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,…
Leana Jelen, a native Yiddish-speaker who works as a sign-language interpreter, visited the Forverts’ studio to talk about her love of languages and what she enjoys about sign language interpretation. Last fall Jelen starred in a series of Yiddish joke videos produced by the Forverts.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. This summer marks 50 years since the iconic Woodstock Music Festival, a joyous, muddy event that took place on a farm in the Catskill Mountains. The festival, which attracted more than 400,000 people over three days in August 1969, aimed to spread a message of love and…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Elie Wiesel’s novel “Night,” the original Yiddish title of which translated to “And the World Remained Silent,” is the single best-known book about the Holocaust. It’s studied today in American schools, and for many readers it’s the only source they have on Holocaust history. But in the…
Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz demonstrate how to braid your challah several different ways.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. On May 13th, a tragedy occurred in Boro Park that shook the local Jewish community and sent shockwaves around the Orthodox Jewish world: A 23-year-old Hasidic man set himself on fire in his car. After the tragedy the directors of 1225, a drop-in center for Hasidic youth…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. I began meeting with “Yehoshua” three years ago to talk about his experience with lifelong mental illness. He was an ideal informant. No subject was off-limits — not family, marriage, work, religion, sexuality or addiction. As a peer counselor for the past eight years with a Bronx-based…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the summer of 2012 Aaron Tessler, a student at Johns Hopkins University, visited his grandmother Rachel Tessler in Tel Aviv. A 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, Mrs. Tessler regaled her grandson with stories of her childhood in the Transylvanian village of Romuli. Although Romuli, located in Bistrita-Nasaud County,…
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