Yiddish
By way of an ancient Roman holiday and two very similar Hebrew letters.
Like Ladino, Haketiya grew out of the Spanish of Jews exiled from Spain. Like Yiddish, it has a range of loving, spiteful, sarcastic, ironic, anxious, and superstitious expressions.
The only pharaoh in the room.
Abraham Cahan was one of America’s first great Jewish newspapermen, and set an example of independent thinking that the nation could sorely use today.
And how Hebrew and Yiddish translations shaped it.
Intrigues, tsuris, and Albanian gangsters.
Purim in Yungvarg, 1948.
Richard Belzer, proud Jew.
The dean of Yiddish versus Hitler’s professors.
An exhibit includes a 16th-century Yiddish version of a Latin anatomy textbook.
Smuggled political literature from Jewish New Yorkers helped.
The story of Dos vort and Di tsayt.