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
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Culture The Extraordinary Life Of Leopold Kozlowski, The Last Klezmer Of Galicia
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Leopold Kozlowski, the last active musician to have grown up playing traditional Jewish music in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, died March 12 in Krakow at the age of 100. A world-renowned expert on Jewish music and a teacher who trained generations of klezmer musicians and Yiddish…
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Yiddish World In Israel, Yiddish Is Surprisingly Trendy
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Last month, I embarked on a dream of mine: a 10-day Hebrew immersion in Israel with the aim to finally become fluent in the language. For years, I’ve been studying Hebrew, both through classes and on my own. Every Shabbat afternoon I get together with my friends…
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Yiddish World She Survived The Holocaust. This Week, She’ll Turn 100.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. This week, Henia Ragol, a Holocaust survivor and loyal reader of the Yiddish Forverts, will celebrate her hundredth birthday. (As we say in Yiddish: May she live 120 years!) During an interview with the Forverts, Ragol (née Kotton), a resident of a moshav in northern Israel who’s…
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News Yiddish Kindergarten May Be Coming To A New York City Public School
Three generations ago, before the Holocaust decimated European Jewry, tens of thousands of students studied at more than a thousand secular Yiddish elementary schools dotted across Eastern Europe. Today, there is only one secular Yiddish school in the world, and it’s in south Australia. Next year, that could change, and in a dramatic way: Secular…
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Fast Forward ‘Torah-less And Reckless’: Haredi Paper Slams Anti-Vaxxers In Yiddish, English
One of the biggest ultra-Orthodox newspapers in the country published an op-ed about the measles outbreak in their community, in which it cited religious mandates to vaccinate children — and took the rare step of translating it into English. Der Yid, the New York-based weekly read by Satmar Hasidim and read by the wider Haredi community,…
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Yiddish World How Paul Robeson Learned Yiddish And Battled Fascism
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. And in English February 21, 2018. The Forward is republishing April 9, 2019 in honor of Robeson’s 121st birthday. The American singer Paul Robeson is mostly remembered today for his hauntingly beautiful bass voice, his groundbreaking career as an actor and his political activism and involvement in…
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Culture In Finland, A Yiddish Resurgence
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Part of my work as Forverts editor is to speak at Jewish conferences, community centers and synagogues about the Forverts and Yiddish culture, which is what brought me to the Finnish capital of Helsinki in early February. I had been invited to this year’s Limud Conference Helsinki…
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Culture The USSR Turned Against The Jews. But First, It Was A Yiddish Intellectual Haven.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s not every day that a manuscript gets discovered in an attic, let alone a complete book written by a distinguished Yiddish author. Well, in the world of Yiddish, where even published books are often relegated to synagogue basements, occasions like these are not entirely unusual. Nonetheless,…
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Fast Forward Why neo-Nazis marched in Ohio this weekend, and almost every weekend in the US
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Opinion The group behind Project 2025 has a plan to protect Jews. It will do the opposite.
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Opinion Just about every interpretation of Trump’s narrow election victory is wrong
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News Texas schools want to add Queen Esther to the curriculum. Here’s why Jews (and many Christians) are opposed.
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News For Israelis still displaced from their homes, reclaiming the kitchen can be an act of hope
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Yiddish בער קאָטלערמאַן געווינט די י. י. סיגאַל פּרעמיע פֿאַר זײַן בוך דערציילונגען „סאַמאָיעד“Ber Kotlerman wins J. I Segal award for his collection of stories, ‘Samoyed’
די העלדן אין דער זאַמלונג זענען אוקראַיִנער ייִדן וואָס לײַדן פֿון אַ שווער לעבן אָבער בלײַבן פֿאָרט לײַטיש.
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Film & TV Hermann Goering’s personal art dealer plundered the world for decades; his victims’ descendants are still seeking justice
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Opinion I’m a Jewish parent and biblical scholar in Houston — I’m enraged that Texas is adopting this biblically illiterate new curriculum
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