Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, the co-creators and stars of the online Yiddish-language sitcom “YidLife Crisis” have been on a roll in the past few months. The comedic duo was recently nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for best original digital media series and has taken their act on the road, performing a live version…
In 1996, Asher Abramovitz, the longtime principal of Kinneret Day School, a non-denominational community school in Riverdale, New York, received an unusual proposition: Aaron Frank, the 27 year-old assistant rabbi of a local Orthodox synagogue, offered to meet weekly with the school’s mostly non-observant eighth graders to chat about Jewish ethics and philosophy, a sort…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In November of 2015, Geza Rohrig, the 48 year-old Hungarian-born lead actor of “Son of Saul,” an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, had an unexpectedly poignant moment. In the film, Rohrig plays a member of the Sonderkommando, the units of Jewish male prisoners in the…
With the arrival of Hanukkah comes the reemergence of dreidels from closets, drawers and cupboards. These tops are a beloved part of the holiday — but where did they actually come from? Like many things in Jewish history, the story that most of us heard about dreidels as children is entirely ahistorical. There were no…
Ever since the beginning of the klezmer revival in the 1970s, music critics and musicians have wondered just how close to its European roots the music they were performing is. The musicians of the 1970s had access to only two sources from which to learn: the few still-living musicians, such as clarinetist Dave Tarras, and…
A version of this article first appeared in Yiddish in the Forverts For years, the Beth Hamedrash Hagadol of Washington Heights, a large 99-year old Orthodox synagogue on 175th Street and Wadsworth Avenue, had barely been able to attract a minyan, the quorum of ten men required for worship. The 6 or 7 gray-haired veterans…
The largest Yiddish cultural festival since the 1930s is coming to New York. Kulturfest: The First Chana Mlotek International Festival of Jewish Performing Arts, of which the Forward is a media sponsor, will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene with a weeklong series of Jewish music, theater, film and art events….
Imagine if a quiz on a popular website asked “How Much Spanish Do You Know?” and then proceeded to provide its readers with a list of words alternating between misspelled Spanish curses, some real words that weren’t actually Spanish and pure gibberish. It’s hard to imagine such a quiz being published outside of the realm…
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