Yiddish
A versatile fellow, this Cossack, identified simultaneously with Israel’s prime minister and his bitterest opponents! Who is he and who robbed him?
A brief history of an indifferent word.
The cadences of the Talmud left their mark on Yiddish, and Israeli, speech patterns.
And most of them reveal a hidden admiration for the person who’s had the wit and the grit to get away with it.
Alter Leyb Robinson and his friend, Shabbos.
Let us sing of rodomont, Sinon, proditomania, and, in particular, grobian.
Lucy Dawidowicz.
One word got turned upside down and downside up again.
The renowned expert on Yiddish literature stops by to talk everything Tevye, Fiddler, Sholem Aleichem, and more.
This Tevye is no “sweetie-pie Jew.”
Ḥasidic songs, and much else, will be known to the world thanks to his work.
Before becoming linked to the famous architect who was trying to escape it, the German word mies (rotten) made its way from Hebrew, to Yiddish, to a thieves’ argot called Rotwelsch.
Contention was so much a part of modern Yiddish culture that, in any study of that culture, it was all but taken for granted.