Yiddish: A story of survival

Are we entering an era when robots will finally liberate people, and particularly women, from the drudgery of housework? There is certainly a buzz around domestic robots right now and every month seems to bring us a new autonomous machine that can fold your clothes or stack your ...  Show more

One of the first recorded examples of a marriage ceremony is dated more than 4000 years ago in Mesopotamia. And it seems that through the ages, weddings have never lost their appeal. The global wedding industry is today worth billions of dollars, and it is one that keeps on growi ...  Show more

The most widely spoken Jewish language on the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish continues to play a significant role in Jewish life today, from Hasidim for whom it is a language of daily life to avant-garde performers, political activists, and LGBTQ writers turning to Yiddish for ins ...  Show more

During World War Two, approximately 1.6 million Soviet, Polish and Romanian Jews survived by escaping to Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, avoiding imminent death in ghettos, firing squads and killing centres. Many of them wrote music about these horrors as the Holocaust unfolded. ...  Show more

In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators a ...  Show more

On October 13th, 1881, the linguist and grammarian Eliezer Ben-Yehuda held what is thought to have been the first modern conversation in Hebrew with two friends at a Paris café. The conversation would have had some serious stumbling blocks, given that the language was still missi ...  Show more