Yiddish

Reading the Koran in Yiddish

Demand for a Yiddish translation of the Koran has never been particularly high, but that didn’t discourage Solomon Blumgarten, penname Yehoash. Blumgarten (1872-1927), a Lithuanian-born New Yorker, translated parts of the Islamic text into Yiddish after studying it during a 1914 trip to Palestine. It didn’t exactly become a bestseller. These days, Yiddish is […]

The Fascinating Yiddish Origins of “Death of a Salesman”

Linda Loman’s famous speech in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman demands that “attention must be paid” to a man like her husband Willy. In the New Yiddish Rep’s new staging of Miller’s 1949 classic (at NYC’s Castillo Theater through November 22), we see much more clearly what, exactly, we should pay attention to. […]