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Culture Absurdity Returns to Chelm
Because Jewish folk humor depicts Chelm as a town inhabited by naive fools, few people realize that Chelm is actually a real town in Eastern Poland that was once home to 18,000 Jews and was highly regarded as a center of Torah study. Now, a half-century after nearly this whole population perished in the death…
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Culture Northern Exposure: Mameloshn’s Unexpected Fate – in Sweden
In the weeks leading up to Sweden’s national election this month, the government put out public service announcements in the press, encouraging its citizens to vote. But one feature was hardly standard issue: The bulletins informed the readers how to get voting instructions in Yiddish. The bulletins served as a reminder of — or, more…
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Israel News When the Anthem Was in Yiddish
The release last Friday of a Spanish version of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” sparked heated debate on radio talk shows and in the blogosphere. Some pundits took to calling the song “The Illegal Alien Anthem.” Even the president has weighed in on the matter. (He’s opposed.) But as one might expect in a country built…
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News Monthly Publication Sets Sights on Young Readers
most people agree that the future of yiddish depends on cultivating a new generation of young people who speak and read the language. In response to the glaring shortage of contemporary reading material for today’s students of Yiddish, the Forverts has begun publishing a monthly news supplement called Vayter (a synonym for “Forward”), written in…
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News Onetime Lubavitcher Creates New Life Out of Whole Cloth
On a recent Sunday evening at the height of New York’s Fashion Week, the Cafe Deville was bustling. Backstage, beneath the downtown bistro’s dining room, designer Levi Okunov’s latest line of coats hung from a set of racks. A hairdresser and a makeup artist were busy doing up the models according to this year’s theme:…
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News Young Players Step Up to the Plate at Yiddish Week
How do you say “home run” in Yiddish? Just ask the dozens of generation X- and Y-ers who were on the field for a hilke-pilke (softball) game during the annual Yidish-Vokh (Yiddish Week), from August 20 to August 26. Max Kellerman, 30, the boxing analyst and host of ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” took several days…
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News Poles Give Warm Welcome to the Exiled Jews of ’68
In 1963, the same year that Beatle-mania was spreading across Europe, three Jewish students in the Polish city of Szczecin (sh’CHE-chin) started a rock band called The Successors. As the Polish youth began tearing at the seams of the restrictive Communist government, they became more and more attracted to the rock and roll songs written…
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News Sportscaster Max Kellerman Pitches for the Mother Tongue
Last August, at the annual Yugntruf Youth for Yiddish retreat in Copake, N.Y., a bearded father pitched a softball to his developmentally disabled 8-year-old son, accompanying each toss with Yiddish words of encouragement. A young man with spiky hair approached the child and asked, “Vilst ikh zol dir vayzn?” (Do you want me to show…
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