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
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Culture Looking Back: July 6, 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 Annie Weiss, 16, was dragged before Magistrate Corrigan in Manhattan’s Centre Street Courthouse on the charge that she was the ringleader of a band of young thieves. A few weeks ago, a gang of young boys broke into the Rabinowitz home on 8 Rector Place and stole goods valued at $50….
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Culture Looking Back: June 29, 2011
100 Years Ago 1912 A gang of Italians held a pogrom in Manhattan, on 114th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, during which two Jews were shot and grievously wounded. Both victims, Morris Stromberg and George Pollack, are in critical condition in Harlem Hospital. The previous evening, Pollack, his wife and the couple’s 14 month-old…
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The Schmooze Klezmer Musician Awarded Highest Folk Honor
The National Endowment for the Arts announced today that klezmer clarinetist Andy Statman is among the recipients of its 2012 National Heritage Fellowships. The Brooklyn-based musician will be awarded the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts during a ceremony in the fall. Reached at his home in Midwood, the 61-year-old bluegrass and klezmer…
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The Schmooze Chana Mlotek, Grande Dame of Yiddish Song
Tonight, renowned Yiddish music anthologist Chana Gordon Mlotek will be honored at The National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene’s annual gala for her life’s work preserving Yiddish folklore. Mlotek, the author of nine books on Yiddish music, has an encyclopedic knowledge of her subject. Now 90, she grew up in the Bronx immersed in Yiddish culture. In 1944,…
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The Schmooze Yiddish Opera Singer Anthony Russell
The first time Anthony Russell heard Sidor Belarsky (1898-1975), on the soundtrack for the Coen brothers film “A Serious Man,” he thought it was Paul Robeson singing in Yiddish. Russell, an African-American classically trained operatic bass, wasn’t yet familiar with work of the Ukrainian-American opera singer and conservator of Jewish music, but he was drawn…
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The Schmooze Folksbiene Announces Festival of Jewish Arts
The National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene has announced that it will be creating a new, bi-annual international festival of Jewish performing arts, the New York Times reports. “Kulturfest,” which will also be named after Yiddish preservationist and anthologist Chana Mlotek, will begin in 2015, to coincide with the Folksbiene’s 100th anniversary. It will be officially presented at…
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Culture How To Get a Haircut in Lvov
Herb Hoffman writes: “When as a child I needed a haircut — desperately, according to my mother — she would say, ‘Azoy a shmenge oyf den kopp, a mameshe choprene.’ This always seemed to me more Polish or German than Yiddish. She herself came from Lvov and knew all three languages. What is the derivation?”…
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Culture Looking Back: June 15, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward After Big Jack Zelig, a gangster from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, survived a recent shooting in a gang war between the Jewish gang headed by “Kid Twist” and the Italian gang led by Jack Sirocco, he took the stand to testify against his assailants. In the wake of the…
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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