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…
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…
Since moving to Manhattan to launch his performing career 17 years ago, composer, playwright and actor Taylor Mac has graced stages from Sydney to Spoleto to San Francisco. But the Obie Award-winning artist has never been invited to perform uptown — until now. On May 24, at The JCC in Manhattan, Mac will premiere “Sleep…
So, you think there isn’t much work out there in the public sector for Yiddish speakers, right? Well, think again. If you just happen to speak the mameloshn and have always wanted to serve the public, then there’s a job for you. It seems the police department in Israel’s capital is looking for native Yiddish…
In conjunction with its conference on “Jews and the Left” (see our story here), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has prepared an outstanding exhibition called “Shades of Red: Yiddish Left-Wing Press in America,” curated by Krysia Fisher and on view until September, 2012. Among the highlights of the exhibition is a series of arresting…
100 Years Ago in the Forward Twenty-five-year-old Brooklyn resident Rose Moscowitz shot and killed her husband, Morris Moscowitz, after he tried to force her to become a prostitute. Moscowitz was initially a packer at a cigar factory, and her wages weren’t enough for her husband. He told her that he wanted her to sell her…
Sheva Zucker’s late mother Miriam was still attending a women’s Yiddish reading group in Winnipeg until just a few months before she died last January at age 97. So, even before her mother passed away, Zucker knew what the best way would be to memorialize her. “My mother was never a shul-goer, and davening is…
My mother and I used to fight about translation. These were not genteel disagreements but passionate, intemperate shouting matches. She would say: “That’s not what I meant! You twisted my words. Why can’t you just translate what I wrote?” I would say: “Because it’s not English; you can’t say that in English!” Or, “It’s too…
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. Over the last three years many Yiddish cultural organizations in New York have relocated to new homes. The Forverts and the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring sold their building on East 33rd Street in Manhattan and their tenants, including the League for Yiddish, the Folksbiene National Yiddish Theater, Yugntruf–Youth…
Since 2005, the New Worlds Theatre Project has been presenting classic Yiddish drama in English translation. This season they’re presenting a new English translation of H. Leivick’s 1921 play “Shmates,” here called “Welcome to America,” a naturalistic drama about the corrosive effects of American capitalism on a traditional Jewish immigrant family. In the notes to…
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