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 Forverts Columnist Tsirl Steingart Dies at 97
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. Translated by Ezra Glinter. On May 18 writer, activist and longtime Forverts columnist Tsirl Steingart died in a car accident in Palm Beach, Florida. She was 97 years old. Steingart was born March 11, 1916 in Bialystok, where she was an active participant in the Bundist…
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Culture Malcolm X and the Jews
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75, and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illuminating and edifying clippings from the Jewish past. 100 years ago 1913 Joseph Hoffman, head of a gang of schnorrers, was sentenced to six…
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Opinion How Do You Spell ‘Knaidel’?
Had Jack Lebewohl of the legendary 2nd Ave Deli been competing yesterday in the final round of 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee, he would have lost to the winner, 13-year-old Arvind Mahankali. The Jewish food maven would have misspelled the winning word: ‘knaidel’. “The thing is, we spell it k-n-e-i-d-e-l,” the deli man said in…
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Fast Forward Boy Wins National Spelling Bee With Yiddish ‘Knaidel’
An Indian American boy from New York won a national spelling contest thanks to his ability to correctly spell the word knaidel, a Yiddish-derived word for a traditional Jewish dumpling. Arvind Mahankali, 13, of Bayside Hills, N.Y., beat 10 other finalists at the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee held Thursday in Oxon Hill, Md. He…
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News Lay-Offs Bring Curtain Down on Jewish Era at Village Voice
For much of its existence, the Village Voice was a paper where you could call a momzer a momzer and use just that term to do it. But the news in May that the out-of-town momzers who own the Voice had fired the paper’s last remaining signature writers — Michael Feingold, Michael Musto and Robert…
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The Schmooze Jewish Languages from Bukhori to Juhuri
A new organization aims to preserve languages that are no longer spoken or are in danger of disappearing
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Culture A Very Yiddish Take on the Star Spangled Banner
Frieda Danziger of Manhattan writes to ask whether I have ever encountered the Yiddish term farfl un lokshn as a comical or disparaging way of referring to the Stars and Stripes. I have, once, in a poem by Abraham Liessin, a well-known Yiddish poet. Liessin, who was born in Russia in 1872 and came to…
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Culture Third Century Synagogue Unearthed in Turkey
1913 •100 years ago Nursery’s heartbreaking scenes A black sign hanging on an old three-story house on the Lower East Side’s Madison Street has written on it, in golden letters: “Hebrew Day Nursery.” This means that inside is a place where they keep babies for the day while their mothers are at work. What sad…
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