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Yaakov Schwartz is The Times of Israel's deputy Jewish World editor. Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, in his Miami Beach apartment, October 10, 1978. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens) In 2014, author and literary scholar David Stormberg took his first trip to the archives at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, in search of material by the late Yiddish-language Jewish-American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. He hit the motherlode. “I was looking for Bashevis Singer’s essays because I was interested in his non-fiction and worldview writing — on literature, on Judaism and Yiddi...

Read this article in Yiddish. Jewish crime ain’t what it used to be. In 1908, New York Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham caused a scandal when he asserted in an article in the North American Review that half the city’s criminals were Jews. The Jewish community was outraged and Bingham was forced to retract his statement. In fact, studies have long shown that Jews have a relatively low crime rate, lower than that of other religious groups. For much of their history, Jews were generally less drawn to crime, partly thanks to the strong social net provided by the organized Jewish community...

Yiddish Is a Language of Faith Jewish Commentary Early in 2021, a niche online argument made its way onto the front page of the Wall Street Journal, complete with a catchy headline: “Designing a Flag for Yiddish Takes Chutzpah.” The cause of the disagreement was the announcement by Duolingo, a website for learning languages, that it would release a course for Yiddish. Usually, the symbol for a language would be the flag of its home country: France, Italy, Japan. Yiddish, however, was a language of exile; the Israeli flag would represent Hebrew, not Yiddish. What, then, should serve as i...

By Dr. Yvette Alt Miller/aish.com (printed with permission) | May 06, 2021 Duolingo, the popular language-learning app with a global following, recently made an exciting announcement: Users can now learn Yiddish, choosing to study Yiddish as little as five minutes a day, with fun lessons sent to their phones. I signed up for the course and loved hearing some of the initial Yiddish sentences. The first lesson featured Yiddish words that sounded much like English: “Mom, a balloon!” a cartoon girl with blue hair said in my first session (Mama, ah balon); a boy with bright oran...

Jewish Ledger YI Love Yiddishfest – Purim Edition! The Yiddishkayt Initiative (“YI Love Jewish”) will serve up its first International VIRTUAL YI Love Yiddishfest – Purim Edition, Feb. 25-28. The event is being simultaneously streamed on the yilovejewish.org website, Facebook Live and YouTube Live. Virtual visitors of all ages will hear the story of Purim as they enjoy a wide range of FREE performances, concerts, readings and interviews, featuring major American and International entertainers. “We’re not able to spread the joy and traditions of Purim and Yid...