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 Yiddish Duolingo Dialect Question a Subject of Great Interest
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s not every day that Yiddish dialectology becomes the subject of intense debate on Facebook and Twitter. But that’s just what happened recently when the creators of Duolingo Yiddish turned to the public to vote on how the language ought to be pronounced in their new course….
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Yiddish World 10,000 Yiddish Books Now Fully Searchable Online
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. After years of work by a small team of linguists, computer programmers, and volunteer editors, visitors to the Yiddish Book Center’s website can now search millions of pages of digitized Yiddish books with the aid of a newly launched computer program. The program, Jochre, allows users to…
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Yiddish World How ‘YidLife Crisis’ Tackled Anti-Semitism
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…
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Yiddish World “In the Wild Forest” – A Yiddish Song from Romania, Revived
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the summer of 2012 Aaron Tessler, a student at Johns Hopkins University, visited his grandmother Rachel Tessler in Tel Aviv. A 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, Mrs. Tessler regaled her grandson with stories of her childhood in the Transylvanian village of Romuli. Although Romuli, located in Bistrita-Nasaud County,…
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Yiddish World Watch A Six-Year-Old Yiddish Speaker Imitate The Forverts’s Cooking Show
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Tzina Schulman, daughter of Yiddish educator Asya Vaisman Schulman and literary translator and KlezKanada director Sebastian Schulman, will soon turn seven. A child with many talents, she not only speaks Yiddish, English and Russian, but is also learning French and Hebrew at a Jewish day school in…
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Culture WATCH: The Musical Legacy Of Velvel Pasternak
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s no exaggeration to say that the renaissance of traditional Eastern-European Jewish music of the 1970s and 1980s would have never occurred without the work of the ethnomusicologist and musician Velvel Pasternak, who died on June 11th. The dozens of books of Jewish music released by his…
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Culture The Extraordinary Life Of Leopold Kozlowski, The Last Klezmer Of Galicia
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Leopold Kozlowski, the last active musician to have grown up playing traditional Jewish music in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, died March 12 in Krakow at the age of 100. A world-renowned expert on Jewish music and a teacher who trained generations of klezmer musicians and Yiddish…
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Yiddish World How Paul Robeson Learned Yiddish And Battled Fascism
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. And in English February 21, 2018. The Forward is republishing April 9, 2019 in honor of Robeson’s 121st birthday. The American singer Paul Robeson is mostly remembered today for his hauntingly beautiful bass voice, his groundbreaking career as an actor and his political activism and involvement in…
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