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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The Schmooze WATCH: These Classic Hollywood Movies Get A Yiddish Makeover
Who knew Darth Vader had such an impressive grasp of the Yiddish language? I mean, not really, but the folks over at Yidlife Crisis, a Yiddish comedy web series, have done a truly solid job of dubbing over the “Luke, I am your father” line. The team released a montage of classic movie moments this…
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The Schmooze Inside The Haunting, Erotic Yiddish Poetry of Celia Dropkin
A version of this post originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Most people associate Yiddish poetry with grandmothers, immigrant workers or the horrors of the Holocaust, if they have associations at all. What certainly does not come to mind are frank and graphic descriptions of sexual acts. That may soon change thanks to a new…
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Life Movie Stars In Forverts History: Princess Mohammed Ali Ibrahim née Ginsburg
The Forverts and Forward alike have a rich history of covering Jewish film stars (including the old standby: stars readers might not have known were Jewish). One of the most noteworthy Jewish stars of yore: Pearl Shepherd, born Pearl Ginsburg or Ginsberg, active in the 1910s and 1920s. Shepard starred in a number of movies,…
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Yiddish World Reimagining the Lively Character of Pre-War Smocza Street
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. For the past few months I’ve been living in a place that no longer exists. I may be sleeping in my own bed in Tel Aviv, but every morning, at the light of dawn, I steal across the borders of time to a thriving Jewish street in…
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The Schmooze We Can’t Make This Up: Yiddish Song Performed On Mongolia’s American Idol
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Besides Mexico City, which hosts the annual Yiddish Idol competition, there really is nowhere on earth where you would expect to hear a Yiddish song performed as part of a singing competition, let alone on national television. Recently, however, the American-Jewish singer Amalia Rubin performed an excellent…
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Culture LISTEN: A Yiddish Shtetl Song Got Revived On NPR
There’s a certain quality of sound particular to a waltz pattern picked out on a viola that never fails to inspire, in me, at least, some strange sense of longing for a shtetl life that I’ve not only never known, but intrinsically know to be undesirable. My ancestors left the shtetl, after all. It’s a…
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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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