Jordan Kutzik is the deputy editor of the Yiddish Forward. Contact him at [email protected].
Jordan Kutzik
By Jordan Kutzik
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News How Do You Talk Dirty in Yiddish?
Have you ever wondered how you might say “quickie” in Yiddish? Or maybe “sugar daddy” or “one-night stand”? You wouldn’t be the first. In 60 years of researching the Yiddish language, linguist Mordkhe Schaechter collected vocabulary on every aspect of human life and developed vocabulary lists for many specialized subjects not covered in detail by…
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Opinion Alexander Imich, Czar’s Last Bar Mitzvah Boy
Alexander Imich at 111 years old / Guinness Book of World Records Ray Bradbury, in his classic 1955 story “The Last, the Very Last,” has a child encounter a 108-year-old man believed to be the last known Civil War veteran. The story, reworked as a chapter in his novel Dandelion Wine, introduces the veteran to…
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Opinion Trying To Prove a Palestinian Died? Good Luck.
In college I had a Palestinian friend who, due to her ethnically ambiguous appearance, was often asked about her heritage. She would sometimes answer the invasive question by stating “I’m 95% Palestinian and I think about 5% squirrel or perhaps raccoon.” After hearing that line three or four times I decided to ask her why…
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Opinion What Nazi Shootings Tell Me About West Bank Killings
Watching horrifying tapes of Nazi executions can tell us a lot about the authenticity of a video depicting the killings of two Palestinian teens in the West Bank While studying Yiddish in Lithuania during the summer of 2008 my fellow students and I visited Ponar, the site where 100,000 people, including nearly an entire branch…
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Culture The Last Living Yiddish Speaker in Lviv
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. During an emotional scene in the new documentary film “Boris Dorfman: A Mentsh,” the 90-year-old Dorfman stands in a forest near Rudno, Ukraine, at the spot where the Germans murdered the last surviving Jews from the Lviv ghetto in June of 1943. Near a memorial-marker that he…
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The Schmooze Yiddish Book Center to Receive National Award
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish [here.][1] On April 24 Yiddish Book Center founder and president Aaron Lansky announced that his organization will receive the National Medal for Museum and Library Service. The award will be presented by First Lady Michelle Obama in a ceremony at the White House on May 8. The…
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Opinion Who Counts as a Holocaust Survivor?
At 111, Dr. Alexander Imich may be the oldest living Holocaust survivor. / YouTube As a writer for a Yiddish newspaper and as a Yiddish translator, I spend a lot of time working with Holocaust survivors and their writings. I’ve spent upwards of 1000 hours conducting oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors and translating Holocaust…
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Culture A Glimpse of Jewish Warsaw
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here Menachem Kipnis is known to Jewish history as a cultural figure who worked across several fields. Born in Uzhmir, Ukraine in 1878, Kipnis distinguished himself as a singer, ethnomusicologist and journalist. As a singer he was the first Jewish tenor in the Warsaw Opera (1902-1918) and…
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