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.
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Yiddish
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Culture How Yiddish Education Got Its Start In America, From Zionism To Socialism
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Are Jews a people or a religious community? This reductive question has been debated for more than two centuries, since the time of the Jewish Enlightenment. Its stakes are particularly high with regard to Jewish education. Religious subjects have an old and fixed place in the Jewish…
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Yiddish World Want To Talk About Current Events In Yiddish? Here’s How.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Forverts readers, whether fluent Yiddish-speakers or students just beginning to master the language, often write in asking how one might say a certain word in the mame-loshn. Usually the word in question will be related to a topic in the news or an approaching holiday. Our standard…
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Theater ‘Tevye Served Raw’ Captures Sholem Aleichem’s Genius In Two Languages
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Sholem Aleichem has been an unusually frequent topic of conversation in New York this summer, thanks to the critical and commercial success of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s Yiddish-language production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” As anyone who has read Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories is well aware,…
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Yiddish World WATCH: The REAL Gefilte Fish
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The gefilte fish you’ve been eating is nothing but a glorified fish patty. When making real gefilte fish, minced-fish stuffing is spooned into slices of carp, between the skin and the bone. Forverts editor Rukhl Schaechter and Polish-born gefilte fish maven Sabina Barszap show how it’s done.
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Opinion Do Your Kids and Grandkids Know Their Family History?
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the summer of 2001, two psychologists at Emory University conducted a unique study, hoping to find the “secret” to raising resilient children. The researchers, Marshall Duke and Robin Feivush, suspected that children who had strong ties to previous generations were psychologically more intact. So they interviewed…
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Culture Listen To The Entire Yiddish Repertoire — At Once!
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Most American Jews recognize at most two or three Yiddish songs: “Afn Pripetshik,” “Tumbalalaika” and perhaps “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn.” American Jews who grew up speaking Yiddish, however, can recognize dozens of others such as “Rozhinkes mit Mandlen,” “Afn Veg Shteyt A Boym” and so forth. Fans…
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Fast Forward Trump/Stormy Daniels Drama Is ‘Farkakte’ Says Rudy Guiliani
Rudy Guiliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, shared on Wednesday while in Israel that he does not think first lady Melania Trump believes that her husband had an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, CNN reported. “She believes her husband. And she knows it’s untrue, ” Giuliani reportedly said at the “Globes” Capital Market conference in…
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Yiddish World From brawls over Zionism to rabbis playing favorites: life in 19th-century yeshivas
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. When reading about the lives of secular 19th- and 20th-century Yiddish and Hebrew writers, you will undoubtedly learn that many of them had studied in yeshivas before adopting a secular lifestyle. Chaim Grade, for example, was a student in the Navoraduk Yeshiva, which taught its students a…
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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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News Texas schools want to add Queen Esther to the curriculum. Here’s why Jews (and many Christians) are opposed.
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