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 WATCH: How to make dairy and vegan cheesecakes for Shavuot
The vegan version is made with chocolate and a surprise ingredient, that requires special tools to open!
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Yiddish World The Forverts Launches A Crossword!
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Thanks to a generous donation to the Forverts by an anonymous donor, the Forverts has launched a biweekly Yiddish crossword puzzle. The puzzles include clues about Yiddish words and literature, Jewish traditions and pop culture. The first puzzle can be seen here. The donor, a Jewish philanthropist,…
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Culture My Mother Survived Italy’s Bombing Of Tel Aviv. Her Life Was Never The Same
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. About 100 years ago my great-grandfather, Zvi Yaakov (Hirsh) Levin, who had immigrated to America with his family from Shat, Lithuania, decided to sell his share in the family business in Chicago and emigrate to Mandatory Palestine with his wife, children and grandchildren. His longing to live…
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Breaking News Yiddishkeit. Lekach. Keriah. Tophet. Holishkes. The Scripps Spelling Bee Just Loves Jewish Words.
You might think that the biggest news to come out of the 2019 Scripps Spelling Bee would be the historic eight-way tie in which the competition ended. Well, you’d probably be right. But what about the Jewish news? Several of the high caliber words posed to contestants were either Yiddish or Hebrew, joining the many…
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Fast Forward The First Word Of The Day At The Scripps Spelling Bee Was ‘Yiddishkeit’
The first word posed in competition this morning on the first day of the storied Scripps National Spelling Bee was “yiddishkeit,” a beloved phrase from Yiddish that sums up Ashkenazi Jewish culture in a manner akin to the term Americana. More technically, the word means “Jewish character or quality,” “Jewish way of life” or “Jewishness,”…
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Yiddish World Five Centuries of Yiddish Poetry, Written by Women
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A remarkable history of women’s poetry in Yiddish was recently published by Joanna Lisek, a scholar of Polish literature. The book is currently available only in its native Polish, but it’s imperative that it be translated into English as well. The monograph, “Kol Ishe: The Voice of…
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Culture How I Learned To Speak Yiddish And Love The Forverts
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It is part of a series on Forverts memories written by and about present and past Forverts writers and editors. Just a few months after I began studying Yiddish, I bought my first copy of the Forverts at a newsstand in midtown Manhattan. The headline on the…
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Yiddish World The Forward Was A Boys’ Club, And I Broke In
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It is part of a series on Forverts memories written by and about present and past Forverts writers and editors. More than thirty years ago, at the beginning of the 1980s, Forverts assistant editor David Matis, who also happened to be a friend of my father’s, invited…
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