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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Culture How Family Holocaust Stories Became Multimedia Art Exhibit
A version of this article appeared in Yiddish here. Children of Holocaust survivors can be split into two groups: those whose parents or grandparents said nothing about those harrowing years, and those whose relatives gave them detailed accounts of their experiences. I belong to the first category. Although my father’s family had, like all the…
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Culture Philip Levine Was Working-Class Poet Inspired by Yiddishkeit
Philip Levine, the Jewish poet who died on February 14 at age 87, was a feisty writer inspired by working class roots and a family tradition of bubbe-meises (grandmother’s fables). In “Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections” (2000) Levine analysed his poem “The Old Testament”: “My twin brother swears that at age thirteen I’d…
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News Polish Jews Protest Monument to Righteous Gentiles in Warsaw Ghetto
This article first appeared in the Yiddish Forverts Plans to erect a monument to Righteous Gentiles next to the newly dedicated Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews is evoking a growing anger in Poland and abroad. The museum stands on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of all the Jewish…
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Culture Celebrating the Life and Career of Yiddish Theater Legend Mina Bern
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. A large crowd filled the main auditorium at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan on January 11 to see a memorial program in honor of the life and work of the Yiddish actress Mina Bern. During the concert a dozen singers, actors and musicians performed…
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Film & TV Isaac Bashevis Singer and His ‘Harem’
In Yiddish theater lore it’s told that when the great actor and heartthrob Boris Thomashefsky mounted a production of “Hamlet” on Second Avenue, the sign outside read, “Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Translated and Improved.” The story is apocryphal — it might not have been Thomashefsky, and it might not have been “Hamlet” — but the episode illustrates…
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Culture Sacvan Bercovitch, Acclaimed Scholar and Translator of Sholem Aleichem, Dies at 81
There can be no greater left-wing yichis than being named after Sacco and Vanzetti. The Canadian Jewish cultural historian Sacvan Bercovitch, who died on December 9 at age 81, was born to Russian Jewish parents who cherished a revolutionary ideal. In his “Rites of Assent,”, Bercovitch explained that he was drawn to America’s Puritans because…
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The Schmooze A Miss America Who Remembered Her Yiddish Roots
Bess Myerson, a Bronx-born beauty whose selection as the first — and to date only — Jewish Miss America turned out to be more than a leggy, musically talented woman. Succumbing at 90 to dementia, she left her imprint on the Jewish community as an indefatigable supporter of Israel and never forgot her Yiddish roots. When…
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Culture Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens
● Beautiful Yetta’s Hanukkah Kitten By Daniel Pinkwater, illustrated by Jill Pinkwater Feiwel and Friends, 32 pages, $17.99. Spared from the butchers’ knife, Yiddish-speaking Yetta makes her home in Brooklyn, trying to find a new family and do good where she can. A Holocaust survivor? Not exactly. Yetta is big white chicken with long eyelashes…
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