You're no idiot, of course. You can serve up a mean s'il vous plaît in a French bistro, live la vida loca for a night of margaritas, and manage a sayonara! after sushi, sake, and karaoke. But when it comes to throwing around a little Yiddish, you feel like a total nebbish! Don't throw up your hands in a helpless “Oy, vey” just yet! The Complete Idiot's Guide® to Learning Yiddish is your guide to this unique tongue, whether you're tackling rules of grammar or just throwing around some key phrases so you sound a little less goyish. In this Complete Idiot's Guide® you get: --A fascinating explanation of how and why Yiddish developed. --An easy introduction to the Yiddish alphabet, as well as to the distinctive sound of Yiddish. --All the Yiddish you'll need for communicating with family and friends or for bargain-hunting on New York's Lower East Side. --A treasury of Yiddish words and phrases for everything.

Part of The Complete Idiot's Guides® popular religion and history titles. The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jewish History and Culture contains information about Jews in early American history through the 19th century as well as coverage of Jewish history and culture in the places you might least expect - Asia and South America.

Movie-Made Jews focuses on American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation, and through unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. While it's a truism that Jews make movies, this book demonstrates how movies make Jews.

This book is about interjections and their transcultural issues. Challenging the marginalization of the past, the ubiquity of interjections and translational practices are presented in their multilingual and cross-cultural aspects. The survey widens the field of inquiry to a multi-genre and context-based perspective. The quanti-qualitative corpus has been processed on the base of topics of relevance and thematization. The range of examples varies from adaptation of novels into films, from Shakespeare, from Zulu oral epics to opera, from children’s narratives to cartoons, from migration literature to gangster and horror films and their audiovisual translation. The use of American Yiddish, Italian American, South African English, and Jamaican account for the controversial aspects of interjections as a universal phenomenon, and, conversely, as a pragmatic marker of identity in (post)colonial contexts.

New speakers are an increasingly important aspect of the revitalization of minority languages since, in some cases, they can make up the majority of the language community in question. This volume examines this phenomenon from the viewpoint of three minority languages: Breton, Yiddish and Lemko.

Organized in an A to Z format for easy reference, The JPS Dictionary of Jewish Words contains 1,200 entries derived from Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic, and English. The entries include words for and associated with Jewish holidays and life-cycle events, culture, history, the Bible and other sacred texts, worship, and more. Each entry has a pronunciation guide and is cross-referenced to other related terms. The introduction is an excellent primer on the history of Jewish words, their transliteration, and pronunciation. The indexes at the back, arranged by categories, help readers easily find the words they want, even when they don't know the exact spelling. This handy and very accessible dictionary is an excellent resource not just for Jews, but for anyone who wants to check the meaning, spelling, and/or pronunciation of Jewish words.

Like many languages across the globe, the Celtic languages today are experiencing varying degrees of minoritisation and revitalisation. The experience of the Celtic languages in the twenty-first century is characterised by language shift to English and French, but they have also been the focus of official and grassroots initiatives aimed at reinvigorating the minoritised languages. This modern reality is evident in the profile of contemporary users of the Celtic languages, in the type of variation that they practise, and in their views on Celtic language and society in the twenty-first century. In turn, this reality provides a challenge to preconceived ideas about what the Celtic languages are like and how they should be regarded and managed at local and global levels. This book aims to shed light on some of the main issues facing the Celtic languages into the future and to showcase different approaches to studying such contexts. It presents contributions interested in explicating the modern condition of the Celtic languages. It engages with attitudinal support for the Celtic languages, modes of language transmission, choosing educational models in minority settings, pedagogical approaches for language learners and perceptions of linguistic practices. These issues are considered within the context of language shift and revitalisation in the Celtic languages. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Language, Culture and Curriculum.

In Stardust Lost, Stefan Kanfer brings the colorful Yiddish stage roaring back to life. Born of ancient traditions stretching back to the drama of the Old Testament, the Yiddish theater was a vibrant part of the immigrant experience. Kanfer invokes the energy, belief, and pure chutzpah it took to establish and run the thriving, influential theaters. He reveals the nightly drama and comedy that played out behind the scenes as well as onstage, and introduces all the players—actors, divas, playwrights, directors, and producers—who made it possible. A richly evocative chronicle of its brief but dazzling existence in America, this is both an elegy for and a tribute to Yiddish theater—lost, but not forgotten.

THE ENGLISH DISEASE is a remarkable feat, a story that mixes the Marx brothers and Maimonides, pornographic yoga with Polish paranoia, and the brutality of kindergarten with the beauty of the Kiddush. It's the tale of Charles Belski, an expert in the works of Gustav Mahler, who, like Mahler himself, is talented and neurotic, and a nonpracticing Jew. Belski suffers guilt over his own contribution to the decline of the Jewish religion, especially since he married a gentile and now has a gentile daughter. As if he can't conjure up enough angst on his own, his great-grandfather appears before him in a dream to admonish him for neglecting the obligations of his faith. For Belski, the dilemma is how an assimilated intellectual can connect with an ancient and irrational (to him) religion without losing his sense of self. Is he the self-hating Jew that his obstreperous colleague pegs him for? Can his wife and daughter bully him into opening up his heart and letting in a little joy? Belski tries to come to grips with the meaninglessness of modern life, the demands of tradition, the nature of love and fidelity, and the true significance of the lyrics to Goodnight Irene. Joseph Skibell has written a novel that is sad, funny, daring, and ultimately redemptive.

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