Will the Real Shrek Please Stand Up?

Children love Shrek, the sweet green ogre and beloved cartoon character who starred, thanks to DreamWorks, in “his” first flick in 2001. What most don’t know—nor do their parents—is that the word shrek is Yiddish for terror or fear. Why would they? The word isn’t to be found in Leo Rosten’s 1971 classic, Joys of Yiddish, or any of its sequels and is rarely mentioned in other Yiddish-English compendiums. Still, it’s common Yiddish, entering the language from German. In Yiddish it is most frequently used as an adjective, shreklekh, as in shreklekh zach (a terrible thing) or shreklekh imgick (something horrible). Shrek foygl is a scarecrow. The chasm between the word’s actual meaning and today’s charming ogre can be traced to a 1990 children’s book, titled Shrek! by William Steig. Steig, who died in 2003, had...

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Noble Books

Nine Nobel laureates reflect on their favorite classic and contemporary Jewish books “I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored,” Albert Einstein wrote in 1945, 24 years after he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. What books, in addition to the Torah and the Talmud, would we want to pass on to the future? We’ve asked Moment co-founder Elie Wiesel and eight of his fellow Nobel laureates—from fields as diverse as economics, physics and medicine—to reflect on their favorite Jewish books. Although most were born before World War II, their selections span the whole of...

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