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 Looking Back: September 14, 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 Real estate magnate Harris Diamond, recently retired, had become depressed and pessimistic after the death of his wife. His children tried to cheer him up, but without success. Recently he was found dead in his Manhattan apartment, on Lexington Avenue. His death was a suicide. Diamond had closed all the windows…
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Culture Looking Back: September 7, 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 Everything was set for the forthcoming wedding of Rose Mann and Isadore Schwartz. But then, tragedy struck: Mann was found dead in the Brooklyn apartment she was setting up for the young couple to reside in after their wedding. She had taken her own life by turning on the gas and…
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Culture Looking Back: August 24, 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 According to New York City District Attorney Charles Whitman, detectives have located Louis “Lefty Louie” Rosenberg, who is one of the suspects wanted for the murder of casino owner Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal. The DA told reporters that he anticipates that “Lefty” will be in police custody by the next week. Reporters…
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The Schmooze An Erev Rosh Hashanah Martyr
Hillel Zeitlin (1871-1942), the leading neo-Hasidic thinker in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, was for Hebrew and Yiddish-reading Jews what Martin Buber was for their more westernized German-reading brethren: the person who rendered the passionate religious life of Hasidism accessible to non-Orthodox Jews. A prolific writer and well-known lecturer, teacher and journalist, Zeitlin was one…
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Culture Looking Back: August 17, 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 Police in Newark, N.J., have arrested a number of figures in a major check-kiting scheme. Morris Lubin, Jacob Lubin and Samuel Freedman, all Newark residents, were arrested after being followed by detectives. One of their gang, who apparently noticed the detectives who were tracking them, managed to slip away; the person…
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The Schmooze More Than Just ‘Radio Shmadio’
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Over the years, I’ve attended lots of symposia but never one that began with the ringing of chimes and concluded with a most hearty and prolonged round of applause. These two sounds, along with the sight of presenters swaying to the beat of “Yiddish Melodies in Swing” or singing…
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Culture The Yiddish Quran
There was an unusual event in Haifa the other day. Muhammad Sharif Odeh, the leader of the Israeli community of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, announced the 25th anniversary of an Ahmadiyya-sponsored translation into Yiddish of selections from the Quran. Called by Haifa’s Jewish mayor, Yona Yahav, the “Reform Jews of Islam,” the Ahmadiyyas, who…
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Books Author Blog: Illusions and Remembering
Yesterday, Steve Stern wrote about his decision to teach creative writing in Vilnius. 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 liked to sit sipping coffee in the tall kitchen window of…
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