"His books have not just been good for the Jews; they have been great." – Joel Yanofsky, Literary Review of Canada
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!I received an e-mail recently from a reader who says, “My parents both came from Russia and I grew up in Brooklyn. I spoke nothing but Yiddish at home and I like to think that I can still speak it pretty well. My question is about the word schlock. I know what it means in English”––Webster’s defines it as “of low... 
The response to the New York Times' weekend Yiddish question and answer competition on Ben Schott's vocabulary blog was unprecedented.
451 comments were left on the page A Bissel Yiddish?. Wex tells me that 451 is the gematria of tanna, a mishnaic sage. Unless the Mishna itself is the subject of discussion, the word, however, generally means idiot in Yiddish.
After much sifting, discussing and editing... 
The idea crops up periodically, generally on Passover, when the khomets-starved brains of certain West Coast executives––addled, some say, by a surfeit of matzoh-brei––go into overdrive and begin to smell money where the rest of us see nothing but Nyafat: “Why don’t we do a Jewish version of The Godfather?”
I can think of a thousand reasons why not, none of which stopped a reasonably... 
Today on the New York Times Ben Schott's Vocab Blog is tackling Yiddish.
And Wex is the moderator! At the time of writing (less than 24 hours after the blog went live) there are over 380 comments where readers have asked questions, answered questions and added their voice. Who said Yiddish is dead? So go to this page on the New York Times website to add your voice to the question and answer... 