This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Few people know that Long Island was once a national center of duck farming with hundreds of active poultry farms. Digging through Purim issues of yesteryear our archivist Chana Pollack recently came upon this amusing ad that ran in The Forward on March 5th, 1925, telling Jewish…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Badkhonem, traditional Eastern-European Jewish wedding entertainers who are part clown, part master of ceremonies and part musical entertainment, are a rare sight these days outside of the Hasidic world. So where should you study if you’d like to learn to be a Badkhn today? Apparently Germany. The…
How was the historic Forward Building built?
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. When I got married, I decided to speak Yiddish to my children, and not just any Yiddish, but my husband’s “haimish Yiddish”; in other words – Hasidic Yiddish. I was able to carry out my plan quickly since I was marrying a divorced father of three, so…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The Jews of Uchanie, my father’s shtetl in Lublin province, used to say about the Jews of Wojslawice just down the road, that they were meshumodim. Turncoats. What worse epithet could you hurl at a fellow Jew? Slawek Nowodworski, the translator/genealogist my son and I hired in…
Be sure to take a piece before it cools: fluden is even tastier when still warm from the oven.
A former Catholic schoolboy in Memphis, Tennessee, describes how Yiddish became an important part of his life.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the final countdown before the election, Ruchie Freier was still uncertain whether she would win the race for Civil Court Judge. But win she did, and starting in January 2017, she’ll become the first Hasidic woman ever elected to this high position. Sipping hot tea with…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The archivist Rose Klepfisz died in her apartment in the Bronx on March 23rd at the age of 102. She is survived by her daughter, Irena Klepfisz, a writer and professor at Barnard College, as well as by relatives in Australia and admirers in Bundist circles and…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. I recently gave a talk about the history of the Forward at Yiddish New York, a festival of Jewish culture that was held in Lower Manhattan. The Forward’s archivist Chana Pollack helped me to locate items of historical interest to show during my presentation. Among the various…
In 1996, Asher Abramovitz, the longtime principal of Kinneret Day School, a non-denominational community school in Riverdale, New York, received an unusual proposition: Aaron Frank, the 27 year-old assistant rabbi of a local Orthodox synagogue, offered to meet weekly with the school’s mostly non-observant eighth graders to chat about Jewish ethics and philosophy, a sort…
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