This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. These days I’ve been thinking of you very much, Bubbe. You left us almost 73 years ago and I still miss you, as well as my youth, when you were my guide, teacher and closest friend. You were the one who taught me what it means to…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Like playing dreidel, the tradition of giving children money (Yiddish: gelt) on Hanukkah is not as old as you think. As Miriam Borden, a Yiddish instructor at Toronto University, wrote last year in the Forward, the tradition is at most several hundred years old. In fact, like…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Latkes were not originally made with potatoes. In fact potatoes didn’t become widely available in Eastern Europe until the 19th century, while latkes harken back to the cuisine of ancient Israel. In Eastern Europe, these pancakes were originally made of quark cheese and buckwheat. A Sephardic equivalent,…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The talented actress Anabela Yaakov died in Tel Aviv on November 21st. She was 78. Anabela, who often appeared with the Israeli Yiddish theater Yiddishpiel, once performed alongside legendary Yiddish comedian Shimon Dzhigan. I first met Anabela when I came to Yiddishpiel with my first play, “Hotel…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. “Gevald!” (For those not in the know, that’s Yiddish for “Help!”) So began a recent message on the Sholem Aleichem Center’s Facebook page, informing fans of the Bronx Yiddish cultural center’s dire need of a new roof. To raise the $20,000 required for the renovation, the Center…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The first step in successfully writing a historical opera is picking a historical figure who can hold the audience’s attention. The opera’s hero needs to have experienced a lot of drama that he can sing about with gusto and pathos; someone who’s played a pivotal role in…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. This week, a newly restored production of the classic Yiddish operetta, “Di Kishefmakherin” (“The Sorceress”), premiered at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. The show, produced by the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, will run till December 29 and is accompanied by English and Russian supertitles….
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s not every day that Yiddish dialectology becomes the subject of intense debate on Facebook and Twitter. But that’s just what happened recently when the creators of Duolingo Yiddish turned to the public to vote on how the language ought to be pronounced in their new course….
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. After three years of hard work and months of beta testing, the League for Yiddish has launched an online version of its popular Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary. Unlike the dictionary’s printed edition, which can only be consulted by looking up English words to find their Yiddish equivalents, the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The Library of Congress in Washington DC, the de-facto national library of the United States, is the largest library in the world. Among the 38 million books, 70 million manuscripts and countless photographs, maps, recordings and letters in its holdings (some 167 million items in total), are…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. After years of work by a small team of linguists, computer programmers, and volunteer editors, visitors to the Yiddish Book Center’s website can now search millions of pages of digitized Yiddish books with the aid of a newly launched computer program. The program, Jochre, allows users to…
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