A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish
A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish

Author: Aya Elyada

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2012-11-07

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0804782822

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This book explores the unique phenomenon of Christian engagement with Yiddish language and literature from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. By exploring the motivations for Christian interest in Yiddish, and the differing ways in which Yiddish was discussed and treated in Christian texts, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish addresses a wide array of issues, most notably Christian Hebraism, Protestant theology, early modern Yiddish culture, and the social and cultural history of language in early modern Europe. Elyada's analysis of a wide range of philological and theological works, as well as textbooks, dictionaries, ethnographical writings, and translations, demonstrates that Christian Yiddishism had implications beyond its purely linguistic and philological dimensions. Indeed, Christian texts on Yiddish reveal not only the ways in which Christians perceived and defined Jews and Judaism, but also, in a contrasting vein, how they viewed their own language, religion, and culture.

Born to Kvetch LP
Born to Kvetch LP

Author: Michael Wex

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2007-11-20

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 0061340847

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A delightful excursion through the Yiddish language, the culture it defines and serves, and the fine art of complaint Throughout history, Jews around the world have had plenty of reasons to lament. And for a thousand years, they've had the perfect language for it. Rich in color, expressiveness, and complexity, Yiddish has proven incredibly useful and durable. Its wonderful phrases and idioms impeccably reflect the mind-set that has enabled the Jews of Europe to survive a millennium of unrelenting persecution . . . and enables them to kvetch about it! Michael Wex—professor, scholar, translator, novelist, and performer—takes a serious yet unceasingly fun and funny look at this remarkable kvetch-full tongue that has both shaped and has been shaped by those who speak it. Featuring chapters on curse words, food, sex, and even death, he allows his lively wit and scholarship to roam freely from Sholem Aleichem to Chaucer to Elvis. Perhaps only a khokhem be-layle (a fool, literally a "sage at night," when there's no one around to see) would care to pass up this endearing and enriching treasure trove of linguistics, sociology, history, and folklore—an intriguing appreciation of a unique and enduring language and an equally fascinating culture.

The Meaning of Yiddish
The Meaning of Yiddish

Author: Benjamin Harshav

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-03-29

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0520319621

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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

How to Talk Jewish
How to Talk Jewish

Author: Jackie Mason

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 0312072368

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Using his hilarious and insightful wit to explain the meaning of every term he covers, Jackie Mason offers a picture window into a world of words that only he could elucidate. From yenta to schtick, Mason gives not only the literal meaning of Yiddish words and phrases, but, as an added attraction, his own interpretive explanation.

Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears
Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears

Author: James A. Matisoff

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780804733946

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In this delightful book, the author enumerates and classifies the formulas Yiddish speakers use to express their emotionsfrom blessings and thanks to lamentations and curses. A rarity among scholarly books, it brings joy while it teaches; it makes us smile, sometimes roar with laughter, while it develops the most rigorous linguistic argumentation."

Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep

Author: Henry Roth

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2013-10-22

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 1466855282

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When Henry Roth published his debut novel Call It Sleep in 1934, it was greeted with considerable critical acclaim though, in those troubled times, lackluster sales. Only with its paperback publication thirty years later did this novel receive the recognition it deserves—--and still enjoys. Having sold-to-date millions of copies worldwide, Call It Sleep is the magnificent story of David Schearl, the "dangerously imaginative" child coming of age in the slums of New York.

Yiddish Civilisation
Yiddish Civilisation

Author: Paul Kriwaczek

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0307430332

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Paul Kriwaczek begins this illuminating and immensely pleasurable chronicle of Yiddish civilization during the Roman empire, when Jewish culture first spread to Europe. We see the burgeoning exile population disperse, as its notable diplomats, artists and thinkers make their mark in far-flung cities and found a self-governing Yiddish world. By its late-medieval heyday, this economically successful, intellectually adventurous, and self-aware society stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kriwaczek traces, too, the slow decline of Yiddish culture in Europe and Russia, and highlights fresh offshoots in the New World.Combining family anecdote, travelogue, original research, and a keen understanding of Yiddish art and literature, Kriwaczek gives us an exceptional portrait of a culture which, though nearly extinguished, has an influential radiance still.

Oy! Oy! Oy! The Teacher Is a Goy
Oy! Oy! Oy! The Teacher Is a Goy

Author: Henry Saltzman

Publisher: Wicked Son

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1642938815

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The year is 1953 and Henry Saltzman, an Americanized Jew looking for his first job as a high school English teacher, unexpectedly finds himself confronting a roomful of intense, hyperactive ten-year-old boys in a Hasidic Brooklyn yeshiva. The assimilated Saltzman is profoundly challenged by their prejudices and fears about the world outside their close-knit religious community and vows to help them become not just good Jews, but good Americans. In the process, like any good teacher, he learns from them as well. Based on the author’s own experience, this charming novel takes us inside the alien world of Hasidic Judaism with humor, warmth, and deep affection.

How to Be a Mentsh (And Not a Shmuck)
How to Be a Mentsh (And Not a Shmuck)

Author: Michael Wex

Publisher: Knopf Canada

Published: 2009-09-08

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0307373185

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Wise and hilarious, this is a book about happiness, your own and that of others. The principles outlined here will work for anyone, Jewish or not, who makes the effort to put them into practice. Drawing on the “wisdom of the ages,” bestselling author Michael Wex shows readers how to figure out the right thing to do in any situation. First he describes the two words “mentsh” and “shmuck.” The former refers most often to an adult who has learned to think of others first; the latter refers to someone who thinks he or she is someone special. In this book, you will learn how to keep yourself from believing you are someone special. You will learn how not to be a shmuck.

My Name Is Asher Lev
My Name Is Asher Lev

Author: Chaim Potok

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0307422348

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this modern classic from the National Book Award–nominated author of The Chosen, a young religious artist is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels, even when it leads him to blasphemy. “A novel of finely articulated tragic power .... Little short of a work of genius.”—The New York Times Book Review Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. He grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. He is torn between two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other devoted only to art and his imagination, and in time, his artistic gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous, visionary portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant.