Yiddish World
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The 20 best Yiddish words for discussing 2020
Click to hear this article read aloud. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought us many challenges. But ironically, it’s also helped make 2020 a great year for learning Yiddish. The annual YIVO Yiddish summer program had so many registrants this summer — 60% more than last year — that administrators had to scramble to schedule more…
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The magic of Kadya Molodwsky’s children’s poetry – now in English
Read this article in Yiddish A new bilingual edition of Kadya Molodowsky’s enchanting Yiddish children’s poetry was recently published in Sweden. Edited and masterfully translated into English by Yaira Singer, “Through an Endless Stretch of Land” makes some of the most popular classic Yiddish children’s poetry available to a wider audience. Kadya Molodowsky (1894-1975), a…
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A new look at the Yiddish literature that flourished in Weimar Berlin
Read this article in Yiddish Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism Marc Caplan Indiana University Press, $40, 394 PP The brief but lively and productive Berlin period in the history of modern Yiddish culture is a special source of interest for contemporary researchers. Out of a melting pot of various languages, styles and…
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What is Der Blatt, the Hasidic newspaper that hid news of a massive super-spreader wedding?
Read this article in Yiddish. Most media organizations would jump on the opportunity to expose a massive wedding held in violation of public health measures during the pandemic. New York Hasidic newspaper Der Blatt did the opposite: it hid the news so as not to tip off secular authorities. The wedding of Yoel Teitelbaum, grandson…
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Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s zeyde was noted Yiddish writer
Read this article in Yiddish. Sure, you might have known that Antony Blinken, President-elect Joe Biden’s selection for U.S. Secretary of State, has a band — but did you know that his great-grandfather, Meir Blinken, was a Yiddish writer? The Ukraine-born elder Blinken, whose Yiddish nom de plume was B. Mayer and who was buried…
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A deep-dive into the issue of gender in Yiddish literature
Read this article in Yiddish. Women, Men and Books: Issues of Gender in Yiddish Discourse Gennady Estraikh, Mikhail Krutikov (Editors) Legenda, $99, 206 PP “Historically, the gender division in Yiddish was arguably the strongest among European languages.” So begins co-editor Mikhail Krutikov’s introduction to the new book, Women, Men and Books – “Issues of Gender…
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WATCH: A powerful song by a young woman who left the Hasidic world behind
Read this article in Yiddish. Although there have been a number of new Yiddish songs recorded in the past couple of years, it‘s rare to see songs written by women who have left the Hasidic community. Hannah Gee was raised Hasidic but decided early on that this wasn’t the life for her. Yet, in contrast…
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Why the exhibit on the Warsaw Jewish quarter, Muranow, is so good
When I first heard that Warsaw’s Polin Museum had an exhibit about Muranow, the former Jewish quarter of the Polish capital, my first instinct was to buy a ticket to Warsaw – until I remembered that we’re in the midst of an epidemic. Although I live in Israel, Muranow has become very familiar to me…
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Podcast: A Jewish revolutionary tells her story
Read this article in Yiddish The Yiddish Book Center recently launched a unique podcast in which the actress, translator and Yiddish theater scholar Caraid O’Brien reads her own translation of the memoirs of a Russian revolutionary. The program, “The Last Maximalist,” recalls the extraordinary early years of Klara Klebanova, a Jewish girl who left her…
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Books Yiddish culture barely touched upon in ‘The New Jewish Canon’
Read this article in Yiddish What were the most important Jewish texts of the last 40 years? What did the Jewish opinion-makers have to say about the most important issues of Jewish survival? Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire Sufrin attempt to answer these questions in a collection of 70 selected documents called “The New Jewish Canon:…
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