This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In July, Israel’s National Authority for Yiddish Culture launched the first government-sponsored Yiddish-language writing contest ever held in the Jewish state. This week, the authority announced the three winners. Ethel Niborski, age 17, won first prize for her short story “Letters to a Blind Grandfather,” for which…
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…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Adah Hetko is a Yiddish singer who adapts classic songs from the collections of ethnomusicologists such as Ruth Rubin and gives them a modern feel. In this recording, produced by the Forverts, she performs her take on the folk song “In Droysn Iz Fintster” (“It’s Dark Outside”)…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. This summer, my synagogue, Young Israel Ohab Zedek in Riverdale, New York, has embarked on a new adventure, completely renovating and expanding its building in order to accommodate the growing number of young Jewish families moving into north Riverdale and south Yonkers. Gazing at the large, wooden…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. “In the 1890s, writers of Yiddish melodramas simply took famous, successful American popular songs and set Yiddish texts to their melodies,” N.B. Minkov wrote in “Pionern fun der Yidisher Poezye in Amerike,” or “Pioneers of Jewish Poetry in America” (1956). “This was a big hit with the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Whenever I see an announcement for the latest exhibit at the Neue Galerie, a New York museum of German and Austrian Art, I’m reminded of the nearly four decades (1955-1994) when the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research had its home in that same Upper East Side townhouse….
Editor’s Note: During the Peekskill riots, in late August, 1949, a violent KKK and fascist mob attacked attendees of a planned concert by Paul Robeson in Westchester County, New York. The violence spread outward, and a number of black and Jewish residents of New York City and Westchester were injured. The following is a translation…
Dr. Hershl Glasser, a Yiddish scholar, lexicographer and Forverts contributor, visited the Forverts’ studio to discuss the history of standard Yiddish pronunciation and to explain why he champions it despite objections from many Yiddish speakers.
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