More in ‘Yiddish’

• Vice President Joe Biden hosted folks from most Jewish-American groups to consult on his upcoming trip to Israel. Conspicuously unrepresented: J Street. [Laura Rozen]
• A columnist argued that Syrian President Bashar Assad is cozying up to Iran not out of rational self-interest and power politics but because he’s an anti-Israel ideologue. [JPost]
• Iran announced ...

• The five U.S. congressmen in J Street’s Mideast delegation were “puzzled” by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon’s refusal to meet with them, and his labeling J Street as not “pro-Israeli”. (But why would they expect a diplomat to have good people skills?) [Haaretz]
• The Israeli government launched a new P.R. campaign designed to empower ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Bridget Kevane examines the late Argentinian dissident and publisher Jacobo Timerman, who, sometimes by necessity, played a complex game when it came to exposing anti-Semitism in his country. Zackary Sholem Berger eulogizes the great Yiddish-language poet Avrom Sutzkever, and bemoans Sutzkever’s underappreciated status (go appreciate three of his poems—the final one ...

Reproduced, with permission, from The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse. You can read them in Yiddish here [PDF].
How?
How will you fill your goblet
On the day of liberation? And with what?
Are you prepared, in your joy, to endure
The dark keeing you have heard
Where skulls of days glitter
In a bottomless pit?
You will search for a key ...

• We hypothesized as much yesterday, and now new reporting reveals that the United States is indeed making an extra hard push for formal Middle East peace negotiations by Feburary or March. [WSJ]
• One option is “proximity talks,” in which Special Envoy George Mitchell would shuttle between the two parties presenting each one’s side. The ...

For many immigrants and their children in the era of mass Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, the ubiquitous Yiddish accent was a source of shame and a barrier to upward mobility. For the cartoonist and animator Milt Gross, that accent was the funniest thing he had ever heard.
In his cartoons, Gross, born in 1895 to ...

Shane Baker was about 5 years old, growing up in Kansas City in the 1970s, when he heard a Yiddish word for the first time. He had gone to see the Marx Brothers classic Animal Crackers, in which Groucho sings, “Hooray for Captain Spaulding//The African explorer//Did somebody call me schnorrer?” Baker asked his father what ...

When we think about Yiddish culture, sex isn’t usually the first thing that springs to mind. But the folks behind this week’s conference “Sex and the Shtetl,” held at the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, put the spotlight on the prurient.
Discussions included what the Jewish Telegraphic Agency calls ...

For as long as I can remember, my father has made fun of Hasidim. In fact, he rarely uses that word; instead, he refers to the Hasidic Jews in my hometown of Montreal, who happen to be prominent in the textile and garbage-bag industries, as “garmentologists” or “garbologists.”
As a child, I thought this was a ...

The results are in: the words “shpiel” and “klutz” have been thoroughly absorbed into the American vernacular, while “mensch” and “kvetch” remain primarily in the linguistic domain of Jews. A third of Jewish Americans who did not grow up in New York have nonetheless been told that they sound like they’re from that city. Sixty-eight ...