the appeal for me is their success at maintaining Yiddish as the lingua franca of their community. Where else but in Williamsburg or Mea Shearim do you hear Yiddish wherever…
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Culture How A Forverts Video Reunited Two Old Friends
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In an apartment somewhere in the metropolis of New York City, the distinguished composer Gershon Kingsley was sitting by his archive when he found sheet music for a composition he had created years ago for the dancer Naomi Leaf Halpern, and he realized that it had been…
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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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