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…
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…
Video: Nate Lavey Goshen, the fabled Egyptian area that the ancient Israelites settled and farmed when famine struck the Holy Land, was so fertile, according to the Bible, that the Israelites multiplied at rates that made the Pharaohs afraid. It?s hard to see Goshen, N.Y., in the foothills of the Catskills, as the locus of…
A few months ago I sent an email to my editor, pitching a story on Yiddish Farm. (That piece is in this week’s paper, and online here.) I didn’t have to make a hard sell. An organic farm, run by 20-something-year-olds, where everyone speaks Yiddish? The piece practically writes itself. Indeed, Yiddish Farm is one…
Victoria Cantor writes: ?Whenever someone embarks on a journey, my cousins all sing a Yiddish song that goes, ?Lumen zikh ke zegena yush ke forte a veck! Hey! Hey! Hey!? Have you any thoughts or ideas as to its origins?? The song Ms. Cantor is thinking of is ?Yoshke Fort Avek,? and the line she…
From Jacob Mendlovic of Toronto comes a letter of complaint about “the intense hostility of Haredim,” or ultra-Orthodox Jews, toward gentiles as manifested in such “Jewish n-words” as sheygets (a non-Jewish boy; from Hebrew shaketz, “abomination”); shikse (a non-Jewish girl); orel (an uncircumcised man) and akum (heathen — a talmudic acronym for ovdey kokhavim u’mazalot,…
100 Years Ago 1912 After dozens of detectives searched high and low for Bronx resident Nathan Schwartz, the main suspect in the murder of 12-year-old Julia Connors, the suspect was found dead from gas asphyxiation in a room on Chrystie Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Disguising himself as Max Hershkovitz and claiming to be…
What’s your socialist bubbe got to do with the Queen of Pop? That’s the question at the heart of “The Material World,” the new Dan Fishback musical headlining this summer’s HOT! Festival at New York City’s Dixon Place. The setting for the show is a dream-world 1920s Bronx boarding house where a family of Russian…
We can now add Kazan, the capital of the Tatarstan Republic in the Russian Federation, to the list of cities that host international Jewish music festivals. Early in June, the city was the site of Tatarstan’s first-ever Jewish music festival, which featured performances by artists from the U.S., Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Austria and Cuba. Tatarstan…
100 Years Ago 1912 Annie Weiss, 16, was dragged before Magistrate Corrigan in Manhattan’s Centre Street Courthouse on the charge that she was the ringleader of a band of young thieves. A few weeks ago, a gang of young boys broke into the Rabinowitz home on 8 Rector Place and stole goods valued at $50….
100% of profits support our journalism