Read this article in Yiddish For the ninth consecutive year the YIVO Institute will hold a series of intensive winter courses with Bard College. Unlike the annual YIVO summer program, which focuses nearly exclusively on Yiddish language and culture, the “Winter Program on Ashkenazi Civilization” includes a wider range of topics. This year, the program…
Read this article in Yiddish One hundred years since first spooking audiences in Eastern Europe, S. An-Sky’s “The Dybbuk” has possessed Zoom and YouTube. In 1920 the Vilna Troupe debuted its legendary production of the most well-known Yiddish play ever staged. Shane Baker, director of the Congress for Jewish Culture had long planned to mark…
Read this article in Yiddish. Yakob Basner may be 93 years-old, but that doesn’t stop him from doing a job he loves: teaching Yiddish. Since immigrating to Southern California from the former Soviet Union in 1980, Basner has taught the mame-loshn to over 2,000 people. “If you want to understand the history of the Jewish…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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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