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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Books The Secret Jewish History of ‘My Fair Lady’
● Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist’s Letters Edited by Dominic McHugh Oxford University Press, 336 Pages, $39.95 Sometimes the Yiddishkeit of a creative talent comes through only in private writings. Playwright and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner won immortality with the stage musicals “My Fair Lady,” “Camelot,” and “Gigi,” which are filled with British and French…
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The Schmooze ‘Yidlife Crisis,’ the First Yiddish Sitcom
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. “Yidlife Crisis” has been a long time coming. Back in the good old days — 60 or 70 years ago — there were Yiddish comedy serials on the radio, featuring the same cast of characters week after week. Unlike their English counterparts, however, these shows never…
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News Why Rabbi Ysoscher Katz Left Satmars for Progressive Start-Up Synagogue
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. He grew up among the ultra-Orthodox Satmar Jews in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, in a childhood with rules so strict that playing Frisbee at summer camp was considered a radical move. Today he serves as the spiritual leader of a small, relatively young, progressive Orthodox synagogue…
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Culture The Secret Yiddish History of Scotland
Recently, as Scotland’s independence vote began to loom large in the media, someone asked me if I had ever heard of Scots Yiddish. “I canna say that I have,” I answered, only to be told that there was an entire chapter on the subject in David Daiches’s autobiographical “Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood.” Scots…
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The Schmooze The Luck of the Yiddish: ‘Godot’ At First Irish NYC Theater Fest
Mingling with the guests at the Origins First Irish Theatre Festival Launch party I spotted Yoel and Avram Weisshauss — two bearded Satmars. I asked in Yiddish: “Vos epes. farvos zaynd ir do?” (“Why are you here?”) Both answered me with a Yiddish-style shrug. Held at Mutual of America’s Park Avenue headquarters and hosted by its…
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The Schmooze WATCH: Bubbe Schools You in Yiddish
You will laugh. You will cry. You will kvell. The Los Angeles Jewish Home has put together a cute video of some of their best bubbes and zaydes explaining the meaning of Yiddish words. “Yiddish: Part One” (implying, we hope, a “Part Two”) enlightens viewers on how to use the usual suspects — mentsh, shvitz, shmuck…
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Life Throwback Thursday: Yiddish Novelist Takes On Stalin’s Terror
Copyright Forward Association Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Vera Hacken was the Odessa-born memoirist of a Czernowitz childhood, and an early novelist of the intricacies of life under the Soviet Union’s police state apparatus — but much…
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News When Jews — and Everyone Else — Learned How To Have Fun
Beth Kissileff writes: “A rabbi recently said to me that there is no word for ‘fun’ in any Jewish language because Judaism is purpose and goal oriented. I said, ‘But there is keyf in Hebrew,’ and he said, ‘No, that’s from Arabic.’ Was the rabbi right?” On first thought, he would appear to be. If…
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