This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The Yiddish Forward is producing a series of classic Yiddish jokes presented in Yiddish by Leana Jelen, a young Yiddish-speaking sign-language interpreter. In this classic a young bride starts off her relationship with her mother-in-law on an unusual note.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. As editor of the Forverts, most of the questions I get from readers involve either the price of an obituary or a request to decipher a handwritten postcard written by a deceased relative. Recently, though, I got an email with a very different sort of question: “I’d…
This video by Yiddish Forverts editor-in-chief Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. I love to watch Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz create classic Jewish dishes, taking us through the recipes step by step in Yiddish (with English subtitles). The way they cook and the foods they prepare take me right…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The legendary actor Fyvush Finkel, who got his start in Yiddish theater and later made the transition to the English stage and television, died a little over a year ago. The last surviving star of the heyday of America’s Yiddish theater, he was still performing only weeks…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. S. Y. Stupnitsky, a forgotten twentieth-century Jewish journalist, made a prescient observation about the great historic Jewish structures in Europe: “Jews built them, and today non-Jews possess them.” Stupnitsky’s words certainly ring true about Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin, the educational brainchild of Meir Shapiro, a Polish rabbi who…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. He took up this thread when he called Miriam the shadchan’te the next morning. “I am still not sure about the way she looks,” Yankel told her. “I have no way of knowing. I can’t even remember from date to date what she looks like. I don’t think I…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Three Cities of Yiddish: St. Petersburg—Warsaw—Moscow. Edited by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov. Oxford: Legenda, 2017, 201 pages The British book series “Studies in Yiddish,” published by Legenda (and known among academics as “the Legenda series”), is in my estimation the most important venue for contemporary research…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A strand of DNA is a lot like computer software; it’s the blueprint for the complex computations that cells perform, and like a coding error in a computer program, a single mutation—either a deletion, insertion, or duplication—to the strand can cause cells to malfunction. But DNA doesn’t…
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