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…
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…
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