An Old Yiddish Nayen Yohr

To the slightly more than casual Jewish reader, Yiddish looks alot like Hebrew. The alphabet is the same while the vocabulary and grammar are all but completely different. Some expressions make the jump, like mazel tov, which Jews use to express congratulations. The Hebrew literally means “good luck,” which in Yiddish would translate to gut glick. But the former expression sticks nevertheless.

Between Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question and the Zionist establishment of a Hebrew-speaking Jewish state in Israel, the Yiddish language has since hung on by threads of nostalgia…