A long-time South Williamsburg resident writes from inside the Yiddish street world, where housing pressure, schooling disputes, and internal politics are not abstractions but weekly arithmetic. This companion to “The Language the City Forgot” shows how real estate turns culture into a fight for space, and how a neighbourhood survives by defending the ordinary.
Hanukkah is not decoration or nostalgia. It is a public act of Jewish memory and responsibility, designed to survive powerlessness as well as sovereignty. This year’s lights carry an ancient discipline into a world that still tests Jewish continuity.
Jewish humour is often misread as self-mockery. In fact, it is a disciplined form of irony designed to resist certainty, fanaticism, and the misuse of power. Rooted in Ashkenazi experience, it functions as an internal defence against oppression and moral intoxication, protecting dignity without surrender and scepticism without nihilism.
South Williamsburg is one of the few places in the modern city where Yiddish never became nostalgia. It remained a working language, passed from parents to children, spoken in homes, schools, shops, and streets. This essay walks the neighbourhood from the inside, tracing how a language survived not through sentiment, but through daily necessity and design.
On the holiest day of the Jewish year, a rabbinic call for peace links the Manchester synagogue attack with the suffering in Gaza — urging compassion, justice, and the pursuit of peace as Torah’s true command.
Yiddish translation of the Sabbath hymns (1829), page 1. The images sear the conscience: children crushed beneath rubble, families irreparably torn apart, neighborhoods transformed into haunting voids. The dead count in the thousands—many of...
Carolyn Gelenter, daughter of a Holocaust survivor, being arrested by police in Parliament Square. Video courtesy of Novara Media. London — Stephen Kapos, 87, survived the Holocaust as a child. This winter, he laid...
Walk down Hester Street in a century-old photograph and you can almost hear it: the bargaining at pushcarts, the crackle of Yiddish in the air, the thrum of a city being learned from scratch....
Walk into almost any synagogue and you may hear the phrase tikkun olam. The Hebrew words sound ancient, but to most non-Jews they are unfamiliar. Translated simply, they mean “repairing the world.” The idea...