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 Forverts in English, and for stories written in…
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 Forverts in English, and for stories written in…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. No matter where you travelled this summer, you were bound to hear Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi’s reggaeton hit “Despacito.” The Spanish-language chart-topper has become one of the most popular songs in history; its music video has been watched 3 billion times on YouTube, and the song…
In 2010 I was contacted by the chief editor of a volume called “Khazars: Myth and History,” put together by the Russian Academy of Sciences. She knew my books on Ashkenazic names, and was familiar with my ongoing study of the history of Yiddish, eventually published by Oxford University Press in 2015 as “Origins of…
How the huge popularity of postcards led an artist to produce Rosh Hashanah cards from his photo studio in Warsaw
This video by Yiddish Forverts editor-in-chief Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. I love to watch Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz create classic Jewish dishes, taking us through the recipes step by step in Yiddish (with English subtitles). The way they cook and the foods they prepare take me right…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Abez. A small station on the Northern railway line more than 2,200 kilometers from Moscow – and only 7 kilometers before the Arctic Circle, where the taiga forest turns into the endless tundra. You won’t find the name Abez on any train station because there is no…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The legendary actor Fyvush Finkel, who got his start in Yiddish theater and later made the transition to the English stage and television, died a little over a year ago. The last surviving star of the heyday of America’s Yiddish theater, he was still performing only weeks…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The decision by the Israel Broadcasting Authority, as part of its transformation into a new agency—the Israel Broadcasting Corporation— to drastically reduce its daily Yiddish radio programming to a weekly half-hour broadcast greatly disappointed Yiddish listeners around the world. None of us, however, were surprised. The writing…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. S. Y. Stupnitsky, a forgotten twentieth-century Jewish journalist, made a prescient observation about the great historic Jewish structures in Europe: “Jews built them, and today non-Jews possess them.” Stupnitsky’s words certainly ring true about Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin, the educational brainchild of Meir Shapiro, a Polish rabbi who…
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