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 WATCH: A Moving Yiddish Hanukkah Song For 2016
Among the numerous meanings Hanukkah has accrued over the centuries, the one that feels most urgent to me now is the opportunity to recall that bravery in the face of tyranny need not be confined to Jewish history. The tired, poor and huddled masses still yearn to breathe free, and Hanukkah is a reminder that…
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Breaking News First Hasidic Female Judge Sworn In — to ‘God Bless America’ in Yiddish
(JTA) — Rachel Freier of Brooklyn officially became the first Hasidic woman to be sworn in as a judge in the State of New York. Freier, a mother of six and former lawyer who practiced commercial and residential estate law, was sworn in Thursday as the Civil Court judge in Kings County’s 5th judicial district,…
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Culture How an Okie Named Woody Guthrie Became Our Best Hanukkah Tunesmith
For 20 years, I was a pop music critic. Every year as the calendar wound down, here came one of music journalism’s over-roasted chestnuts: the annual roundup of new Christmas albums. I never groaned. I’m one of those Christmas music people. As soon as the Thanksgiving turkey is down my gullet, I’m trotting out the…
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Culture Bringing Jewish Music Back From the Ashes of Kristallnacht
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. When Hirsch Lewin was deported from Germany in 1940 after six months of suffering in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he could not have imagined that seventy-six years later, musicians in Berlin would release an album of the music he had produced. Even when Lewin founded his record…
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Community A Look Inside Jewish Romania
Bucharest, Romania I find myself in Eastern Europe for the “International Festival of Yiddish Theatre,” having been invited by the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Romania holds the chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016 and has invited the New York based National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene to present a play of which…
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Community A Trump Embassy Move Would Be Nothing To Celebrate
During his campaign, Trump promised that he would honor a longstanding American commitment and finally move the American embassy in Israel from it’s current home in Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem, where the seat of the Israeli government is located. For more than a decade, no foreign embassy has been located there, and the world…
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Culture In Poland, Artistic Excavations Reveal a Lost World of Jews
This article, which originally appeared in the Forverts, is one of a four-part series by Barbara Finkelstein about her recent trip to Poland. The Grodzka Gate Centre in the city of Lublin came into being in the early 1990s, when Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, a physics student, set out to establish an independent theater in the Grodzka…
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Culture How I Reunited My Holocaust Survivor Father With His Long Lost Neighbor
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Jerzy “Jurek” Skarżyński had been up half the night. The next day he was going to meet the daughter and grandson of a Jewish man who once lived in Uchanie, his home village, and his mind would not slow down. Jurek, a Polish Christian, had not spoken…
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