This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. When I teach my course on Eastern-European Jewish culture at the University of Michigan, I always ask my students who graduated from Jewish day schools: “What were you taught about the world to come, ghosts, spirits and demons?” I always receive the same reply: “Jews don’t believe…
Many of the Forverts’ Yiddish cooking shows starring Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz, “Eat in Good Health,” can be found on the Forward’s website by clicking here. The rest of the episodes are available on Youtube by clicking here. Another Forverts’ cooking show series, “Timeless Delicacies,” can be viewed on Youtube here.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. More than 40 years ago, ten families founded a Yiddish day school in Melbourne with just 10 children in attendance. Today, Sholem Aleichem College (known simply as “Sholem”) has 300 students and remains the only secular day school in the world where Yiddish is a required daily…
In this episode of “Eat in Good Health”, Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz demonstrate how to make a bialy from scratch the traditional way. Although not as famous as its cousin, the bagel, bialys are a quintessentially Jewish treat. Named after the city of Bialystok, the term originated from the phrase “bialystoker kukhn” (literally: baked-good…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. As many of you know, this has been a challenging year for us here at the Forverts – most notably, because we had to end our printed edition which had been the cornerstone of our newspaper since its founding in 1897, and transform ourselves into a purely…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2010) was undoubtedly one of the most important Yiddish writers after the Holocaust. A new collection of her essays, has just arrived. The book, Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays, was translated into English by her daughter Goldie Morgentaler and published by McGill-Queens…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The 1980s marked the peak of a bizarre and often disturbing television trend: the “very special episode.” Such episodes featured tragic events intruding upon the usually idyllic world of evening sitcoms. “Very special episodes” served an overt pedagogical purpose, warning about everything from drunk driving and the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. This summer, my synagogue, Young Israel Ohab Zedek in Riverdale, New York, has embarked on a new adventure, completely renovating and expanding its building in order to accommodate the growing number of young Jewish families moving into north Riverdale and south Yonkers. Gazing at the large, wooden…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. “In the 1890s, writers of Yiddish melodramas simply took famous, successful American popular songs and set Yiddish texts to their melodies,” N.B. Minkov wrote in “Pionern fun der Yidisher Poezye in Amerike,” or “Pioneers of Jewish Poetry in America” (1956). “This was a big hit with the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Whenever I see an announcement for the latest exhibit at the Neue Galerie, a New York museum of German and Austrian Art, I’m reminded of the nearly four decades (1955-1994) when the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research had its home in that same Upper East Side townhouse….
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The poem, written in Yiddish by Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, was translated by Zackary Sholem Berger. A Picture of September Twelfth In the spitefully beautiful day you hung up a thousand copies of my beautiful photo. Extremely abridged bio, dry statistics, kids on my lap. My smile, eternally warm,…
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