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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News Polish Jews Protest Monument to Righteous Gentiles in Warsaw Ghetto
This article first appeared in the Yiddish Forverts Plans to erect a monument to Righteous Gentiles next to the newly dedicated Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews is evoking a growing anger in Poland and abroad. The museum stands on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of all the Jewish…
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Culture Celebrating the Life and Career of Yiddish Theater Legend Mina Bern
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. A large crowd filled the main auditorium at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan on January 11 to see a memorial program in honor of the life and work of the Yiddish actress Mina Bern. During the concert a dozen singers, actors and musicians performed…
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Film & TV Isaac Bashevis Singer and His ‘Harem’
In Yiddish theater lore it’s told that when the great actor and heartthrob Boris Thomashefsky mounted a production of “Hamlet” on Second Avenue, the sign outside read, “Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Translated and Improved.” The story is apocryphal — it might not have been Thomashefsky, and it might not have been “Hamlet” — but the episode illustrates…
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Culture Sacvan Bercovitch, Acclaimed Scholar and Translator of Sholem Aleichem, Dies at 81
There can be no greater left-wing yichis than being named after Sacco and Vanzetti. The Canadian Jewish cultural historian Sacvan Bercovitch, who died on December 9 at age 81, was born to Russian Jewish parents who cherished a revolutionary ideal. In his “Rites of Assent,”, Bercovitch explained that he was drawn to America’s Puritans because…
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The Schmooze A Miss America Who Remembered Her Yiddish Roots
Bess Myerson, a Bronx-born beauty whose selection as the first — and to date only — Jewish Miss America turned out to be more than a leggy, musically talented woman. Succumbing at 90 to dementia, she left her imprint on the Jewish community as an indefatigable supporter of Israel and never forgot her Yiddish roots. When…
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Culture Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens
● Beautiful Yetta’s Hanukkah Kitten By Daniel Pinkwater, illustrated by Jill Pinkwater Feiwel and Friends, 32 pages, $17.99. Spared from the butchers’ knife, Yiddish-speaking Yetta makes her home in Brooklyn, trying to find a new family and do good where she can. A Holocaust survivor? Not exactly. Yetta is big white chicken with long eyelashes…
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Culture Israel Zamir, a Man Who Was Far More Than Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Son
The journalist, author, and translator Israel Zamir, who died on November 22 at age 85, deserves to be remembered as more than just the son of Nobel prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991). As he wrote in Journey to My Father, Isaac Bashevis Singer, a 1995 memoir which is due out in paperback in June 2015,,…
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The Schmooze Yiddish Pop Star Claire Barry Dies at 94
Claire Barry, with her sister, Merna, on the cover of their 1961 album ‘Side by Side.’ Claire Barry, who crossed over from the world of Yiddish entertainment to global pop stardom as half of The Barry Sisters, died Monday in Aventura, Florida. She was 94. At the height of their popularity in the 1950s and…
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