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 Forverts in English, and for stories written in…
Yiddish
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Culture Yoshke of Nazareth
Henry Sapoznik, director of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at the University of Wisconsin, has taken me to task for writing in my July 27 column that the song “Yoshke Fort Avek” was written by the Yiddish performer Aaron Lebedeff during the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. Lebedeff, Mr. Sapoznik writes, had nothing to do with…
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Culture Looking Back: August 10, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward Has anybody seen Abie Levitt’s wife? The Levitts moved with their son to Portland, Ore., from New York a few years ago. Not long after, Rosie Levitt started making noises about how the family should move back to New York. Abie didn’t want to go back — he was…
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Culture Looking Back: August 3, 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 — Joseph Sidernscher, better known as Whitey Lewis, was arrested as an accomplice in the murder of Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal. Initially it appeared that Lewis had a watertight alibi, but after a few hours in police custody, he appeared distressed, as the police were able to link him to the two…
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News Learning Yiddish on the Farm
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…
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Opinion More Than Just a Farm
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…
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News Bon Voyage for Jews
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…
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Culture Interfaith Insults
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,…
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Culture Looking Back: July 20, 2012
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…
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