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We take Jewish secular culture here in its modern shape, its language form, Yiddish. It is not the first expression of worldly or secular Jewish culture. In ancient times almost the entire cultural…
The very lack of a self-contained territory that has so far disqualified the study of Yiddish from NDEA [the National Defense Education Act] support endows Ashkenazic Jewry with exemplary value for a…
Mar Abramowitz did not attend services in our temple. With a dozen or so other Ashkenazi refugees from Eastern Europe he worshiped in a tiny downtown loft that was said, by those who had never been…
The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language has been assembled on the basis of inclusiveness—that is to say, as a dictionary which attempts to record and include all the words of the Yiddish language…
[ . . . ] Similarly, the Russian Jews use the traditional rhyming couplet in those verses that chronicle a historical event or inculcate an ethical truth. The real folksongs, however, are set to music…
There’s a marvelous story by Eduardo Stilman about a silver samovar. It caressingly describes the prodigious object—its polished ebony handles, finely carved arabesques, mischievously-turned spigot…
[The writings of the nineteenth-century maskilic writers] Perets Smolenskin and Yitsḥok Erter opened cracks in the faith of Hasidic young men [like Asch himself]. Their life of [Talmud] study without…
[ . . . V]iewed from the broad historic perspective, it is not at all surprising that American Jewry has not yet produced those great cultural achievements for which we are all…
2. What was it that made for the peculiar position of the Jews in the Middle Ages and later, until emancipation came along? It was the ghetto, we are told and told again, which was at the root of…
With regard to the life and fate of the remaining Jews, located at present in the Occupation Zones of Germany, you hear at every step the words: “sheyres hapleyte” [saving remnant], “sheyres hakhurbn”…