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 Abbreviate This!
Howard Schranz wants to know the origin and exact meaning of the Yiddish word nebekh. “When I was 11,” he writes, “after my father, a”h, died, I heard a lot of nebekh thrown my way. I know it meant something like, ‘It’s pitiful,’ and I quickly tired of being called that. Show some sympathy if…
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Culture Looking Back: January 18, 2013
100 Years Ago 1913 One of our local, homegrown Jewish gangsters from New York City’s East Side, Joseph Tablinsky, was arrested on the charge of horse thievery. Sam Bernstein, who owns a stable on Cherry Street, where two horses worth about $400 recently went missing, brought the charges. The horses were later found in Berish…
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The Schmooze Setting ‘Yellow Ticket’ to Music
Klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals has experience scoring documentary and feature films. But earlier this year she faced an unusual challenge when she was approached by the Washington Jewish Music Festival to score a 1918 feature-length silent film called “The Yellow Ticket.” Unlike other scoring jobs, where her focus was mainly on heightening viewers’ experience of…
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Culture Looking Back: January 4, 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 After hearing screams coming from a hut on the lake in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, a boy ran to a nearby police officer and told him something was wrong. The officer ran to the hut, where he found a young woman who had been shot three times in the back and once…
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Books Author Blog: Speaking Backwards
Earlier, Harry Brod wrote about a couple of sayings with which he disagrees and why he always has a valid passport. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: I’ve been told that…
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The Schmooze Translation Contest to Honor Abraham Sutzkever
Summer Literary Seminars has announced its Abraham Sutzkever Translation Prize, marking the centennial of the birth of one of the most acclaimed Yiddish poets of the 20th century. “To me, he is the leading Yiddish poet, the epitome of Yiddish literature in the 20th century,” Mikhail Iossel said of Sutzkever. Iossel, a Soviet émigré and…
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Culture When To Call a Schmuck a Schmuck
What or who is a Schmuck anyway?
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Culture Looking Back: December 28, 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 Each Friday evening in Manhattan, Nathan Friedman preaches against the “sinful Jews.” Formerly a Jew himself, Friedman is a missionary who invites Jews into his little storefront church and attempts to get them to convert to Christianity. When 17-year-old Paulina Rothberg stood outside Friedman’s church on a recent Friday night, she…
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