Wex

Why send your kid to Hebrew school?

Sabina Wex graduates from middle school At least once a month, someone, usually a business acquaintance who doesn’t know much about my private life, will ask what my 14-year-old daughter is up to at her Hebrew day school, and then go on to let me know in no uncertain terms that I am a traitor to every aspect of the Yiddish language and culture from which I make most of my living, from the fondly... Read more here

Wex

South African Jews in Yiddish

After a lecture I recently delivered about the importance of a familiarity with traditional Jewish texts and religious practices to a proper understanding of Yiddish, I was beset by a number of doubters. Noticing that one of my interlocutors had a South African accent, I asked her if she was familiar with the term khateysim. “Of course,” she replied, but couldn’t tell me where the term comes... Read more here

Wex

Yiddish exhaustion….

I finished my new novel "The Frumkiss Family Business" (due for release in Canada at the end of September) a couple of weeks ago and am laying low until it's time to start editing..... You call this a vacation? I’m so tired that I don’t even know how to describe myself. Am I oysgemutshet un oysgematert, “run down and weary, exhausted and exhausted?” Don’t ask me. Mutshet comes from Yiddish’s... Read more here

Wex

Spit three times when you win an award

The audio version of my book, Just Say Nu, recently won an award and I found myself confronted with the same problem that I had to face after Born to Kvetch won something: How could I let people know? How was I to say something nice about myself without calling down an evil eye and very likely destroying the very good fortune that I wanted to talk about? How are you supposed to spit three times at the end... Read more here

Marilla

Old Jewish Man River

We were sent this by Theodore Bikel - our dear, dear friend. It was just too damned good to keep to ourselves. Mary Tyler Moore producer Stan Daniels does Old Man River as an old Jewish guy. Enjoy! (And if you receive this via email and can't see the YouTube player, just click on the link to bring you to the website and you can look at it... Read more here

Wex

The evil inclination

The yeytser horeh, the evil inclination, is still alive and well among our children. My thirteen year-old daughter just informed me that a friend of hers has been grounded after coming home from what was supposed to have been a Yom Ha’Atzma’ut party with “a hickey the size of a matzoh ball.” It’s probably a good thing. According to the medresh, "Were it not for the yeytser horeh, no one would... Read more here

Wex

Yiddish and the Dave Clark Five

Early last week I found myself using the Yiddish phrase kosher fardint without any hint of irony. This doesn’t happen often. Although there’s no necessary reason not to use kosher fardinen (the infinitive form) to mean exactly what it appears to mean, “to earn in a kosher way, to obtain something by means of honest toil and effort,” it seems to be used more often in the sense of “it serves him... Read more here