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From our Director

Yiddishkayt Director Dr. Rob Adler Peckerar shares his thoughts, frustrations, and hopes for a new vision of Jewish culture.

Read about Yiddishkayt’s aspirations for 2013, including our plans to create the next generation of scholars of Yiddish culture and history.

Today in Yiddishkayt… June 8 Birthday of Ber Mark, Historian, Journalist, & Activist Ber Mark was born on June 8, 1908 in Łomża to an educated, business-oriented family and received both a traditional Jewish and a general secular education. In 1927, Mark moved to Warsaw, where he studied law at Warsaw University. During this time, he became involved in leftist circles, joining the Polish Communist Party in 1928. From 1934-1938, he was a member of the Central Jewish Committee and edited their publications and briefly as the legal affairs editor of the communist daily דער...

Of Words and Wars Now that the 2012 campaign is in full swing (az okh un az vey — o and woe), the Vortsman is keeping his eye on the misuse of Yiddish (or Yinglish) in the media. A recent report on the assumed GOP candidate said: “When told that if he doesn’t switch ties, he’ll be perceived as wearing the same thing two nights in a row, Romney says, it’s fine with him, he’ll ‘look like a schlep.’” Even if we were to put aside our insistence that Yiddish words not be transliterated as though they were German (fat chance), the writer of the report...

Fools’ Errands and Errors A reader asks for the meaning of tamevate, and notes it could not be found in any dictionary. Of course not. The reader was looking under ט (tes), one of the two letters in the Hebrew alef-beyz (alpha-bet) with the sound of “t.” Had he looked under the other letter, תּ (tof, in Israeli/Sefardic, tav), he’d have found both the word tam — Hebrew spelling תּם — and tamevate. Tam is the Hebrew-origin word for, as Weinreich’s dictionary has it, “a naïve person, moron, half-wit,” while tamevate is...

Of Dictionaries and Hats A reader wrote: “In the Yiddish I spoke all my life ‘moyde’ meant ‘forgive.’ I recently learned that in Hebrew it means ‘thanks.’ I would like to know how this exchange came to be.” Der Vortsman, hardly a Hebraist, sought enlightenment from his dictionaries: Yitskhok Niborski’s indispensable Verterbukh fun loshn-koydesh verter in yidish (Dictionary of Holy-Tongue [i.e., Hebrew/Aramaic] Words in Yiddish) and The New Bantam-Megiddo Hebrew & English Dictionary. Niborski confirmed that Yiddish uses the Hebrew-origin word moyde in...