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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Life Throwback Thursday: Globetrotting Yiddish Reporter
Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Born in Lithuania in 1900 and raised on the Lower East Side, Jean Khyene Jaffe was a globetrotting reporter with a 30-year career in journalism. After graduating from Hunter College and Columbia…
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Culture ‘Tent’ Creates At-Home Birthright for Jewish Culture
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. In 2013, The Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., launched an ambitious series of cultural programming aimed at providing an opportunity for young Jews to learn about modern Jewish culture. The weeklong program, “Tent,” brings together 20 young people aged 21 to 30 in order to…
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News A Poet’s Life Spanning Shtetl and Subway
Few of us will lead a life as full as my “shviger” (mother-in-law), Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman: a life that spanned an ocean with an unremitting creative urge and a sense of personal purpose that encompassed a universe. While it may appear that her tragedies outweighed her joys, she dazzled the world with her accomplishments and was…
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Culture Will the Real Sholem Aleichem Please Stand Up?
The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye By Jeremy Dauber Schocken, 464 pages, $28.95 Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ By Alisa Solomon Metropolitan Books, 448 pages, $32.00 Like most Jews of my generation, I saw “Fiddler on the Roof” before…
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The Schmooze Klezmatics Given Lifetime Achievement Award at YIVO
In the mid 1980s several key figures in the klezmer revival movement had day jobs at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. So, perhaps it was only fitting that The Klezmatics were given a lifetime achievement award at YIVO’s Manhattan headquarters November 19. After cocktails and dinner at the Center for Jewish History’s atrium on…
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Life Throwback Thursday: Moscow’s Yiddish Stage Star
Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Born in 1897 to an artistic Jewish family in Warsaw, Yokheved-Yudes Minkova, garnered fame as part of the beloved Moscow State Jewish Theater troupe, known by the acronym GOSET and headed by…
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Recipes The Cook Behind America’s First Yiddish Cookbook
Several years ago, while on a walk with his dog, John Lankenau came across a tombstone leaning against a fire hydrant on Manhattan’s East Fourth Street. Most of the writing on the tombstone was in Hebrew, but not the name: Hinda Amchanitzky. Lankenau rescued the tombstone from the sidewalk and went looking for answers: Who…
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Forward 50 2013 Solon Beinfeld
When Solon Beinfeld, co-editor-in-chief of the new Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary, was on a Fulbright scholarship in Paris in the 1950s, Yiddish wasn’t part of his graduate work. But having been raised in a Yiddish-speaking home, Beinfeld couldn’t help but gravitate toward the city’s Yiddish-speaking community, and especially to its Medem Library, named after the Bund…
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