This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. from LOGTV FILMS on Vimeo. A new documentary film, “Still Life in Lodz,” by Polish-Jewish film director Slawomir Grunberg, portrays four generations of Jewish life in Lodz through the perspective of a still-life painting that belonged to a Jewish family and hung in their apartment from the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. This week, mazel tovs are echoing in Yiddish social media over the news that klezmer musician Daniel Kahn, star of the hit video of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in Yiddish, and his wife, Yeva Lapsker, a translator and dancer, had their first child in Berlin. The boy was…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The morning after the Jersey City grocery store shooting last week, I waited impatiently to hear details about the victims and how the Hasidic community was coping with the tragedy. According to news sources, the fifty boys in the school right next door to the store laid…
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 Latkes were not originally made with potatoes.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 In Eastern Europe, these pancakes were originally made of quark cheese and buckwheat.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….
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