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 WATCH: Leana Jelen, Yiddish Comedian, Speaks About Sign Language Interpretation
Leana Jelen, a native Yiddish-speaker who works as a sign-language interpreter, visited the Forverts’ studio to talk about her love of languages and what she enjoys about sign language interpretation. Last fall Jelen starred in a series of Yiddish joke videos produced by the Forverts.
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The Schmooze Judge Judy Schools RuPaul In Yiddish
This is the future that liberals want — a Jewish woman reality TV judge correcting a queer black business tycoon on his use of Yiddish. Judge Judy Sheindlin and RuPaul Charles, known as RuPaul — he’s the ultimate mononym — are one of a kind, having both used reality TV to become icons. For him,…
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The Schmooze Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kate McKinnon Attend ‘Fiddler On The Roof’ In Yiddish
The rabbi, learned and wise, is the most important member of any shtetl. That is, unless Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and “Saturday Night Live” star Kate McKinnon show up. That’s just what happened on Tuesday night at Stage 42, the Off-Broadway theater where the Folksbiene’s celebrated Yiddish-language revival of “Fiddler on the Roof”…
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Yiddish World How Elie Wiesel Became A Surrogate Father For Children Of Survivors
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Elie Wiesel’s novel “Night,” the original Yiddish title of which translated to “And the World Remained Silent,” is the single best-known book about the Holocaust. It’s studied today in American schools, and for many readers it’s the only source they have on Holocaust history. But in the…
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Yiddish World Behind The Scenes On ‘Shtisel,’ Netflix’s Surprise Ultra-Orthodox Hit
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. On a recent Tuesday evening, more than 2,200 fans of the Israeli television show “Shtisel” streamed into Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-el to watch a lively stage discussion with three of the series’s leading actors and its producer. The Israeli drama about an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem, which…
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Yiddish World Watch A Six-Year-Old Yiddish Speaker Imitate The Forverts’s Cooking Show
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Tzina Schulman, daughter of Yiddish educator Asya Vaisman Schulman and literary translator and KlezKanada director Sebastian Schulman, will soon turn seven. A child with many talents, she not only speaks Yiddish, English and Russian, but is also learning French and Hebrew at a Jewish day school in…
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Culture WATCH: The Musical Legacy Of Velvel Pasternak
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s no exaggeration to say that the renaissance of traditional Eastern-European Jewish music of the 1970s and 1980s would have never occurred without the work of the ethnomusicologist and musician Velvel Pasternak, who died on June 11th. The dozens of books of Jewish music released by his…
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Culture Velvel Pasternak, Champion Of Traditional Jewish Music, Dies At 86
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Velvel Pasternak, the publisher, scholar and nonpareil Jewish music historian primarily known for his expertise on the music of Hasidism, has died. He was 86 years old. Pasternak was born in Toronto, Canada into a religious family descended from the Modzitz Hasidim. At the age of 16…
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