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Tag Name "Yiddish" (23)

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Yiddish for gall, nerve, arrogance-whatever
Howard Fast
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Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bear the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are the undried, uncongealed Jewish tears.
I. L. Peretz
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There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love... In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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I heard Yiddish when my father's family came to the house, which was as seldom as my mother could arrange it.
Joseph H. Greenberg
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On a crowded bus in Israel, a mother was speaking to her son in Yiddish. An Israeli woman reprimanded her. You should be speaking Hebrew. Why are you talking to him in Yiddish? The mother answered, I don't want he should forget he's a Jew.
Kirk Douglas
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There's an expression in Yiddish, which is der gelernte naar - a learned fool. You can know a great deal, you can have a Ph.D., and you can still be a total idiot.
Mark Helprin
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English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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Even though I loved the song [My Yiddish Momme] and it was a sensational hit every time I sang it, I was always careful to use it only when I knew the majority of the house would understand Yiddish. However, you didn't have to be a Jew to be moved by 'My Yiddish Momme.' 'Mother' in any language means the same thing.
Sophie Tucker
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Romanian-Yiddish cooking has killed more Jews than Hitler
Zero Mostel
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Not now, for the last three thousand years, Hebrew has been penetrated and fertilized by ancient Semitic languages - by Aramaic, by Greek, by Latin, by Arabic, by Yiddish, by Latino, by German, by Russian, by English, I could go on and on. It's very much like English.
Amos Oz
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I wrote my first book, I published it in 1955, it was in Yiddish and it was called And The World Was Silent.
Elie Wiesel
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The prejudice is still there, but it's breaking down. You have writers like Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union. He's a writer who's determined to break down genre barriers. He's done amazing things.
George R. R. Martin
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It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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To me the Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it are identical.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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I'm Italian, but some people think I'm Jewish because I work the Yiddish. I also work the Italian, by the way.
Joy Behar
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Donald Trump did his usual softball interview on Fox News where the interviewer agreed with Trump that using that Yiddish vulgarity is going to be OK for him.
Lawrence O'Donnell
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When I was a little boy, I thought when I grew up I would talk Yiddish. I thought little kids talked English, but when they became adults, they would talk Yiddish like the adults did. There would be no reason to talk English anymore, because we would have made it.
Mel Brooks
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There are nineteen words in Yiddish that convey gradations of disparagement, from a mild, fluttery helplessness to a state of downright, irreconcilable brutishness. All of them can be usefully employed to pinpoint the kind of individuals I write about.
S. J. Perelman
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I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive.
Theodore Bikel
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They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.
Anne Lamott
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What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time.
Etgar Keret
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Well, you have children so you know: little children little troubles, big children, big troubles - it's a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too.
Grace Paley