(JTA) — Philip Roth’s character Alexander Portnoy captured the insecurity of second-generation immigrants in two priceless sentences. “I was asked by the teacher one day to identify a picture of what ...

Jewish words can divide the community between insiders and outsiders. (JTA) — Do you go to shul, temple, synagogue, minyan or just services? Let me ask it another way: That synagogue you won’t set ...

In the hallways of New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the story was told as a punchline: the great Yiddish dictionary project that took 25 years and never got beyond the first letter of ...

One of the biggest misnomers in the Jewish vocabulary is the translation of tzedakah as “charity.” This mistranslation has gone on for so long in the American Jewish community that it's a hard habit ...

(RNS) — There is a Yiddish word that our grandparents used that has fallen out of use. The word is shanda — shame. Some would say: Good riddance. For several generations, the idea and living reality ...

It isn’t easy being a language without a country. Unlike English, Hebrew and hundreds of other languages that have governments to protect them and nurture their growth, Yiddish has, for the most part, ...

Last week I delivered a sermon based on the Torah portion of the week and which compared Moses, the great Jewish redeemer, with Abraham Lincoln, the martyred American emancipator. When I finished, I ...

It used to be commonly held that Orthodox Jews were more interested in ritual observances—the obligations between people and God—while Reform Jews were interested in charity and justice, or the ...