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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Opinion Alexander Imich, Czar’s Last Bar Mitzvah Boy
Alexander Imich at 111 years old / Guinness Book of World Records Ray Bradbury, in his classic 1955 story “The Last, the Very Last,” has a child encounter a 108-year-old man believed to be the last known Civil War veteran. The story, reworked as a chapter in his novel Dandelion Wine, introduces the veteran to…
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The Schmooze ‘Fiddler’ Lyricist Sheldon Harnick Turns 90
“The sad thing is that Joe Stein and Jerry Bock can’t be part of this celebration,” mused lyricist Sheldon Harnick at his 90th birthday bash hosted on June 2 by Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a principal of Bernstein Global Management at its New York City headquarters. It was Stein who wrote the book, and Bock who wrote…
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The Schmooze 6 Things About ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ on 50th Anniversary
On Monday, the Folksbiene theater will celebrate the 50th anniversary “Fiddler on the Roof.” In honor of this auspicious birthday, we bring you a trove of obscure fun facts about the Jewish classic. If nothing else, you can bust it out at Shabbat dinner to one-up the family. What else is useless knowledge for? 1.Richard…
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Culture Does Translating Yiddish Preserve History Or Betray It?
Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the 20th Century By Anita Norich University of Washington Press, 160 pages, $30 Translators are villains, lechers, traitors. Like the spinster who translates Yankel Ostrover’s stories in Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” they are vain. “Who has read James Joyce, Ostrover or I?” she seethes. “I didn’t…
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Culture The Last Living Yiddish Speaker in Lviv
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. During an emotional scene in the new documentary film “Boris Dorfman: A Mentsh,” the 90-year-old Dorfman stands in a forest near Rudno, Ukraine, at the spot where the Germans murdered the last surviving Jews from the Lviv ghetto in June of 1943. Near a memorial-marker that he…
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Culture Why You Shouldn’t Call Mel Bochner a Lox Jock
From King Solomon to Ludwig Wittgenstein — with the notable exception of Moses — Jews have always been people of words. It seems appropriate, therefore, that the artist Mel Bochner’s new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, a retrospective of decades’ worth of his work and his first major museum show in New York City, is…
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Culture Spitting and Other Methods of Warding Off Canaries, Jinxes and Evil Eyes
Forward reader Herb Hoffman writes: “I was raised in Brooklyn with the knowledge that spitting three times (or at least making a ritualized spitting movement or sound, which I’ve always rendered as ‘ptu, ptu, ptu’) is an effective way of warding off a kinehore — or ‘canary’ in my native Yinglish. My mother especially used…
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News The Remarkable Career of Ruth Wisse, Yiddish Scholar and Political Firebrand
On a cold day in late March, I sat in room 103 of Harvard University’s Sever Hall with about 60 undergraduates, listening to Ruth Wisse talk about Avrom Sutzkever. A partisan and a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto, Sutzkever was one of the 20th century’s greatest Yiddish poets. The reading that day was of his…
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Fast Forward It was a historic Jewish night at the Oscars. Why are so many Jews outraged?
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