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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Community A Heartrending Case For Skipping Synagogue
The kapos at Mauthausen beat Reb Isser ben Avrum so savagely he could no longer stand straight. Sustaining other permanent injuries to his nose and left eye, he was, incredibly enough, one of the more fortunate ones. He arrived in America in the early 1950s and began life anew, remarrying and raising a second family….
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Fast Forward Steve Bannon Insulted Trump Opponents As ‘Shmendriks’
Steve Bannon might have promoted Breitbart News as “the platform for the ‘alt-right,’” but that has not prevented him from using the universal language of insults: Yiddish. Bannon, now the White House chief strategist to President Trump, used to refer to backers of rival Hillary Clinton as “shmendriks,” according to a new book on the…
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Yiddish World VIDEO: Watch Us Make Roast Chicken And Pilaf With Noodles For Shabbos
I am SO making this delicious-looking chicken and rice pilaf next Friday. I just watched this video — in Yiddish (with English subtitles) — from our Yiddish Forverts editor-in-chief Rukhl Schaechter and culinary historian Eve Jochnowitz. On the outside, the chicken looks like your basic, but Schaechter stuffs it with half an orange and two…
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Yiddish World The Fantasy Writer, Der Nister, and His Ambivalence Towards Zionism
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Der Nister, a master of fantasy tales who later turned to Soviet-style realism in his writing, was a complicated man and rarely opened himself up to strangers. There were books of memoirs written about him but they deal, for the most part, with his earlier years. The…
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Culture Yankel and Leah (Chapter 2): Awkward First Date
This originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. To read the previous chapter. And so after some perfunctory small talk, an appointment was arranged. Yankel would meet with someone called Leah Spielman (he scribbled this into his small appointment book), daughter of Abe and Helen Spielman, refugees from the Old World, now living in Flatbush. “Appointment”…
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Yiddish World Gella Fishman Made Sure That Yiddish Wasn’t Shoved Aside
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. About two years ago Gella Fishman, the Yiddish teacher and archivist who passed away last month, called me one evening and asked indignantly: “How could it be that YIVO is now sending all its letters out without a single word in Yiddish?” Although I had been receiving…
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Yiddish World Jewish Converts in the Russian Empire
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Ellie R. Schainker, “Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906” (Stanford University Press) In Sholem Asch’s novel “Petersburg,” Madam Kvasnetsova, an interesting Jewish woman who has converted to Christianity, owns a house in St. Petersburg and an inn for Jews who come to…
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Yiddish World Yiddish Summer Weimar Will Highlight the Cultures of Israel
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. This year the theme of the annual festival, Yiddish Summer Weimar, will be “The Other Israel: Seeing Unseen Diasporas.” Besides its usual programming the five-week celebration of Ashkenazi culture will also include a series of concerts and workshops dedicated to the various cultures of Israel and the…
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