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 Her Husband Is Not a Mensch
In April 1907, a frazzled Forverts reader wrote in to the newspaper’s advice column, the Bintel Brief, entreating the editor “not to write which city this comes from.” Her life, she wrote, is terrible. Her husband is “truly not a mensch.” What should she do? Liana Finck reimagines this story in graphic form as part…
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Culture Looking Back: June 1, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward Through an advertisement he placed in the Forverts, Berel Cohn found his father, Avrom Yingerman, whom he hasn’t seen in 25 years. Yingerman, who hails from the Polish town Brisk, divorced his wife 25 years ago and left her and their three children in Poland. He went to New…
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The Schmooze Q&A: Taylor Mac on Fabulous Tenement Songs
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…
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The Schmooze Law and Order: Special Yiddish Unit
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…
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The Schmooze Slideshow: Yiddish Communist Magazines
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…
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Culture Looking Back: May 25, 2012
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…
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The Schmooze Yiddish Poems From Daughter to Mother
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…
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News Love and Translation
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…
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