Yiddish is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originates from 9th century Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages. Yiddish is primarily written in the Hebrew alphabet.
Klezmer is an instrumental musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The essential elements of the tradition include dance tunes, ritual melodies, and virtuosic improvisations played for listening; these would have been played at weddings and other social functions. The musical genre—also sometimes known by the earlier term freilach music —incorporated elements of many other musical genres including Ottoman music, Baroque music, German and Slavic folk dances, and religious Jewish music. As the music arrived in the United States, it lost some of its traditional ritual elements and adopted elements of American big band and popular music. Among the European-born klezmers who popularized the genre in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s were Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein; they were followed by American-born musicians such as Max Epstein, Sid Beckerman and Ray Musiker.
The Forward, formerly known as The Jewish Daily Forward, is an American news media organization for a Jewish American audience. Founded in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily socialist newspaper, The New York Times reported that Seth Lipsky "started an English-language offshoot of the Yiddish-language newspaper" as a weekly newspaper in 1990.
The Workers Circle or Der Arbeter Ring, formerly The Workmen's Circle, is an American Jewish nonprofit organization that promotes social and economic justice, Jewish community and education, including Yiddish studies, and Ashkenazic culture. It operates schools and Yiddish education programs, and year-round programs of concerts, lectures and secular holiday celebrations. The organization has community branch offices throughout North America, a national headquarters in New York City and approximately 11,000 members nationwide. It owns and operates a summer camp located in Hopewell Junction, New York called Camp Kinder Ring. It also runs an adult vacation campground facility, Circle Lodge, with bungalows and cottages, and a healthcare center in Bronx, New York.
Yankev Shternberg was a Yiddish theater director, teacher of theater, playwright, avant-garde poet and short-story writer, best known for his theater work in Romania between the two world wars.
Chaim Grade was one of the leading Yiddish writers of the twentieth century.
Der Nister was the pseudonym of Pinchus Kahanovich, a Yiddish author, philosopher, translator, and critic.
Chava Rosenfarb was a Holocaust survivor and Jewish-Canadian author of Yiddish poetry and novels, a major contributor to post-World War II Yiddish Literature.
Maalos is a Hasidic monthly magazine published in New York and mostly geared for women featuring a token section devoted to children. Maalos was founded by Sarah Jungreisz in 1996.
Michael Alpert is a klezmer musician and Yiddish singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, scholar and educator who has been called a key figure in the klezmer revitalization, beginning in the 1970s. He has performed in a number of groups since that time, including Brave Old World, Kapelye, Khevrisa, The Brothers Nazaroff, Voices of Ashkenaz and The An-Sky Ensemble, and collaborated with clarinetist David Krakauer, hip-hop artist Socalled, singer/songwriter/actor Daniel Kahn, bandurist Julian Kytasty, violinist Itzhak Perlman, ethnomusicologist and musician Walter Zev Feldman and numerous others.
Pete Rushefsky is an American klezmer musician and Executive Director of New York City's Center for Traditional Music and Dance. He plays the cimbalom or "tsimbl" as well as the 5-string banjo.
Beyle (Berta) Friedberg, best known by the pen names Isabella and Isabella Arkadevna Grinevskaya, was a Russian-Jewish novelist, poet, and dramatist. As a translator, she translated into Russian works from Polish, German, French, Italian, Armenian, and Georgian.
Haim Kantorovitch was an American socialist teacher, writer, and Marxist theoretician. Kantorovitch is best remembered as one of the intellectual leaders of the Militant faction of the Socialist Party of America in the early 1930s and as a founder and editor of The American Socialist Quarterly, the SP's theoretical magazine.
During the nine decades since its establishment in 1919, the Communist Party USA produced or inspired a vast array of newspapers and magazines in at least 25 different languages. This list of the Non-English press of the Communist Party USA provides basic information on each title, along with links to pages dealing with specific publications in greater depth.
Susman Kiselgof was a Russian-Jewish folksong collector and pedagogue associated with the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg. Like his contemporary Joel Engel, he conducted fieldwork in the Russian Empire to collect Jewish religious and secular music. Materials he collected were used in the compositions of such figures as Joseph Achron, Lev Pulver, and Alexander Krein.
Yakov Lidski was a Warsaw-based Jewish bookseller and publisher, pioneer of Yiddish literature publishing. Founder of “Progress” publishing house, which was the first to publish modern Yiddish literature, and co-founder and owner of the important publishing syndicate “Central.”
Shifra Kholodenko (1909-1974) was a Russian- and Yiddish-language poet, writer and translator from the Soviet Union.
Bernard Chaimovich Gorin was a Russian-born Jewish-American Yiddish playwright, journalist, and translator.
Jeremiah Hescheles was a Yiddish-language modernist poet, journalist, and Klezmer violinist. Because of his sharp memory and varied life experiences, he was an important resource for researchers of Yiddish culture and Klezmer music in the late twentieth century.
Rakhel Feygenberg, often known by her Hebrew pen name Rakhel Imri, was a Russian-born Israeli writer, playwright, translator and journalist who wrote in both Yiddish and Hebrew. She wrote and published prolifically from the early 1900s to the 1960s.
