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.
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Yiddish
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Opinion The Key to Bernie Sanders’s Appeal Isn’t Socialism. It’s Yiddish Socialism.
At a rally last October, Remaz Abdelgader — a hijab-wearing Muslim, a senior at George Mason University and the daughter of Sudanese immigrants — stood to ask Bernie Sanders a question. She started by referring to the Islamophobic bigotry of many of the Republican candidates. As she continued, calling herself “an American Muslim student who…
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Culture How Yiddish Blossomed After the Holocaust
Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture After the Holocaust By Jan Schwarz Wayne State University Press, 360 pages, $46.99 In 1954, while passing through the Uruguayan capital city of Montevideo, the Yiddish literary editor Mark Turkov met a Jewish journalist from Paris who had begun writing a book about his experience in Auschwitz. Turkov invited him…
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Culture Scholars Are Finally Tackling Yiddish Children’s Literature
In the 1921 Yiddish children’s book “The Wind That Got Angry,” by Moyshe Kulbak, an “old, wandering wind” finds himself booted out of his village when a thaw sets in. He tries to find somewhere in the woods to rest. He’s tired and wants to sleep, but no one wants him around. The oak tree…
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Culture Say Hello to ‘Mr. Yiddish’
King of Yiddish By Curt Leviant Livingston Press, 305 pages, $30 When Shmulik Weingarten arrived in Israel in 1950, authorities in higher education discreetly advised him to change his name. As the narrator of Curt Leviant’s novel “King of Yiddish” tells us, “Even though all the founding fathers of Israel were born into that supple,…
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Yiddish World How Aaron Frank Became the Unlikely Orthodox Head of Secular Day School
In 1996, Asher Abramovitz, the longtime principal of Kinneret Day School, a non-denominational community school in Riverdale, New York, received an unusual proposition: Aaron Frank, the 27 year-old assistant rabbi of a local Orthodox synagogue, offered to meet weekly with the school’s mostly non-observant eighth graders to chat about Jewish ethics and philosophy, a sort…
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Culture Meet the Orthodox Star of Oscar-Nominated ‘Son of Saul’
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In November of 2015, Geza Rohrig, the 48 year-old Hungarian-born lead actor of “Son of Saul,” an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, had an unexpectedly poignant moment. In the film, Rohrig plays a member of the Sonderkommando, the units of Jewish male prisoners in the…
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Opinion Why Donald Trump’s ‘Schlonged’ Doesn’t Matter — and Why That Fact Matters
For a time in the early 1980s I was unemployed in Los Angeles and watched a lot of daytime TV. One day I was watching a rerun of “The Newlywed Game,” a quiz show that asked contestants about their spouses’ habits to see how well they knew each other. In this segment, the question was:…
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Culture The 7 Most Famous Uses of ‘Schlong’ Before Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s use of the term “schlonged” may have been the most recent example of a Yiddish curse hitting the mainstream. But it’s hardly the first. In fact, the term schlong has been swinging around pop culture for quite a while. Here are seven of the most noteworthy uses of the (rather unpleasant) term: 1969…
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Film & TV Bonhoeffer biopic tells of a pastor turned would-be Hitler assassin — but is the story true?
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News What Mike Huckabee’s ‘Kids Guide to Israel’ says about his views
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Culture At 95, Shaindel Schreiber is still dispensing babka and advice on the Lower East Side
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Fast Forward Trump attorney general pick Pam Bondi: 5 things Jews should know
In Case You Missed It
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News Israel reached a ceasefire in Lebanon. Why does Gaza seem so hard?
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Culture Barbra Streisand recorded here — and so did Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, John Lennon and, uh, The Village People
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Fast Forward Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to helm EPA, says he received bomb threat with ‘pro-Palestinian themed message’
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Opinion We can be thankful this year — and Jewish wisdom can help
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