This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Nechama Lifshitz, the popular singer who defied the censors by singing in Yiddish and Hebrew throughout the Soviet Union, serving as a deep inspiration for the so-called Jews of Silence under Communist rule, has died at the age of 89. Nechama Lifshitz was born in Kaunas, Lithuania…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Among the many holidays in the Jewish calendar, May could easily be called Israel Month. It begins with Memorial Day, which commemorates the fallen soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces, and is followed immediately by Yom Haatzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. Several weeks later comes Jerusalem Day, celebrating…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Unlike many American newspapers during World War II, which largely ignored the ongoing Nazi extermination of European Jewry – most notoriously, the New York Times – the Forverts continually printed reports on the Nazi genocide. Despite its prominent coverage in the Forverts, the articles were not always…
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This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Although the sheer brutality of the pogroms has been largely overshadowed by the Holocaust, the massacres of Jews in the Russian Empire before WWI and especially in the postwar chaos surrounding its dissolution (1917-1922) were so well-orchestrated that some modern scholars consider them to have constituted a…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. See the funniest and most touching moments in the video series, as Lipa reacts spontaneously to people and situations as only Lipa can.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A new book describes a surprising phenomenon in Palestine right before the founding of the State of Israel: a burst of literary creativity by respected non-Jewish Polish writers who were stationed in Palestine during World War II. In 1941, soon after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union,…
Some have it sweet but this one is savory!
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. There’s a joke among Hasidim that a boy receives a prayer book in honor of his upsherin (at age three), and a girl receives one for her upsherin as well – when her hair is shaved after marriage. One of the first questions that I asked a…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In addition to the traditional Seders that take place on the first two nights of Passover, Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers have celebrated alternative Yiddish cultural Seders for decades. The most well-known of them, the “Driter Seder” (Third Seder), which takes place during the intermediate days of Passover, was…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Fay Bialowas explains how the farfel was once made from scratch, and then we show you how to prepare it with onions and lima beans.
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