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
The Latest
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Yiddish World Beloved Singer Nechama Lifshitz Has Died
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Nechama Lifshitz, the popular singer who defied the censors by singing in Yiddish and Hebrew throughout the Soviet Union, serving as a deep inspiration for the so-called Jews of Silence under Communist rule, has died at the age of 89. Nechama Lifshitz was born in Kaunas, Lithuania…
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Yiddish World 120 Years of the Forverts: Pogrom Refugees Desperately Seeking Relatives in America
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Although the sheer brutality of the pogroms has been largely overshadowed by the Holocaust, the massacres of Jews in the Russian Empire before WWI and especially in the postwar chaos surrounding its dissolution (1917-1922) were so well-orchestrated that some modern scholars consider them to have constituted a…
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Life ‘Oedipus In Brooklyn And Other Stories’: Dark Themes And Complex Women
Looking for rich, complicated women in fiction to match the rich, complicated women in your life? In search of women whose lives and loves defy usual narratives? Pick up Blume Lempel’s “Oedipus In Brooklyn And Other Stories” (Mandel Vilar Press/Dryad Press, 2016), just released in English translated from Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron…
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Community WATCH: Singing In My First Cultural Seder
A scant two months after my very first performance in Yiddish at the Sholom Aleichem Kultur Tsenter, I was invited to sing at the Yiddish Artists & Friends Actor’s Club Cultural Seder by Khazn Moshe Ber. I was very nervous, as at that point I had only ever performed in Yiddish a couple of times….
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Community Should A Synagogue Be A Safe Space?
When is a “safe space” not safe? Depends on who’s asking. The term itself was borne of the desire to cultivate nurturing community for vulnerable populations— think, say, LGBTQ teenagers, or survivors of sexual abuse. But in the age of an ascendant “alt-right,” some conservative commentators decry the very notion of safe space as a…
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Yiddish World Celebrating 120 Years of the Forverts: Jewish Housewives Urged To Buy Long Island Ducks
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Few people know that Long Island was once a national center of duck farming with hundreds of active poultry farms. Digging through Purim issues of yesteryear our archivist Chana Pollack recently came upon this amusing ad that ran in The Forward on March 5th, 1925, telling Jewish…
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The Schmooze WATCH: Lipa Schmeltzer, AKA The Hasidic Lady Gaga, Shakes Up Purim
The stereotype-defying Orthodox singer and composer, also known as the Hasidic Lady Gaga, talks to the Yiddish Forward at his latest concert in Manhattan.
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Community What Judaism Can Teach Us About Getting Older — And Potty Humor
I never quite feel like I’m the right age. My congregants consistently tell me that I’m too young to be a rabbi. When I watched the standup comedian Robert Klein began one of his sets with a song about colonoscopies (below), I also felt be a bit out of place. When the rest of the…
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