This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s not every day that Yiddish dialectology becomes the subject of intense debate on Facebook and Twitter. But that’s just what happened ...

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. is a reviews editor who manages how-tos and various projects. She’s worked as an editor and writer (and ...

Kvetch. Mensch. Mazel tov. Schmooze. Colorful Yiddish words and phrases have been in America’s collective cultural bloodstream throughout generations — and many more might soon follow. Duolingo, the ...

A non-Jewish graduate student has submitted the first M. A. thesis dealing with the Yiddish language ever to be completed by a student at the University of Toronto, it was learned here today. John ...

My father Hershl (Harry in English, Heshek in Polish) was a Holocaust survivor of many camps and ghettos, as was my mother. Each made their way to America separately. My father, by way of Germany; my ...

For about six months in 2018, I spent every Thursday night alone in Siberia. It wasn’t nearly as cold or desolate as its namesake, especially after the longtime New Orleans dive bar underwent a ...

There’s an old Yiddish folk saying that goes, “S’iz shver tzu zayn a Yid” (It’s tough to be a Jew). Anyone who knows German or Pennsylvania Dutch likely understands the Yiddish original. Yiddish is ...

Does newspaper have a sound? Is it the rustling of paper? The pop-up ads of the digital world? The short films on the New York Times website? Or might it also be articles and editorials read aloud to ...

The origin of Yiddish, the millennium old language of Ashkenazic Jews, is something which linguists have questioned for decades. Yiddish is thought to have been invented by Iranian and Ashkenazic Jews ...

In his precise, already canonical The Meaning of Yiddish (University of California Press, 1990), Israeli-American scholar Benjamin Harshav recalled how Max Weinreich (1894-1969), author of the ...

On my mother’s side, they all spoke fluent Yiddish. Most of these conversations took place while eating moisture-free yellow pound cake and washing it down with warmed-up day-old Maxwell House Coffee.

The YIVO Institute looks at the Jewish “language war” in Palestine before the founding of the Jewish state. (New York Jewish Week) — Just before the end of the second millennium, Ezer Weizman, then ...