Yiddish
The Last BooksWednesday, May 1, 2013 by Jonathan Brent | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The invisible structures created by the Jewish people of Eastern Europe over a thousand years were given shape and transmitted through the books and the documents collected by YIVO. These structures still move us. If we do not know what they are, we do not know ourselves.
The Politics of YiddishMonday, April 29, 2013 by Ruth Wisse | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Jews who hold on to, or reach back for, the Yiddishkeyt of Yiddish yearn not merely for a declining language but for the social and political ideal that seems embedded in it.
Shani Boianjiu and the Past and Present of Jewish LiteratureWednesday, March 20, 2013 by Melissa Weininger | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Israeli writer Shani Boianjiu's first novel, composed in English, is a rare contemporary addition to the Jewish tradition of transnational literature.
Not Dead Yet: The Remarkable Renaissance of Cantorial MusicTuesday, December 25, 2012 by Allan Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
After a half-century of steady decline, two unlikely Jewish groups are reviving hazzanut.
The Twenty-Seventh ManWednesday, November 28, 2012 by Diana Muir Appelbaum | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
On the night of August 12, 1952, a group of Yiddish writers was executed on Joseph Stalin’s orders for the crime of writing while Jewish. The executions were the tragic culmination of the grand romance between Jewish intellectuals and Marxism.
I. B. Singer’s Last LaughMonday, August 6, 2012 by David G. Roskies | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Like millions of his fellow immigrants to America, Isaac Bashevis Singer started over. In the beginning, he was a deadly serious Polish-Yiddish writer with world-literary ambitions.
Heschel in Yiddish and HebrewWednesday, March 14, 2012 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Standing at Sinai, "All the people were seeing the thunder" (Exodus 20:15), seeing the sounds. The word "revelation" would be somewhat misleading, since nothing was unveiled: The mountain was wreathed in cloud and smoke.
The Yiddish Silver ScreenThursday, October 27, 2011 by Nahma Sandrow | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Nobody is sure exactly how many movies were ever made in Yiddish. James Hoberman's exhaustive study Bridge of Light (2010) lists some hundred such films, made in the 20th century primarily in America, Germany, Austria, Romania, Poland, and Russia.
Lives of the Ex-HaredimTuesday, August 2, 2011 by Joshua Halberstam | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
"Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Juliet calls out in pristine Yiddish from the heights of her fire escape. Melissa (Malky) Weisz, who plays Juliet in the recent film Romeo & Juliet in Yiddish, probably asked the same question in a more vernacular Yiddish—and with very different expectations—in her earlier life.
Meet Sholem AleichemTuesday, July 19, 2011 by Nahma Sandrow | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
In the 1880's, the Ukrainian Jew Solomon Rabinowitz began his literary career under an assumed name—assumed because he was writing in Yiddish, rather than a respectable language such as Hebrew or Russian. The pseudonym he chose was Sholem Aleichem.
Editors' Picks
Ordinary Jews Michael Berkowitz, H-Net. A new translation of Yehoshue Perle's 1935 novel Yidn fun a gants yor offers "a vivid portrait of the shtetl before the Holocaust."
Investigating the Shiksa Menachem Kaiser, Los Angeles Review of Books. "Who is the shiksa? Where did she come from? How did she get to where she is today?" And "is calling someone a shiksa really a hate crime?"
Der Hobit Ezra Glinter, Paris Review. "For every Yiddish reader piecing together a difficult 19th-century text, there’s a language enthusiast trying to translate Tolkien. Often, they are the same person."
Speaking Jewish Sarah Bunin Benor, Kavvanah. "American Jews speak a Jewish language comparable to Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Greek, and many other Diaspora languages." (Interview by Alan Brill)
Redemption of the First Shorn Philologos, Forward. What’s the grammatical difference between upsheren and upsherenish? It’s the difference between an ordinary haircut and an offering to the Lord.
From Nebekh to Nebbish Philologos, Forward. Both nebekh and nebbish denote an unfortunate fellow; but the Americanized version dispenses with any hint of sympathy.
The Paper Brigade Adam Soclof, JTA. When the Nazis occupied Vilna, they planned to destroy large numbers of Yiddish texts. A group of Jewish scholars worked to save the books from destruction.
People of the Book, Power of the Tongue Debra Rubin, Huffington Post. The Library of Congress celebrates the centennial of its Hebraica collection with a multifaceted collection, including everything from Bibles to Winnie the Pooh in Yiddish—or Vini-der-Pu.
Nu Students Dudi Goldman, Al-Monitor. “Yiddish intrigues me with its majesty,” says an Israeli Arab studying at Bar Ilan University—where Arabs make up a quarter of the students in the Yiddish program.
The Yiddish Quran Philologos, Forward. Yiddish is so closely, so intimately, so inextricably linked to Judaism that there is something singularly odd about encountering it in the service of another, and in some ways anti-Jewish, religion.