Jordan Kutzik is the deputy editor of the Yiddish Forward. Contact him at [email protected].
Jordan Kutzik
By Jordan Kutzik
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Yiddish World 120 Years of the Forverts: Pogrom Refugees Desperately Seeking Relatives in America
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…
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The Schmooze 2016, As Told Through Yiddish Curses
In a previous article I explained how people misuse Yiddish and Yiddish curses in American English. Though written to accurately reflect the correct form of Yiddish curses, the following are not meant in any way to poke fun of or make light of the sad events and tragedies of the past twelve months. Rather they…
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The Schmooze Why Don’t People Use Yiddish Curses Properly, in English?
As often happens when a popular Yiddish-related article is making the rounds, I received multiple Facebook messages asking what I thought of Gersh Kuntzman’s article in the New York Daily News declaring “farkakt” the best word to describe 2016. I wasn’t impressed. Kuntzman’s article is a pretty typical example of what I, for lack of…
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Culture Bringing Jewish Music Back From the Ashes of Kristallnacht
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. When Hirsch Lewin was deported from Germany in 1940 after six months of suffering in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he could not have imagined that seventy-six years later, musicians in Berlin would release an album of the music he had produced. Even when Lewin founded his record…
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The Schmooze WATCH: Amazing Yiddish Rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’
Leonard Cohen died exactly a year ago on November 7, 2016. In honor of his yarzheit, or the anniversary of his death, the Forward is proud to reprise this story and video of an amazing version of ‘Hallelujah’ in Yiddish. The Berlin-based singer-songwriter and “punk-Klezmer” musician Daniel Kahn is one of the most innovative performers…
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News The Jewish Education of Jessye Stein — on a South Dakota Indian Reservation
One day, Jessye Stein, a computer teacher on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, was trying to persuade a student to return to his Lakota language class when the young man suddenly posed an unexpected question. “He asked me where I come from, where my people come from and what my ancestral language…
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Culture A Concert of Talented Men
Last year Yiddish Soul was the highlight of the Folksbiene’s Kulturfest, a festival that featured hundreds of performances over eight packed days and attracted tens of thousands of attendees. At the time, I wrote in the Yiddish Forward that this high-profile concert of Hasidic and cantorial music, presented as part of SummerStage in Central Park,…
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Opinion Why Jews Need To Recognize the Armenian Genocide Once and for All
Imagine that you’re walking in Manhattan a few days before Holocaust Memorial Day and see five airplanes skywriting in massive letters that the Holocaust was a hoax. How would you feel? Imagine that you later find out that a full-page advertisement had run the same day in the Washington Post explaining that although some Jews…
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