Hasidic pop star Lipa Schmeltzer recently delivered a pair of newly-designed silver yarmulkes for President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle. The gift was the culmination of a promise he had made to the First Couple last Hanukkah, after the annual candlelighting ceremony at the White House, where the singer had been invited to perform….
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…
Two Yiddish-language theatrical productions, “Toyt fun a Salesman” and “The Golden Bride,” have been nominated in several categories for the Drama Desk awards. “Toyt fun a Salesman,” a translation of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” produced by the New Yiddish Rep, was nominated for Outstanding Revival of a Play, and its lead actor, Avi…
When I first saw the short film from Sheffield University featuring Dr. Eran Elhaik claiming that Yiddish has its roots in Turkey, I thought it must be an elaborate ruse, a Sacha Baron Cohen-esque prank to poke fun at the sometimes inane world of academia. But I soon realized that it was, alas, all too…
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. One day shortly after the outbreak of World War I, when Yisrael Kristal was a child, word spread throughout his hometown of Zarnow, about fifty miles from Lodz, that Emperor Franz Joseph was visiting a nearby town. The boy, along with a group of Jews from his…
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…
A version of this article first appeared in Yiddish in the Forverts. In Hamburg, Germany, a group of five 14-year old girls, most of them from Muslim Turkish homes, recently interviewed a Yiddish folksinger and even learned a Yiddish song themselves. The activity was part of Geschichtomat, a project that encourages eighth-graders in this north…
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