The Street That Continues
A quiet portrait of Williamsburg’s Satmar community, where Yiddish remains the working language, family life anchors continuity, and tradition is guarded through daily structure rather than slogans.
Category: Judaism
Everything Here Follows the Rent
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 and the Covenant of Light
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.
Why Jewish Humour Is Not Self-Deprecation
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.
The Language the City Forgot
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.
Yom Kippur Sermon: Peace Amid Ashes
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.
Ashkenazi Ethics and the Burden of Conscience
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...
Holocaust Survivor at the Center of Britain’s Crackdown on Pro-Palestinian Protests
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...
Yiddish New York: A Living Heritage of Torah, Safety, and Continuity
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....
Tikkun Olam: The Jewish Call to Repair the World
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...