Itzik Gottesman
By Itzik Gottesman
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Yiddish World Are Jews afraid of Christmas?
Learn why shtetl Jews covered their pots on Christmas Eve and other fascinating traditions related to the holiday
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Yiddish World The shul knocker: The protagonist of Rosh Hashanah Eve
Although shul knocking may seem like a low-status profession today, shul knockers were held in high regard in the shtetl.
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Yiddish World What this convert to Christianity wrote about the Jews
Haym Isaac's 1836 book on the folklore of the Polish and German Jews was so popular, there were three editions of it.
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Yiddish World Five Passover shtetl traditions you’ve never heard of
Some of the best descriptions of shtetl life come from the stories and essays by the Yiddish writer B. Gorin (1868-1925). Author of the first book about the history of the Yiddish theater, Gorin also had an eye for writing about everyday life, both in Europe and in America. In his book “Fargesene nigunim” (“Forgotten…
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Yiddish World My touching – and funny – moments with Forverts obituaries
When I first began working at the Forverts in the year 2000, I had already missed out on the old traditions of typesetting and printing; the reign of the digital world had begun. But tucked away in the corners of the hall where the typesetters once worked, remained artifacts of yesteryear: the telegraph ticker tape…
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Culture Scenes From The Forverts: When Hasidic Proofreaders And Secular Editors Went Head-To-Head
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It is part of a series on Forverts memories written by and about present and past Forverts writers and editors. By the time I began working at the Forverts as an associate editor under Boris Sandler, I had missed out on the paper’s venerable traditions of Yiddish…
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Culture What Was Passover Like Before WWII? 5 Facts You May Not Know
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. If you‘re ever looking for descriptions of life in the shtetl, the most informative source is the work of B. Gorin (1868-1925). Though he was best known as the author of the first history of the Yiddish theater, Gorin was also a great writer with a special…
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The Schmooze How to Sing Like a Real Folk Singer
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here Can you say with certainty that someone sings in an authentic Yiddish style? Fortunately, we have materials to help us figure it out — the records and CDs of folksingers, the recorded compilations from Ruth Rubin, Sofia Magid, Ben Stonehill and others; the recordings in the…
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