Next time you’re chattin’ with your khaverim (friends) and mishpukheh (family), bust out some Yiddish expressions that’ll liven up the conversation.Nothing is censored in Dirty Yiddish. It includes phrases for any situation, so readers have enough chutzpah (balls) to tell the local deli that they’ve waited long enough for their knish, and explicit swear words crude enough to shock Bubby and everyone else at the Passover seder. There’s even vulgar sex terminology so graphic it puts the outspoken Lower East Side princesses to shame. Bust out with expressions they never teach you in school, including cool slang, funny insults, explicit sex terms, and raw swear words.  Dirty Yiddish teaches the casual expressions heard every day on the streets of New York . . . What’s up? Vos makhst du?Crazy bastard! Meshuggeneh momzer!I’m hammered. Ikh bin fershikkert.Don’t fuck with me! Bareh mikh nit!I have the shits. Ikh hob a shittern mogn.Lick my pussy. Lekh meyn lokh.Was it good for you? Tsufreedn? Read more

A “fascinating and enlightening” collection of comics and writings that explore the Yiddish language and the Jewish experience (The Miami Herald).We hear words like nosh, schlep, and schmutz, but how did they come to pepper American English? In Yiddishkeit, Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle trace the far-reaching influences of Yiddish from medieval Europe to the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. This comics anthology contains original stories by such notable writers and artists as Barry Deutsch, Peter Kuper, Spain Rodriguez, and Sharon Rudahl. Through illustrations, comics art, and a full-length play, four major themes are explored: culture, performance, assimilation, and the revival of the language. “The book is about what Neal Gabler in his introduction labels ‘Jewish sensibility.’…he writes: ‘You really can’t define Yiddishkeit neatly in words or pictures. You sort of have to feel it by wading into it.’ The book does this with gusto.” —TheNew York Times“As colorful, bawdy, and charming as the culture it seeks to represent.” —Print magazine“Brimming with the charm and flavor of its subject…a genuinely compelling, scholarly comics experience.” —Publishers Weekly“A book that truly informs about Jewish culture and, in the process, challenges readers to pick apart their own vocabulary.” —Chicago Tribune“A postvernacular tour de force.” —The Forward“With a loving eye Pekar and Buhle extract moments and personalities from Yiddish history.” —Hadassah“Gorgeous comix-style portraits of Yiddish writers.”––Tablet “Yiddishkeit has managed to survive, if just barely…because [it] is an essential part of both the Jewish and the human experience.” —Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, from his introduction“A scrumptious smorgasbord of comics, essays, and illustrations…concentrated tastes, with historical context, of Yiddish theater, literature, characters and culture.” —Heeb magazine Read more

More than a quarter of a century ago, Leo Rosten published the first comprehensive and hilariously entertaining lexicon of the colorful and deeply expressive language of Yiddish. Said “to give body and soul to the Yiddish language,” The Joys of Yiddish went on to become an indispensable tool for writers, journalists, politicians, and students, as well as a perennial bestseller for three decades.Rosten described his book as “a relaxed lexicon of Yiddish, Hebrew, and Yinglish words often encountered in English, plus dozens that ought to be, with serendipitous excursions into Jewish humor, habits, holidays, history, religion, ceremonies, folklore, and cuisine–the whole generously garnished with stories, anecdotes, epigrams, Talmudic quotations, folk sayings, and jokes.” To this day, it is considered the seminal work on Yiddish in America–a true classic and a staple in the libraries of Jews and non-Jews alike. With the recent renaissance of interest in Yiddish, and in keeping with a language that embodies the variety and vibrancy of life itself, The New Joys of Yiddish brings Leo Rosten’s masterful work up to date. Revised for the first time by Lawrence Bush in close consultation with Rosten’s daughters, it retains the spirit of the original–with its wonderful jokes, tidbits of cultural history, Talmudic and Biblical references, and tips on pronunciation–and enhances it with hundreds of new entries, thoughtful commentary on how Yiddish has evolved over the years, and an invaluable new English-to-Yiddish index. In addition, The New Joys of Yiddish includes wondrous and amusing illustrations by renowned artist R.O. Blechman. Read more

Master a foreign language once and for all.Would you like to become fluent at speaking as well as reading and writing?Then this book is for you!In this step-by-step guide, you will find out how to:• Master the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar of a foreign language.• Practical conversation strategies to become a fluent speaker.With a friendly tone and constant encouragement, you will discover the strategies that work best for you and learn faster. More importantly, you will build up your speaking skills and master conversation.Federica Lupis is fluent in four languages and has over 10 years of experience helping learners become fluent. Her proven method is the result of formal education and knowledge as a self-taught learner.Do you want to master the language of your dreams?Start learning the most effective way and pick up your copy by clicking the BUY NOW button at the top, before the price changes. Read more

What do George and Laura Bush have in common with Dick and Jane? Well, both hail from prototypical WASP families. And, perhaps more to the point, both exhibit a natural resistance to moral complexity (i.e., reality). That's the premise of this hilarious new primer-style book in which George, Laura, and the entire Bush family communicate with uncharacteristic expressiveness, conveying shades of of feeling and nuances of meaning that plain old English can't deliver -- by peppering their conversatuon with Yiddishisms. See George's mother. Her name is Bar. She wears a lot of pearls and is a farbisseneh. "You are late, George," Bar says. "Of course I am late," George says. "I am the President of the United States. I am a big macher." Like all good primers, Yiddish with George and Laura tells a simple story -- and, in the end, important life lessons are imparted. Read more

“Incredible . . . Inspiring . . . Important.” —Library Journal, starred review “A marvelous yarn, loaded with near-calamitous adventures and characters as memorable as Singer creations.” —The New York Post      “What began as a quixotic journey was also a picaresque romp, a detective story, a profound history lesson, and a poignant evocation of a bygone world.” —The Boston Globe “Every now and again a book with near-universal appeal comes along: Outwitting History is just such a book.” —The Sunday Oregonian As a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, Aaron Lansky set out to save the world’s abandoned Yiddish books before it was too late. Today, more than a million books later, he has accomplished what has been called “the greatest cultural rescue effort in Jewish history.” In Outwitting History, Lansky shares his adventures as well as the poignant and often laugh-out-loud stories he heard as he traveled the country collecting books. Introducing us to a dazzling array of writers, he shows us how an almost-lost culture is the bridge between the old world and the future—and how the written word can unite everyone who believes in the power of great literature.A Library Journal Best Book A Massachusetts Book Award Winner in Nonfiction An ALA Notable Book Read more

One of the great Yiddish scholars of the twentieth century, S.A. Birnbaum (1891–1989) published Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar in 1979 towards the end of a long and prolific career. Unlike other grammars and study guides for English speakers, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar fully describes the Southern Yiddish dialect and pronunciation used today by most native speakers, while also taking into account Northern Yiddish and Standard Yiddish, associated with secularist and academic circles. The book also includes specimens of Yiddish prose and poetic texts spanning eight centuries, sampling Yiddish literature from the medieval to modern eras across its vast European geographic expanse.The second edition of Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar makes this classic text available again to students, teachers, and Yiddish-speakers alike. Featuring three new introductory essays by noted Yiddish scholars, a corrected version of the text, and an expanded and updated bibliography, this book is essential reading for any serious student of Yiddish and its culture. Read more

As the main spoken language of the Jews for more than a thousand years, Yiddish has had plenty to lament, plenty to conceal. Its phrases, idioms, and expressions paint a comprehensive picture of the mind-set that enabled the Jews of Europe to survive a millennium of unrelenting persecution: they never stopped kvetching---about God, gentiles, children, food, and everything (and anything) else. They even learned how to smile through their kvetching and express satisfaction in the form of complaint.In Born to Kvetch, Michael Wex looks at the ingredients that went into this buffet of disenchantment and examines how they were mixed together to produce an almost limitless supply of striking idioms and withering curses (which get a chapter all to themselves). Born to Kvetch includes a wealth of material that's never appeared in English before. You'll find information on the Yiddish relationship to food, nature, divinity, and humanity. There's even a chapter about sex.This is no bobe mayse (cock-and-bull story) from a khokhem be-layle (idiot, literally a "sage at night" when no one's looking), but a serious yet fun and funny look at a language that both shaped and was shaped by those who spoke it. From tukhes to goy, meshugener to kvetch, Yiddish words have permeated and transformed English as well. Through the idioms, phrases, metaphors, and fascinating history of this kvetch-full tongue, Michael Wex gives us a moving and inspiring portrait of a people, and a language, in exile. Read more

Jane is in real estate. Today is Saturday. Jane has an open house. She must schlep the Open House signs to the car. See Jane schlep. Schlep, Jane. Schlep. Schlep, schlep, schlep. In text that captures the unque rhythms of the original Dick and Jane readers, and in 35 all-new illustrations, a story unfolds in which Dick and Jane -- hero and heroine of the classic books for children that generations of Americans have used when learning to read -- manage to express shades of feeling and nuances of meaning that ordinary English just can't deliver. How? By speaking Yiddish, employing terms that convey an attitude -- part plucky self-assertion, part ironic fatalism. When Dick schmoozes, when Jane kvetches, when their children fress noodles at a Chinese restaurant, the clash of cultures produces genuine hilarity. Read more

Have you always wanted to learn how to speak Yiddish but simply didn’t have the time?Well if so, then, look no further. You can hold in your hands "Conversational Yiddish Quick and Easy" which contains one of the most advanced and revolutionary methods that was ever designed for quickly becoming conversational in a language.In creating this time-saving program, master linguist Yatir Nitzany spent years examining the twenty-seven most common languages in the world and distilling from them the three hundred and fifty words that are most likely to be used in real conversations.These three hundred and fifty words were chosen in such a way that they were structurally interrelated and, when combined, form sentences.Through various other discoveries about how real conversations work—discoveries that are detailed further in this book—Nitzany created the necessary tools for linking these words together in a specific way so that you may become rapidly and almost effortlessly conversant—now.If your desire is to speak perfectly proper and precise Yiddish or learn complicated grammatical rules then this book is not for you.However, if you need to actually hold a conversation while on a trip to Israel or Brooklyn, to impress that certain someone, or to be able to speak with your grandfather or grandmother as soon as possible, then the Nitzany Method is what you have been looking for.This method is designed for fluency in a foreign language, while communicating in the present tense.Nitzany believes that what’s most important is actually being able to understand and be understood by another human being right away.Therefore, unlike other courses, all words in this program are taught in both the Hebrew alphabet as well as English transliteration. More formalized training in conjugation, tense, grammar rules, and the like can all come later. This is one of the several, in a series of instructional language guides, the Nitzany Method’s revolutionary approach is the only one in the world that uses its unique language technology to actually enable you to speak and understand native speakers in the shortest amount of time possible.No more depending on volumes of books of fundamental, beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, all with hundreds of pages in order to learn a language. With Conversational Yiddish Quick and Easy, all you need are fifty-seven pages.Pick up your copy today and learn a new language quickly and easily. Read more

Yiddish—an oft-considered "gutter" language—is an unlikely survivor of the ages, much like the Jews themselves. Its survival has been an incredible journey, especially considering how often Jews have tried to kill it themselves. Underlying Neal Karlen's unique, brashly entertaining, yet thoroughly researched telling of the language's story is the notion that Yiddish is a mirror of Jewish history, thought, and practice—for better and worse. Karlen charts the beginning of Yiddish as a minor dialect in medieval Europe that helped peasant Jews live safely apart from the marauders of the First Crusades. Incorporating a large measure of antique German dialects, Yiddish also included little scraps of French, Italian, ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, the Slavic and Romance languages, and a dozen other tongues native to the places where Jews were briefly given shelter. One may speak a dozen languages, all of them Yiddish.By 1939, Yiddish flourished as the lingua franca of 13 million Jews. After the Holocaust, whatever remained of Yiddish, its worldview and vibrant culture, was almost stamped out—by Jews themselves. Yiddish was an old-world embarrassment for Americans anxious to assimilate. In Israel, young, proud Zionists suppressed Yiddish as the symbol of the weak and frightened ghetto-bound Jew—and invented modern Hebrew. Today, a new generation has zealously sought to explore the language and to embrace its soul. This renaissance has spread to millions of non-Jews who now know the subtle difference between a shlemiel and a shlimazel; hundreds of Yiddish words dot the most recent editions of the Oxford English Dictionary.The Story of Yiddish is a delightful tale of a people, their place in the world, and the fascinating language that held them together. Read more

A cross between Henry Beard's Latin for All Occasions and Ben Schott's Schott's Original Miscellany, JUST SAY NU is a practical guide to using Yiddish words and expressions in day-to-day situations. Along with enough grammar to enable readers to put together a comprehensible sentence and avoid embarrassing mistakes, Wex also explains the five most useful Yiddish words–shoyn, nu, epes, takeh,and nebakh–what they mean, how and when to use them, and how they can be used to conduct an entire conversation without anybody ever suspecting that the reader doesn't have the vaguest idea of what anyone is actually saying. Readers will learn how to shmooze their way through such activities as meeting and greeting; eating and drinking; praising and finding fault; maintaining personal hygiene; going to the doctor; driving; parenting; getting horoscopes; committing crimes; going to singles bars; having sex; talking politics and talking trash.Now that Stephen Colbert, a Catholic from South Carolina and host of the "Colbert Report," is using Yiddish to wish viewers a bright and happy Chanukah, people have finally started to realize that there's nothing in the world that can't be improved by translating it into Yiddish. Wex's JUST SAY NU is the book that's going to show them how. Read more

Highlights an international generation of scholars currently revitalizing the field of Yiddish studies.Yiddish Hip Hop, a nineteenth century "Hasidic Slasher," obscure Yiddish writers, and immigrant Jewish newspapers in Buenos Aires, Paris, and New York are just a few of the topics featured in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture. Editors Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren, and Hannah S. Pressman have gathered a diverse and richly layered collection of essays that demonstrates the currency of Yiddish scholarship in academia today. Organized into six thematic rubrics, Choosing Yiddish demonstrates that Yiddish, always a border-crossing language, continues to push boundaries with vigorous disciplinary exchange. "Writing on the Edge" focuses on the realm of belles lettres; "Yiddish and the City" spans the urban centers of Paris, Buenos Aires, New York City, and Montreal; "Yiddish Goes Pop" explores the mediating role of Yiddish between artistic vision and popular culture; "Yiddish Comes to America" focuses on the history and growth of Yiddish in the United States; "Yiddish Encounters Hebrew" showcases interactions between Yiddish and Hebrew in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and "Hear and Now" explores the aural dimension of Yiddish in contemporary settings. Along the way, contributors consider famed and lesser-known Yiddish writers, films, and Yiddish hip-hop, as well as historical studies on the Yiddish press, Yiddish film melodrama, Hasidic folkways, and Yiddish culture in Israel. Venerable scholars introduce each rubric, creating additional dialogue between newer and more established voices in the field.The international contributors prove that the language-far from dying-is fostering exciting new directions of academic and popular discourse, rooted in the field's historic focus on interdisciplinary research. Students and teachers of Yiddish studies will enjoy this innovative collection. Read more

The five short novellas which comprise this anthology were written between 1890 and World War I. All share a common setting-the Eastern European Jewish town or shtetl, and all deal in different ways with a single topic-the Jewish confrontation with modernity. The authors of these novellas are among the greatest masters of Yiddish prose. In their work, today's reader will discover a literary tradition of considerable scope, energy, and variety and will come face to face with an exceptionally memorable cast of characters and with a human community now irrevocably lost.In her general introduction, Professor Wisse traces the development of modern Yiddish literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and describes the many shifts that took place between the Yiddish writers and the world about which they wrote. She also furnishes a brief introduction for each novella, giving the historical and biographical background and offering a critical interpretation of the work. Read more

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The most widely spoken Jewish language on the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish continues to play a significant role in Jewish life today, from Hasidim for whom it is a language of daily life to avant-garde performers, political activists, and LGBTQ writers turning to Yiddish for inspiration. Yiddish: Biography of a Language presents the story of this centuries-old language, the defining vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the present.Jeffrey Shandler tells the multifaceted history of Yiddish in the form of a biographical profile, revealing surprising insights through a series of thematic chapters. He addresses key aspects of Yiddish as the language of a diasporic population, whose speakers have always used more than one language. As the vernacular of a marginalized minority, Yiddish has often been held in low regard compared to other languages, and its legitimacy as a language has been questioned. But some devoted Yiddish speakers have championed the language as embodying the essence of Jewish culture and a defining feature of a Jewish national identity. Despite predictions of the demise of Yiddish-dating back well before half of its speakers were murdered during the Holocaust-the language leads a vibrant, evolving life to this day. Read more

“A pioneering study” of how two languages have coexisted in the Jewish state, with “a wealth of information” on Yiddish newspapers, theater, and more (AJS Review).Yiddish in Israel: A History challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew.Following Yiddish in Israel from the proclamation of the State until today, Rojanski reveals that although Israeli leadership made promoting Hebrew a high priority, it did not have a definite policy on Yiddish. The language’s varying fortune through the years was shaped by social and political developments, as well as the cultural atmosphere in Israel. Public perception of the language and its culture, the rise of identity politics, and political and financial interests all played a part.Using a wide range of archival sources, newspapers, and Yiddish literature, Rojanski follows the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture. With compassion, she explores the tensions during Israel’s early years between Yiddish writers and activists and Israel’s leaders, most of whom were themselves Eastern European Jews balancing their love of Yiddish with their desire to promote Hebrew. Finally Rojanski follows Yiddish into the twenty-first century, telling the story of the revived interest in Yiddish among Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivors as they return to the language of their parents. Read more

A major literary figure and frequent contributor to the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts from the 1920s to the mid-1930s, Jonah Rosenfeld was recognized during and after his lifetime as an explorer of human psychology. His work foregrounds loneliness, social anxiety, and people’s frustrated longing for meaningful relationships—themes just as relevant to today’s Western society as they were during his era.The Rivals and Other Stories introduces nineteen of Rosenfeld’s short stories to an English-reading audience for the first time. Unlike much of Yiddish literature that offers a sentimentalized view of the tight knit communities of early twentieth-century Jewish life, Rosenfeld’s stories portray an entirely different view of pre-war Jewish families. His stories are urban, domestic dramas that probe the often painful disjunctions between men and women, parents and children, rich and poor, Jews and Gentiles, self and society. They explore eroticism and family dysfunction in narratives that were often shocking to readers at the time they were published. Following the Modernist tradition, Rosenfeld rejected many established norms, such as religion and the assumption of absolute truth. Rather, his work is rooted in psychological realism, portraying the inner lives of alienated individuals who struggle to construct a world in which they can live. These deeply moving, empathetic stories provide a counterbalance to the prevailing idealized portrait of shtetl life and enrich our understanding of Yiddish literature. Read more

Red Shoes for Rachel, Sandler’s award-winning collection of three novellas, features tightly wound tales that seamlessly incorporate diverse genres, including magic realism, satire, and autobiography, and profound psychological profiles to create touching portrayals of the human experience. Zumoff’s translation of Sandler’s original Yiddish collection makes the J. I. Segal Award–winning volume available to English readers for the first time. In the collection’s eponymous novella, Rachel, a daughter of Holocaust survivors raised in Brighton Beach, encounters a Moldovan Jewish immigrant divorcee as she is tending to her disabled, elderly mother along the Coney Island boardwalk. As the two begin a relationship, the story reveals their past and the commonalities between two children of Holocaust survivors raised in very different societies. In the novella Karolina Bugaz, an exhausted Moldovan Jewish immigrant architect leaves his wife and newly religious son behind to go on a cruise to a mysterious island, which may just be a direct voyage through space and time into his past. In the volume’s most acclaimed story, Halfway Down the Road Back to You, an elderly Moldovan Holocaust survivor in Israel separated from her children by emigration must confront her past as her failing mind begins to blur the boundaries between her daily life and the horrors of war sixty years before. The novella was adapted by the author into an acclaimed play, which has been staged in the United States, Belgium, and France. Read more

A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples.Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed.The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York–based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee’s “God’s Black Lamb,” Moyshe Nadir’s “Closer,” and Esther Shumiatsher’s “At the Border of China.”These poets dreamed of a moment when “we” could mean “we workers” rather than “we Jews.” Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain. Read more