Free Republic

In April, the language-learning app Duolingo added its 40th language to its program arsenal: Yiddish. A couple of decades ago, it would have been unthinkable for a mainstream non-Jewish language program to offer an expansive, comprehensive course in Yiddish. But Duolingo’s Yiddish addition only serves to reflect the increased global interest in learning a language that once had as many as 12 million speakers. Ladino, a Romance language of Sephardic Jews still spoken by hundreds of thousands worldwide, has also garnered much interest in recent years. Ladino classes, both online and in-person, are widely available to prospective learners. But while...

s of today, the first book in the Harry Potter series is available in Yiddish. “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” — or “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” as it is known in the United States — was released in Yiddish by the Swedish publisher Olniansky Tekst Farlag on Friday. (Yiddish is an official language in Sweden.) It was translated by Arun Visnawath, 29, the son of an Indian-American father and Gitl Schaecter-Visnawath, author of the “Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary.” Her father was a professor of Yiddish at Columbia University. Yair Rosenberg chronicles the story behind the translation in Tablet...

Seth Rogen, a Jewish-American Hollywood actor and filmmaker who is studying Yiddish for a role, will be honored by a group devoted to promoting that language. The Workmen’s Circle, a group whose mission is to strengthen Jewish identity based on social justice and Yiddish language, will honor Rogen, 37, in a ceremony Monday in Manhattan, the New Jersey Jewish News reported Wednesday. “It’s something that’s always been just a very big part of my life,” the actor said of his Jewish identity in an interview with NJJN. “The first jokes I ever wrote were about it; it was a very...

I wanted to follow up on my overnight post noting that rapidly emerging "schlong" revisionist analysis of Donald Trump's statement which now - a mere dozen hours later - has emerged into a full-fledged "schlong truth" movement. Trump himself is doubling down on "schlong" and has enlisted Jeff Greenfield who is vouching for the normalness and non-sexual meaning of the phrase. It was unclear to me at first from Greenfield"s tweet whether he was basing this on personal experience as a New York Trump contemporary (Greenfield is only slightly older than Trump but, according to Wikipedia, grew up in tonier...

Just how much did Ben Zimmer chuckle while writing this "schlong" analysis for Politico? Well, no matter how much he was laughing, he did manage to write in a serious tone on the subject...which made it come off even funnier than was probably intended. At first Zimmer slams Donald Trump for his use of the term "schlonged" but ends up exonerating him when other examples of the slang word being used as a synonym for "defeat" were found.

The Republican senator from South Carolina had good reasons to quit the Republican presidential race, as he did this week. He had succeeded in his goal of making the rest of the field more hawkish. He avoided an embarrassing defeat in his home-state primary. And, in leaving, he is being a mensch. Specifically, he is helping his Republican Party avoid getting shtupped by Donald Trump. Or make that "schlonged." Trump, in his latest bit of narishkeit, proclaimed Monday night that Hillary Clinton got "schlonged" by Barack Obama in their 2008 contest. Thus did Trump bastardize a Yiddish noun for penis...

As the number of Yiddish speakers declines, those who love the language look for ways to ensure its survival.In the misery of a Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Poland, Jack Lewin remembers, the books helped him survive. Reading the Yiddish words late into the night, Lewin could forget the hunger that sometimes brought him to tears. "I lived with the characters of the books," he says in his home near Wilshire Boulevard, his green-and-gray eyes distant with memory. Maybe it was those books that made it possible for him and the others to be human after Auschwitz. Now he traces his...

That hot new website making fun of Jewish Republicans? My husband and I made it—and you’re welcome.You know how it is. You’re standing in the hallway outside the bathroom watching your husband shave, your always-simmering wrath toward the state of American politics in general and the Republican Party in particular brought to a rolling boil by several cups of coffee drunk at injudicious speed, and you’re both inveighing against certain distant-ish relatives whose ideological leanings are a constant source of ire, wondering aloud what terrible misfortune might need to befall them to bring them around, or at least lay their...

At Johns Hopkins, reviving a dying art In 1970, Cynthia Ozick published an essay suggesting that in light of the rapid decline of Yiddish among American Jewry, English could serve as the new language of the Jews: "a language for our need." Ozick has since retracted this opinion-and yet, the issues that drove to her raise the idea remain: What role, if any, does Yiddish still play for Jews in this country? If it can be maintained, in what form? Tamar Nachmany, a junior at Johns Hopkins University has a compelling new answer to these questions in the form of...

A smattering of Yiddish words has crept into the American vernacular: Non-Jews go for a nosh or schmooze over cocktails. Yet the language itself, once spoken by millions of Jews, is now in retreat. But you don't have to be Jewish to love Yiddish. In Japan, a linguist has toiled quietly for decades to compile the world's first Yiddish-Japanese dictionary — the first time the Jewish language has been translated into a non-European language other than Hebrew. It was in the hills of Kyushu Island in southern Japan where Kazuo Ueda carried out his impressive and quixotic quest, devoting his...

Silence settles over the auditorium of the Ottmar Gerster municipal music school in Weimar, Germany. From a corner of the hall, a group of elderly women begin to sing, timidly, in German, “A boy saw a little rose, little rose upon the fields.” Schubert’s melody rises, graceful and solemn; the audience, some 70 people from various age groups and nationalities listens intently. Soon, the voices fade away, and a middle-aged man with a beard, glasses and curly hair sits down at the piano to lead the audience in the next song. But this time, the words are in Yiddish. “If...

This week, Jewish children all over the world will gamble for nuts or coins using a specially marked four-sided top, a dreidel. In Yiddish, the four dreidel letters stand for words nearly identical to those used in a similar game once played by German-speaking children. Nun: nichts. Nothing happens. Pass the top to the next player. Shin: shtel. Put one extra token into the pot. Hey: halb. Take half the pot. Gimmel: ganz. All! Win the whole pot. In Hebrew, though, the four dreidel letters aren't just game instructions but an abbreviation particularly appropriate to the Hanukkah celebration. Nes gadol...

A group of American college students stands in a semicircle, clapping and hopping on one foot as they sing in Yiddish: "Az der rebe tantst, tantsn ale khsidim!" In English, the lyrics mean: "When the rebbe dances, so do all the Hasidim." This isn't music appreciation or even a class at a synagogue. It's the first semester of Yiddish at Emory University in Atlanta — one of just a handful of college programs across the country studying the Germanic-based language of Eastern European Jews.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel's kosher cellular phone market has a new model, a device with a Yiddish interface to help devout Jews combine tradition with modern technology. Hundreds of thousands of mobile phones, popularly dubbed kosher because they block access to services frowned upon by ultra-Orthodox rabbis, have been operating in the Jewish state for years. Last month, Israel's second largest mobile provider, Partner introduced what it hailed as the world's first Yiddish cell phone, manufactured by Alcatel-Lucent. Marc Seelenfreund, CEO of Israeli Accel Telecom which imports and distributes mobile phones to all Israeli operators, had a special team of...

Comic legend Jackie Mason is railing against accusations of racism following a performance in New York Thursday, where he referred to President Barack Obama as a "schwartza." Celebrity gossip site TMZ.com confronted Mason with a camera on Friday over the flap. The celebrity gossip site reported that that the literal translation of "schwartza" in Yiddish is "black," but added that some say "it's a disparaging reference to African Americans, akin to the N-word." Mason told a TMZ cameraman, "(I'm not going to answer) these stupid questions because you're trying to multiply me into a racist. I've called (people) a lot...

There are no pleasant, constructive or even likeable human beings in this gigantic book, written by an American Leftwing atheistic Yiddishist, living, significantly, in Berkeley, California. There is no vigorous and lively State of Israel in Chabon's imaginary world; there is no thriving American Jewry in the most prosperous and tolerant country on earth; the world of Christian Americans and other religions barely appears, and then only as cardboard cutouts. Instead, the novel is set in an imagined Pale of Yiddish Settlement, Jozef Stalin's "solution" for the Jews in the early Soviet Union. Instead of Siberia, the Jews are transplanted...

They fought it, they mocked it, they tried to get rid of it. Before WWII more than 10 million people spoke Yiddish, and in less than 50 years it turned into an endangered language, but no more There is a story that the Greek minister of culture, in an attempt to convince foreign donors to help preserve Greek cultural treasures, stood on the dais, looked straight at the audience, and began to declaim: “Metaphor, democracy, diploma, allegory, melody.” The message was clear: Greece was the cradle of European civilization, and its treasures were of interest not only to Greeks, but...

A Polish-Jewish renaissance By GREER FAY CASHMAN The Krakow Festival of Jewish Culture has become so important that it is listed on Poland's national calendar of events and is even used as a marketing tool for tourism. This year, the Yiddishpiel theater will be taking part in the 16th annual festival, touring Polish cities including Zamosc, Krakow and Bilgoraj, birthplace of Yiddishpiel founder Shmuel Atzmon. Atzmon, who turns 77 this year, will celebrate his birthday on the theater troupe's Bilgoraj stop along with Israeli journalist Israel Zamir, son of Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Zamir will also be turning...

Learning Yiddish Before WWII, a third of Warsaw's population spoke Yiddish, the language of Central Europe's Jews. Yiddish culture disappeared along with its speakers, who were wiped out during the Holocaust. But now, young Poles are beginning to learn the language. Yiddish, the language spoken by Central and Eastern Europe’s Jews before the second world war, now mainly survives in small enclaves in Lithuania, Russia and Belarus, as well as in the US. Those Jews who left countries like Poland for Israel after the end of the war now speak Hebrew, the language of the bible. Very few traces of...

Washington, September 20: A new organization called the US-India League has been formed by a group of leading American conservatives to draw the US, India and Israel closer in their objectives of fighting terrorism and setting an example of progress through democracy. At its first meeting on Monday leading conservatives who spoke, including Don Feser, executive director, and Alan Keyes, a former Ambassador, emphasised that while India, the US and Israel may not agree on all issues, they are united in facing the most important challenges facing the world today. On US-India relations, the League said in a mission statement...