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,…
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…
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