Jewish Word | Verklempt: The Yiddish Word that Wasn’t
Borrowed from Yiddish and launched into the cultural stratosphere by a Canadian comedian and his Jewish mother-in-law, “verklempt” keeps evolving.
Beshert | Not a Chain Restaurant
In the early 1960s, when I was about 10 or so, I was in the backseat of our family car driving somewhere in upstate New...
Yiddish Storytelling for a New Generation
Yiddish has a rich legacy of storytelling for children, including both global classics and works that originated in the mother tongue of Ashkenazi Jewry. Join Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone translator Arun Viswanath and Miriam Udel, editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature for a wide-ranging conversation with Moment Deputy Editor Sarah Breger about how they are helping to bring the legacy of Yiddish into the twentieth century, their work in relation to broad developments in Jewish history and how it intersects with their own family narratives.
New Faces of the Yiddish Revival
A new generation has taken up the banner and found creative ways to make Yiddish relevant, injecting the language into concerts, lectures, poetry, theater and podcasts.
Book Review | Yiddish for Pirates
Narrated by Aaron, a wisecracking 500-year-old African Gray parrot with a penchant for Yiddish puns, the book follows Moishe, a 14-year-old who yearns for adventure after discovering his father’s book of maps.
Israel and I: A Love/Hate Relationship
The Donald Trump victory is not only highly distressing to me as an American; it is troublesome because it portends to render peace in my beloved Israel more distant than ever.
‘While I’m Here’: A Look Back at Theodore Bikel
Theodore Bikel was an actor, a folksinger, a Yiddish speaker, an activist. Now, a group of musicians is making its own attempt at preserving Bikel’s legacy.
Jewish Word // “Zaftig”
A Full-Bodied History
by Hilary Weissman, with additional reporting by Sala Levin
For a quick overview of the complexities of the word zaftig, take a look at...
Book Review // A Bintel Brief
A heartfelt letter sent to a newspaper editor a century ago has long stayed with me. I happened upon it decades after it was written. With his soul in torment, a New York factory owner had turned to the editor for advice. He was not paying his workers— like him, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—nearly enough for them to make ends meet. He had a business to run, and there were limits to the wages he could afford. Still, the suffering of his employees and their families tore at his heart. What should he do?
Jewish Word | Tsuris
Nobody Knows the Tsuris I’ve Seen…
“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” laments an African-American spiritual. In Yiddish, this feeling is encapsulated by the word tsuris—variously...