It’s not your grandparents’ Poland anymore. Or is it?
The late filmmaker Menachem Daum described two Polands in this essay — one of inclusivity, another of ethnic nationalism
Yiddish World
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Queer Yiddish Camp, a new alternative to summer Yiddish intensives
In the last few years, the Yiddish world has seen initiatives like Yiddish Duolingo, Yiddish Harry Potter and Yiddish TikTok attract new generations of Yiddishists. Starting in May, an online summer Yiddish intensive called Queer Yiddish Camp joins this new wave. Summer Yiddish intensives, like those run by YIVO and the Yiddish Book Center, hold…
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Ryback’s art captured Ukrainian shtetl life before it disappeared
As Russia’s bloodletting in Ukraine continues, we have begun sharing stories about the great contribution that Ukrainian Jews have made to our rich Jewish culture and to the world at large. Today we’ll focus on the renowned avant-garde Jewish painter Issachar Ber Ryback, whose lithographs and paintings portrayed traditional Jewish life in the Ukrainian shtetl,…
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The concert that composer Sholem Secunda nearly missed
From the editor: On August 26, 1971, the Forverts published this article in Yiddish by Sholom Secunda, the prolific composer of hits like “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” and “Dona Dona”. In it, he describes why he nearly cancelled going to a concert of his songs, performed by campers at the Yiddish summer camp, Camp Hemshekh….
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Recording an album as an eight-year old girl
One afternoon, when I was eight years old, my father and I traveled by train to a recording studio in Manhattan. My father was the khazn, or cantor, at the Manhattan Beach Jewish Center. We were making a record together with Sholom Secunda, the composer of the song “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn”. The plan was…
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The colorful stories about my ancestor from Uman, Ukraine
In light of the ongoing war in Ukraine, I’d like to share a little bit of our own family history during a period when Ukraine had hundreds of thriving Jewish communities. Growing up in Detroit, I heard many stories of what life was like for my family in dreym (in the old country) in Uman,…
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VIDEO: Learn why dumplings are a Purim tradition
Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz demonstrate how to make this tasty dish the way East European Jews did it for centuries and explain why it’s a Purim specialty.
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Growing up, as a biracial child, with survivor grandparents
Kyla Kupferstein Torres, whose mother was Black Jamaican, describes how her father's parents helped form her Jewish identity
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Growing up as a young Jewish girl in the Ukrainian countryside
This is one in a series of stories submitted by readers about their ancestors’ experiences growing up in Ukraine, during a time when it was a thriving center of Jewish life. My grandmother, Perl (we called her Paula) Braver or Braverman, was a fair-haired, blue-eyed woman who usually wore her long hair in braids atop…
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Heirloom: A blouse made of fabric hidden from the Nazis
This story is part of the Forverts series, “Our Favorite Heirlooms.” My favorite heirloom is a blouse that my mother made with fabric that she had hidden from the Nazis before being deported to the notorious Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland. Before the war, my mother lived in Radom, Poland, a…
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Why I think Putin Bombed Babyn Yar
On March 1, 2022, artillery shells fired by the Russian Army in Ukraine fell in and near Babyn Yar (also known as Babi Yar), the Holocaust’s largest mass grave. On September 29-30, 1941, led by the SS commanders, a large number of Einsatzgruppen, Wehrmacht and German police units as well as Ukrainian collaborators combined to…
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