Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the Yiddish language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews in Europe and still spoken by many Hasidic Jews today.
For more stories on Yiddishkeit, see Forverts in English, and for stories written in…
Yiddish
The Latest
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Yiddish World The Yiddish professor and female Orthodox rabbi sharing Yiddish children’s literature with the world
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…
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Yiddish World Reclaiming my great-great-grandfather’s prayer book and the Yiddish world he lived in
Read this article in Yiddish June 2020 through August 2021 was supposed to be a gap year for me as I moved from my undergraduate to graduate studies. I didn’t plan for the pandemic, let alone its impact on my Jewish, scholarly and music communities. We were all forced to adapt to online formats, reshaping…
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Culture In this classic Jewish children’s book, a Yiddish-speaking dog learns to reject racism
As America continues its intensified reckoning with questions of racial justice, parents and educators are keenly aware of the need to speak to children about race in ways that feel authentic and relatable. The Jewish community can look to Yiddish literature for models of antiracist storytelling that took shape long before the storied alliances of…
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Yiddish World How this NYC high school student came to Yiddish
Read this article in Yiddish To be honest, I was never interested in learning Yiddish. Before the pandemic, it was a dead language to me, something that my parents and grandparents spoke, and before that – my great-grandparents. I have Israeli family, so Hebrew is familiar to me. Yiddish is not. I could understand enough…
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Yiddish World Feeling at home in my Yiddish-speaking bubble
The ten students in my Yiddish class are of differing political persuasions but we're united in our love of the language.
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Yiddish World A side of my father – the Yiddish poet, Wolf Younin – that few people saw
Read this article in Yiddish Wolf Younin, whose yortsayt was this week, was a Yiddish poet, folklorist, book collector and columnist for several Yiddish newspapers, including the Forverts. A number of his poems were set to music and because they sound so much like folk songs, few people know he wrote them. One of these…
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Yiddish World The “golden age” of Yiddish-speaking criminals
Read this article in Yiddish. Jewish crime ain’t what it used to be. In 1908, New York Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham caused a scandal when he asserted in an article in the North American Review that half the city’s criminals were Jews. The Jewish community was outraged and Bingham was forced to retract his statement….
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Culture Today’s Google Doodle has a Yiddish soundtrack
Today’s Google Doodle offers an interactive ode to swing dance — and a bisl Yiddish. Please let me explain. If you visit the search engine today, you’ll find an image of dancers in Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, and, if you click, you’ll hear a jazzy instrumental version of the classic “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn.” The tune,…
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