Trump’s Yiddish Trash Talk Launches the Great ‘Schlong’ Debate of 2015
As the great sage Toby Ziegler once said, “Don’t bring the Yiddish unless you know…
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Call Me Pesach
In Yiddish, Jews reacted to the stories wafting out of Holy Week churches with a mixture of fear and derision. The Christian savior was regularly referred to by playful nicknames like Yoizel, Getzel, and most creatively Yoshke Pandre. The layers of meaning in this last name are astonishing: Using the diminutive suffix “–ke,” Yoshke translates as “Little Joe.”
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Touched by a Michael Landon: America’s Jewish Angel
When Michael Landon died, many Christians thought they’d lost one of their own. Knowing that he was defined at least in part by language, when Landon finally told a Jewish story in a Little House episode, he used Yiddish as a marker of identity.
Read MoreReview: Jews in America: Anti-Semitism, Class Struggle, Secularism
PBS’ The Jewish Americans covers three hundred fifty years of Jewish-American history with only a few glaring omissions.
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It’s Hard to be a Jew
A scholar of nonviolence shares his struggle with Jewish identity during a time of escalating conflict and violence in Israel.
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The Untold Story of The Greatest Yiddish Poet in America
Peter Manseau’s first novel, Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, takes on themes of Jewish-Christian enmity, the trials of translation, and the idea of language as a virtual homeland.
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Chabon, Safran-Foer, Krauss—the “New Yiddishists”—Don’t Speak Yiddish
On Vanity Fair’s profile of the post-Roth and Bellow generation of Jewish novelists.
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