Variant of German which arose during the Middle Ages as a trade language of Jews in important centers of commerce (countries along the Rhine and Danube). Today the East European branch of Yiddish (language of the Ashkenazic Jews) has approx. 5 million...

Language of the *Ashkenazic community. Yiddish is written in Hebrew letters. Although it died out in Western Europe, it continued to be used in Russia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland and the Ukraine. Before the *holocaust, there were thought to be...

// n. A semi-jocular label applied to instances of the fronting of focused elements which are typical of the Yiddish-influenced English of the New York City area but which sound odd to most other speakers of English. Examples are My brother-in-law he...

TEKHINES. Tekhines, a Yiddish word from the Hebrew Teḥinnot, "supplications," are Jewish private devotions and paraliturgical prayers in Yiddish written by both women and men but recited primarily by women. As texts in the...

Yiddish (ייִדיש yidish or אידיש idish, literally: "Jewish") is a non-territorial Germanic language, spoken throughout the world and written with the Hebrew alphabet. It originated in the Ashkenazi culture that developed from about the 10th...

A couple of weeks ago, I described Health Commissioner Tom Frieden's decision not to ban a controversial circumcision practice outright as "backing down." Looks like I read it wrong; and that's certainly not how the community took it. There have been rumblings of protest in...

Long after most of its customers left the neighborhood to pursue the American Dream, the last matzo factory on the Lower East Side is moving out, saying goodbye to a part of town that was once home to hundreds of thousands of immigrant Jews.Streit's, a...

When Bill Connelly heard that the heirs of a collector of Jewish memorial books were cleaning out his library, he rushed to New York and fished dozens of the Yiddish-language volumes out of a municipal trash bin.With their lists of residents from long vanished European...