Read this story in Yiddish Who doesn’t sometimes feel like telling about the seders of his childhood, the seders of his home. And I too have a story to share and I will try to do it here. Both my mother and father were poets – at least in small measure. And whose mother and…
Click to hear this article read aloud. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought us many challenges. But ironically, it’s also helped make 2020 a great year for learning Yiddish. The annual YIVO Yiddish summer program had so many registrants this summer — 60% more than last year — that administrators had to scramble to schedule more…
Read this article in Yiddish. This week marks the 250th anniversary of what is believed to be the birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the most influential composers of all time, and a favorite among the Jews in Eastern Europe. Beethoven’s popular “Moonlight Sonata,” for example, is the topic of a wonderful children’s tale…
Read this article in Yiddish Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism Marc Caplan Indiana University Press, $40, 394 PP The brief but lively and productive Berlin period in the history of modern Yiddish culture is a special source of interest for contemporary researchers. Out of a melting pot of various languages, styles and…
Read this article in Yiddish What were the most important Jewish texts of the last 40 years? What did the Jewish opinion-makers have to say about the most important issues of Jewish survival? Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire Sufrin attempt to answer these questions in a collection of 70 selected documents called “The New Jewish Canon:…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. I only had the opportunity to meet Amos Oz, the distinguished Israeli author who passed away on December 28 at the age of 79, on one occasion. It was in 2004, in Philadelphia. I was then on a Jewish Studies fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, having…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The story of the Jews during the Holocaust era is usually divided into that of two zones: the Jewish zone, which includes the ghettos and the camps under the Germans and their allies, and the “free” zone, which includes the territories that were free of Nazi domination….
The works of Yiddish writer and satirist Moyshe Nadir in English translation are gaining a wider audience these days. The newest addition to this growing collection is Nadir’s acerbic comic play “Messiah in America,” translated by Michael Shapiro and published by Farlag. The Yiddish word farlag actually means publishing house. Both the selection of the…
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