This is 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 Yiddish World, and for stories written in Yiddish,…
Yiddish
The Latest
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Culture How To Confuse a Gentile
Carol Russak writes from San Francisco: “My mother, who was from a small town near Chernovitz, used to use the expression daber nisht when she didn’t want to talk about a subject. I know that this means ‘Don’t talk,’ a combination of Hebrew daber and Yiddish nisht. Have you ever come across this expression?” I…
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Culture Looking Back: December 14, 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 Chicago police arrested Samuel Kramer, the famed New York City pickpocket who was arrested months ago with gangsters “Lefty Louie” Rosenberg and “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz but managed to escape, after an anonymous tip informed them that Kramer was holed up in a local brothel. He was in bed when five…
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The Schmooze Englander’s Inspiration
The Forverts’s Rukhl Schaechter once heard a Yiddish professor complain that his American students knew nothing about Stalin’s execution of 13 Soviet Jews, which took place in August 1952. Even more discouraging, he added, was their “complete lack of interest” in the Yiddish culture that once thrived in the Former Soviet Union. Two days before…
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Culture Nathan Englander Play Explores Stalin-Era Tragedy
Every writer confronts the possibility of failure. There is no guarantee of being read or if read, of hitting the mark. But no writer expects to succeed and still fail, not through any fault of his own, but because his culture has been destroyed, his language suppressed and his readers murdered. Yet that is the…
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Culture Looking Back: November 30th 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 Morris Lustig, who in 1910 poisoned his wife in order to collect $3,000 in insurance money, has been freed from Sing Sing prison’s death row. Lustig was freed after it was determined that his attorney wasn’t given enough time to cross-examine a key witness, a drug store owner who testified that…
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Culture The People of the Books
This column seems recently to have aroused in many of you questions about Yiddish words or phrases that you remember hearing long ago from parents or grandparents. The latest such query comes from Marcia Bender of Forest Hills, Queens. She asks: “When my grandmother was very old, I used to help her light the Sabbath…
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Food Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish Food Writer
Editor’s Note: The Beet-Eating Heeb is the nom de plume of Jeffrey Cohan, a former journalist in Forest Hills, PA. He also blogs about Judaism and veganism on his own website. Somewhere in the higher realms, Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer is observing his 110th birthday today. And it would be a pity if his…
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The Schmooze Theaters Paved With Gold
When my parents landed in New York in 1947 they were assigned a case worker. I’m not sure who did the assigning, but I remember my father saying how puzzled he was. “Case” was German for cheese, and he didn’t understand why he needed a cheese worker. My parents didn’t tell many stories about their…
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