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
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Culture Three Cities of Yiddish: St. Petersburg—Warsaw—Moscow
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Three Cities of Yiddish: St. Petersburg—Warsaw—Moscow. Edited by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov. Oxford: Legenda, 2017, 201 pages The British book series “Studies in Yiddish,” published by Legenda (and known among academics as “the Legenda series”), is in my estimation the most important venue for contemporary research…
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The Schmooze Check Out This Extremely Foreboding Yiddish Sex-Ed Cartoon
Congratulations — you made it to the end of the week! As a reward and a reminder to always use protection, The Schmooze would like to gift you this adorable cartoon music video of an old Yiddish cabaret song that seeks to teach the children an important life lesson. The song and the video were…
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Community A Heartrending Case For Skipping Synagogue
The kapos at Mauthausen beat Reb Isser ben Avrum so savagely he could no longer stand straight. Sustaining other permanent injuries to his nose and left eye, he was, incredibly enough, one of the more fortunate ones. He arrived in America in the early 1950s and began life anew, remarrying and raising a second family….
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Fast Forward Steve Bannon Insulted Trump Opponents As ‘Shmendriks’
Steve Bannon might have promoted Breitbart News as “the platform for the ‘alt-right,’” but that has not prevented him from using the universal language of insults: Yiddish. Bannon, now the White House chief strategist to President Trump, used to refer to backers of rival Hillary Clinton as “shmendriks,” according to a new book on the…
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Yiddish World VIDEO: Watch Us Make Roast Chicken And Pilaf With Noodles For Shabbos
I am SO making this delicious-looking chicken and rice pilaf next Friday. I just watched this video — in Yiddish (with English subtitles) — from our Yiddish Forverts editor-in-chief Rukhl Schaechter and culinary historian Eve Jochnowitz. On the outside, the chicken looks like your basic, but Schaechter stuffs it with half an orange and two…
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Yiddish World The Fantasy Writer, Der Nister, and His Ambivalence Towards Zionism
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Der Nister, a master of fantasy tales who later turned to Soviet-style realism in his writing, was a complicated man and rarely opened himself up to strangers. There were books of memoirs written about him but they deal, for the most part, with his earlier years. The…
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Books Yankel and Leah (Chapter 2): Awkward First Date
This originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. To read the previous chapter. And so after some perfunctory small talk, an appointment was arranged. Yankel would meet with someone called Leah Spielman (he scribbled this into his small appointment book), daughter of Abe and Helen Spielman, refugees from the Old World, now living in Flatbush. “Appointment”…
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Yiddish World Gella Fishman Made Sure That Yiddish Wasn’t Shoved Aside
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. About two years ago Gella Fishman, the Yiddish teacher and archivist who passed away last month, called me one evening and asked indignantly: “How could it be that YIVO is now sending all its letters out without a single word in Yiddish?” Although I had been receiving…
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