My obsession with my Hasidic father’s handwritten letters
His letters were remarkably similar to those I wrote as a teen: petty gossip among friends, misunderstandings, pranks, but also deep friendship.
His letters were remarkably similar to those I wrote as a teen: petty gossip among friends, misunderstandings, pranks, but also deep friendship.
The war in Ukraine recalls Avrom Reyzen’s story about a Jew who’s worried that ammunition he's helping create might kill his own brother.
An audio recording of 12 Yiddish writers reading their works, accompanied by English translations, is now available. The recording can be ordered either as a digital download or as two CDs (or both), and comes with a book that includes the readings in Yiddish and in English, as well as a biography of each writer…
Samuel J. Spinner Jewish Primitivism Stanford University Press, 272 pp. According to the Russian־Jewish art critic, Abram Efros (1888-1954), modern Jewish art needs to embody two principles: European modernism and Jewish folk art. In his article, “Aladdin’s Magic Lantern,” Efros wrote that “the face of modernism is turned outwards, while folk art turns inward.” Efros’…
Read this article in Yiddish A classic Yiddish book about a child of divorce has now been republished in a bilingual edition. The story, Between Parents, by the Yiddish essayist and journalist, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, describes the experiences of a young boy in Warsaw after his parents get divorced. The book was first published in…
Read this article in Yiddish A jack of many trades is sometimes a master of them all Speaking with Miriam Udel, the Yiddish professor at Emory University in Atlanta who is reacquainting the world with Yiddish children’s literature, you quickly notice something remarkable. In one moment she sounds like a literary scholar and in the…
The ten students in my Yiddish class are of differing political persuasions but we're united in our love of the language.
An artful online video adaptation of Sholem Asch’s groundbreaking 1906 Yiddish play, “God of Vengeance”, is now streaming through May 31, 2021. The 100-minute video is in English. The play, known in Yiddish as “Got fun nekome”, tells the story of a seemingly observant Jewish couple and their daughter Rivkeleh who live upstairs in their…
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