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
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The Schmooze Yiddish Supergroup Pays Homage to Nathan ‘Prince’ Nazaroff
Photo: Fumie Suzuki So, there in a gazebo on the boardwalk in Coney Island are The Brothers Nazaroff, taking refuge from the steamy afternoon sun. It is 92 degrees and horribly humid outside as the five Nazaroffs start playing and singing. A Hungarian documentary crew is shooting with two cameras as the brothers sing “Lucky…
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Israel News After 30 Years, First Klezmer Festival Founder Says ‘Mission Accomplished’
Thirty years ago, klezmer music was a dying art, played mostly by aging musicians at the occasional wedding or bar mitzvah. That started changing in the late 1970s with the klezmer revival, and especially with KlezKamp, one of the first klezmer festivals and a training ground for new artists. Now, KlezKamp, the annual festival of…
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Culture Yiddish Tango Is Irresistible Musical Hybrid
(JTA) — The music that packs the Skirball Cultural Center’s stately courtyard – Yiddish tango – is a musical hybrid twice over. On the tango side, it is a blend of African-born rhythms and a potpourri of European music styles. On the Yiddish side, it combines mournful liturgical melodies with folk songs. Tango, too, is…
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Life How One Yiddish Actress Was Blocked From Stardom
Actress Esther Nersolavska // 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. In 1965, a short two column item at the bottom left corner of page ten of the Forverts announced the funeral of Esther Nadya Neroslavska,…
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Culture How and Why We Mourn Robin Williams
It has become a depressingly familiar and ritualized cycle of mourning. I heard the news on Facebook. If I’d been on Twitter, I would have heard it there — Robin Williams dead at 63 of an apparent suicide. Those who knew him shared memories of his talent and his generosity. Those who met him once…
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Culture The Origins of Yiddish: Part Fir
In this last of a four-part series about the contemporary controversy over the origins of Yiddish, I’ll begin with the last of the Yiddish linguists profiled by Batya Ungar-Sargon in her Tablet essay, Alexis Manaster Ramer. Born in Poland to Holocaust survivors who came to the United States when he was a child, Manaster Ramer…
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Culture Remembering More Than a Century of Bel Kaufman’s Rebellious Charm
Bel Kaufman, who has died on July 25 at the age of 103, once told an audience at Iona College in 2011: “You’re laughing. It’s a very good sound, the sound of survival.” Born Bella Kaufman in 1911, she is best known as author of the 1965 bestseller “Up the Down Staircase” a fictionalized version…
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The Schmooze Congress For Jewish Culture Leaves Its Office, But Not Its Mission
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. On July 17, the New York Times reported that the Congress for Jewish Culture, one of the few remaining Yiddish organizations in New York, would close their Manhattan office at the end of the month. The Congress’s office space, on Broadway just off 26th street, was…
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