What Yiddish has been to Ashkenazi Jews, Ladino has been to Sephardic Jews. Perhaps more correctly called Judeo-Spanish, Ladino is a Romance language based on Old Spanish and influenced by several other languages. Although not widely used today, it is still spoken by small Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries. The story of Ladino…
Yiddish was long thought to be a moribund language, expect among very old Jews and in ultra-Orthodox and Hassidic communities. Happily, the lingua franca spoken by 11 million Jews before World War II has been making a comeback — including in some unexpected quarters (see the links below). Quote: “When I teach Yiddish, the…
Before the Second World War, Yiddish was spoken by some 11 million Ashkenazi Jews, a majority of the world’s Jewish population. The Holocaust decimated Yiddish language, literature, and culture in Europe. After the war, assimilation in the West also took a toll, as did the establishment of Hebrew as the official language of the State…
The Israeli dramatic television series Shtisel focuses on the Shtisels, a family of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. The show — whose dialog is in a mixture of Hebrew and Yiddish — is distributed in the U.S. by Netflix (with English subtitles). During its two-season run so far, the series has won legions of ardent fans,…
Last month we featured an item about the restoration of a historic synagogue in Egypt, a project financed by that country’s government. This month, along the same lines, we bring the extraordinary story of two Egyptian women -– Magda Haroun, a Jew (pictured left) and Marwa Abu Dagga, a Muslin of Palestinian background -– who…
Many elements comprise an ethnic and religious group’s culture — song, dance, literature…
The biological mother of Hollywood producer and executive producer Marra B. Gad was a white, unwed Jewish woman; her biological father was a non-Jewish African-American man who never learned of the pregnancy. As an infant, Gad was adopted by a Midwestern Jewish couple. The fact that her biological mother was a Jew is significant: No…
Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews are a small minority within the Jewish People (except in Israel, where they are a slight majority). Unfortunately, a great many Ashkenazi Jews (and even many Mizrachi and Sephardi Jews themselves) know little about this significant Jewish subgroup, which has a unique, rich history and culture of its own. JIMENA…
Dani Rotsein and Toni Pinya, both living on the Spanish island of Majorca, are working to revive…
The Met Cloisters, a museum in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, is displaying objects from the Colmar Treasure, a medieval Jewish family’s trove of exquisite decorative pieces that remained hidden for some 500 years. The Cloisters — a branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art — focuses on architecture, sculpture, and decorative arts from…
To learn about these and many more AmazingJews, watch a compilation put together by JewOfTheWeek.net in 2015 and posted on YouTube.