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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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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The Schmooze Yiddish Book Center to Receive National Award
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish [here.][1] On April 24 Yiddish Book Center founder and president Aaron Lansky announced that his organization will receive the National Medal for Museum and Library Service. The award will be presented by First Lady Michelle Obama in a ceremony at the White House on May 8. The…
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Culture Getting to the Heart and Sole of the Matter
Shelly Rosen, who grew up living with grandparents who spoke to her in Yiddish, writes that Yiddish words from those days are still popping up in her head — the latest of which is padeshve, which she thinks means “the sole or arched part of the bottom of my foot.” And she asks, “Did I…
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The Schmooze Remembering Felix Fibich, Yiddish Choreographer-Dancer
Whenever Warsaw-born dancer, choreographer Felix Fibich — who died on March 20, at 96 — and I would meet, we’d discuss Jewish choreography and sometimes end up dancing together. At the June 24, 2002 “Celebration of Stars” 67th anniversary of the Yiddish Artists & Friends Actors Club at Sutton Place Synagogue, club president Cory ‘G’daliah’…
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The Schmooze PBS Station Loses Much-Maligned Yiddish Quiz
I may have gone too hard on my bubbe in a blog post last week. As it turns out, she may not have been at fault for my abysmal score on Thirteen-WNET’s Yiddish quiz, created in honor of Simon Schama’s five-part series, “Story of the Jews.” In fact, my poor score may not even have…
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Life Second Avenue Songbird Selma Kaye
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 the early 1950s, Second Avenue Yiddish Theatre Manager Joseph Rumshinsky and Composer Edmund Zayenda were hell bent on finding their songbird, best able to represent their latest play “My Lucky Day.”…
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