Yiddishkayt in April  

 

Sholem Aleykhem!   

 

We are so excited that spring is here and soon two of our newest, boldest programs are launching. We're so pleased to announce that the pilot of the groundbreaking Helix Project, our cultural immersion in European Jewish culture for college students, is moving forward. We have selected six extremely talented students from UCLA and Berkeley as the pioneers of this exciting program. You can read more about them below. And for those of you who are looking for a similar travel experience, but are not full-time college students, there are still spots left to join us this summer on our Yiddishkayt Expeditions.

  

Thanks to the many of you have written or called about the profile of the program that appeared in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. And while some (included in the article) may scoff at our embrace of the marvelous, multifaceted complexity of Jewish culture and that we celebrate all aspects of Jewish life -- from the glat kosher to the glat treyf -- your support makes us even more certain that celebrating the culture of yidn fun a gants-yor (everyday Jews) ensures an appreciation of our heritage based on stunning cultural achievement and beauty.      

  

We so hope you'll join us this weekend to end your Passover in style with our yidARTS April concert at Genghis Cohen on Saturday or that you'll spend some time this month appreciating all of the amazing things related to Yiddish happening here in L.A. And apropos of yesterday's article, today Der Vortsman explores some Yiddish ways to express stupidity.

 

אַ פֿריילעכן פּסח -- Best wishes for a very happy Peysakh,

       Yiddishkayt   

APRIL 2012
YidBits Vol. 7 No. 4
a bisl yiddishkayt
In This YidBits
Evening of Yiddish Song
Helix Project
Der Vortsman
Yiddish around L.A.
Yiddishkayt in History
 
Find us (and like us) on facebook!
 
Mark Levy in Concert
Mark Levy in Concert at Genghis Cohen 4.14.
Click to hear Levy's performance of "Yosl Klezmer."


yidARTS 2012 * April  


Mark Levy
An Evening of Yiddish Song

4.14.12 * 8:00 P.M.

Genghis Cohen (click for map)
740 North Fairfax
Los Angeles 90046
Our YidARTS April  program features accomplished singer Mark Levy with An Evening of Yiddish Song at Genghis Cohen (740 North Fairfax) on April 14th at 8:00 p.m.

Mark Levy has appeared throughout the country and abroad sharing his rich repertoire of Yiddish music - classic folk songs, theater songs, songs from the struggles for labor rights and social justice. Come end Passover with this celebration of Yiddish music (and even a famed Genghis Cohen New York-style Egg Roll for those overdosed on matzo).

The stage at Genghis Cohen is an intimate space, visit yiddi.sh/levytix to get your tickets now. 
HELIX PROJECT UNDERWAY!

Making the Jewish Past Present

with the Helix Project 

 

As featured in the Los Angeles Times (4.9.12), Yiddishkayt's Helix Project is off to an exciting start. Over the past few months, we've been interviewing candidates nominated by professors of Jewish Studies at Berkeley and UCLA to become our pilot cohort of Helixers and we couldn't be more excited about this summer.

These six exceptional students have expressed their most profound interest in exploring the vibrant Jewish culture of Eastern Europe. You can read a little about them and their interests HERE. The Helix begins with a series of intensive workshops here in L.A. before heading off to Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania to experience where Jewish life thrived before its terrible destruction. We are looking for support to help these students (and future Helixers) take part in this incredible opportunity. If you might be interested in sponsoring a student, please write or call us!

Interested in exploring Jewish culture in Europe, but you're not a college student? There's still room left on our Expeditions this summer. Our Cradle of Theater and Song trip commences in Bucharest before heading to Iasi, birthplaces of Yiddish theater. Then, we head across Bessarabia (today, Moldova) as we bring Aaron Lebedeff's classic Romania, Romania to life with wine, song, and plenty of mamaliga. Or, travel In the Footsteps of Great Jewish Writers, from Sholem Aleichem to Sigmund Freud, as we journey from the imperial metropolis of Kiev through the great cities and shtetlach of Galicia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Both trips allow you to jump off for a personally-guided tour of your family's historic town or village.

Visit yiddi.sh/ykexped or call (213) 389-8880 for more information.   
Der Vortsman
Fools' Errands and Errors

A reader asks for the meaning of tamevate, and notes it could not be found in any dictionary.

Of course not. The reader was looking under tes, one of the two letters in the Hebrew alef-beyz
Khelmer khokhem a/k/a  Fool
  (alpha-bet) with the sound of "t." Had he looked under the other letter, tof (in Israeli/Sefardic, tav), he'd have found both the word tam -- Hebrew spelling tof-mem -- and tamevate. Tam is the Hebrew-origin word for, as Weinreich's dictionary has it, "a na�ve person, moron, half-wit," while tamevate is "foolish, half-witted."

This is an example of the khokhme (wisdom, opposite of tipshes, stupidity; see below) of Yiddish folk-speech. The Hebrew noun was, in becoming an adjective, "Yiddishized" (faryidisht) through the addition of a Slavic ending. It so happens, too, that Yiddish uses another in its extensive vocabulary of Hebrew/Aramaic words to describe a fool: tipesh. (The general term for foolishness is tipshes; see above.) Tipesh should not be confused with the "purely Yiddish" word (of Latin-Greek origin), tipish that sounds alike, but is spelled differently and that means "typical." To confuse the two would be tamevate.

On the same subject-revealing yet another word for stupidity--from way off in the Midwest comes this query: "In our Play Readers group yesterday, we came across the word stupka. Is that a Yiddish word? It was in reference to a woman. The line was, 'She's probably a stupka.'"  

 

Der Vortsman replied in this manner, that he hoped was not that of a tipesh: Stupe is a Yiddish word for BOTH a wooden mortar and a blockhead or person who is stupid (get the cognate?). "Stupke" would be the diminutive feminine form. He went on to caution the play readers to sidestep the bad transliteration and to pronounce the word: STUP-ke, with the "u" pronounced as in "soup."

 


Continuing in the vein of less-than-smart, we wondered how Michele Bachmann (remember that stupke...tam...tipesh?) would pronounce certain Yiddish words as they are commonly presented in the media. Readers will recall her denunciation of President Obama as having "tshuts-pah," because it's usually spelled that way: chutzpah.  

 

Chick Pea-Sack

Flipping through recent publications in print and on the net we found these words and imagined them from the mouths of the innocently uninformed. The first word is the "approved" spelling, followed by the fully-justified pronunciation in standard English: Pesach -- pea*satch; Chaloshes -- tsha*loh*shes (nausea).  

 

And, finally, to complete the circle of foolishness: The first item above discussed the meaning of tam for "fool." A na�ve individual might confuse that Hebrew-Yiddish word, spelled תּם (tof-mem), with another Hebrew-origin word that sounds the same but that is spelled with the other "t" letter, tes, and has a totally different meaning: טעם (tes-ayin-mem-tam). It means "taste," both in the physical and abstract sense, just as in English: it has a good taste (or flavor)...it shows good taste.  

 

May we hope that, someday, the media and the arbiters of such matters will give up their Germanized transliterations of Yiddish words and adopt the YIVO Standard? To do less would be to preserve their status as totally lacking in tam while playing the role of tam.

  

Der Vortsman is Hershl Hartman, Yiddishkayt Board Member and Education Director at the Sholem Community. You can write the Vortsman at info at yiddishkayt.org. 

  

Kedey tsu zen dem arkhiv funem vortsman...

For Der Vortsman's archives, visit yiddi.sh/vortsman.
Yiddish around L.A.
Fabulist Eliezer Sheynbarg
Read more about Shteynbarg in our TODAY IN YIDDISHKAYT feature HERE

CIYCL Welcomes Yitskhok Niborski
Two Public Lectures  
Free and Open to the Public (in Yiddish with English translation)
Royce Hall, UCLA
 The California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language welcomes Yitzkhok Niborski, the Academic Director of Europe's leading Yiddish cultural organization, the Paris Yiddish Center at the Biblioth�que Medem, to Los Angeles to give a series of workshops and public lectures.

Sunday, April 15, 4 PM
"Bam leyb oyf der sude - At the Lion's Banquet" The Subversive, Charming Fables of Eliezer Shteynbarg and Their Relevance Today

Thursday, April 19, 4 PM
Avrom Sutzkever's Masterwork "Geheymshtot--Secret City": The Vilna Ghetto As Allegory

For details and workshop descriptions, visit yiddi.sh/ciyclyn.


Jacob and Jack
at the Zephyr Theatre    
Running Now through 5.6.12  
 Zephyr Theatre
7456 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles

Jacob and Jack
tells the story of Jack Shore, a well known television personality, who is appearing for one night only in a tribute to his grandfather, Jacob Shemerinsky, great star of the Yiddish theater.  Backstage in his dressing room, Jack confronts his challenges as an actor and as a husband to his co-starring wife.  Simultaneously, 75 years in the past, Jacob has problems of his own.  Actors play their past and present roles in a dizzying display of life in the theater in this time traveling farce.

For reservations or more information, click here.
HistoryHistorical Yiddishkayt
The image at the top of this month's YidBits comes from a comic strip by Zuni Maud (1891-1956). Maud was born near Grodno, White Russia and immigrated as teenager to the United States. An exceptionally innovative artist, Maud famously collaborated with Yosl Cutler to create the Modicut Puppet theater and his illustrations and comic art were widely published in the popular Yiddish press. 

 

Like us on Facebook for more Yiddishkayt history, including Today in Yiddishkayt, where you can find out about major figures and events in the history of Yiddishkayt throughout the world. 
YidBits and YidPicks are made possible in part by a grant
from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs
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