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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Books Author Blog: A Yiddishist in Vilnius
Steve Stern’s most recent book, “The Book of Mischief,” is now available. 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 had fun in Vilnius, despite my low tolerance for fun. Not to…
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News Tribute to Disappearing Jews of Friesland
When Jacob Nathan de Leeuwe found himself returning nearly two decades ago from his home in a suburb of Amsterdam to this isolated idyll he calls “the end of the world,” it undoubtedly was the pull of his roots. De Leeuwe’s family had lived in this semi-autonomous region in the northern Netherlands known as Friesland…
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Culture The Dybbuks Made Me Do It
If there had been stand-up comedy in the shtetl, “The dybbuk made me do it!” could very well have been a popular catchphrase. The myth of an innocent person turning to evil because a demon has taken possession of his or her body is common to all cultures, but it has deep roots in Jewish…
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Israel News Celebrating 25 Years of Koran in Yiddish
Members of a Muslim sect that translated parts of the Koran into Yiddish are marking 25 years since that translation was published. The president of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Israel, Muhammad Sharif Odeh, said the group translated select parts of the Koran into Yiddish in order to present a different face of Islam. In…
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The Schmooze Radio Days Are Here Again
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Nearly 30 years ago, when musician and musicologist Henry Sapoznik first stumbled across a cache of aluminum transcription disks of Yiddish radio shows from interwar America, little did he suspect that they would find a home at the Library of Congress. Abandoned in an attic, deposited in a dumpster,…
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Culture Neither a Niftar Nor a Nishperer Be
Time to catch up on some mail! Gary J. Frenkel takes issue with my statement in my August 17 column that the name Jesus in Hebrew is Yeshu (a shortened form of Yeshu’a, itself a shortened form of Yehoshua or Joshua). Mr. Frenkel writes: “My understanding is that Yeshu is, not a shortened version of…
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The Schmooze Cursing the GOP in Yiddish
May your son the doctor introduce you to his fiancée, Bristol Palin. May your child give his bar mitzvah speech on the genius of Ayn Rand. May your insurance company decide constipation is a pre-existing condition. It’s not clear who’s behind these Yiddish Curses for Republican Jews. But in just three days, the online phenomenon…
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The Schmooze Yiddish Theater for Smart Alecks
Allan Lewis Rickman likes to say that the best audiences for “The Essence: A Yiddish Theatre Dim Sum” are gentile college students — a demographic that seemed (shockingly!) underrepresented at the show’s opening NYC Fringe Festival performance at the Robert Moss Theater on August 14. More than a few people in this crowd murmured recognition…
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