- Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer (November 21, 1902 (see notes below) – July 24, 1991) was a Nobel Prize-winning Polish born American writer of both short stories and novels. He wrote in Yiddish. - Sholom Aleichem
Sholom Aleichem (May 13, 1916) was a popular humorist and Russian (geographically, Ukrainian) Jewish author of Yiddish literature, including novels, short stories, and plays. He did much to promote Yiddish writers, and was the first to pen children's literature in Yiddish. His work has been widely translated. The musical "Fiddler on the Roof" (1964), loosely based on Sholom Aleichem's stories about his character Tevye the Milkman, … - Sholem Asch
Sholem Asch, also written Shalom Asch (1 January 1880, Kutno - 10 July 1957, London) was a Polish-born American novelist, dramatist, and essayist in the Yiddish language. Asch was born in Kutno, Poland, of Jewish heritage. He was one of ten children of a cattle-dealer and innkeeper, and received a traditional Jewish education; as a young man he followed that with a more liberal education obtained at Wloclawek, … - Chava Alberstein
Chava Alberstein (born December 8, 1947 in Szczecin, Poland) is an Israeli singer, lyricist, composer, musical arranger, and actress. She is one of the most important Israeli singers, with a career spanning more than forty years. Chava Alberstein was born in the town of Szczecin in Northern Poland. She came to Israel at age four, and grew up in Kiryat Chaim. In 1964, when she was 17, a nightclub appearance in Jaffa led to a CBS recording contract. - Leo Rosten
Leo Calvin Rosten (April 11, 1908-February 19, 1997) was born on 11 April 1908 in Lodz, Russian Empire (now Poland) and died on 19 February 1997 in New York. He was a teacher, academic and humorist best remembered for his stories about the night-school "prodigy" Hyman Kaplan (first published in "The New Yorker" in the 1930s, and later reprinted in two volumes-"The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N" and "The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N", … - Max Weinreich
Max Weinreich (1893/94 Goldingen, Courland (Kuldiga, Latvia) - 1969 New York City, USA) was a linguist, specializing in Yiddish, and the father of the linguist Uriel Weinreich. Weinreich founded the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (originally called Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO)) in Vilnius (Vilna) in 1925, and was its director from 1925 to 1939. From 1940 he led it in New York. - Nachman Of Breslov
Nachman of Breslov also known as Reb Nachman of Bratslav, Nachman from Uman, or simply as Rebbe Nachman (in local Yiddish reb Nokhmen Broslever) (April 4, 1772 – October 16, 1810 (18th of Tishrei)) was the founder of the Breslov Hasidic dynasty. Born at a time when the influence of his great-grandfather, the Baal Shem Tov, was waning, … - Shneur Zalman Of Liadi
Shneur Zalman of Liadi (September 4, 1745 – December 15, 1812 O.S.), was an Orthodox Rabbi, and the founder and first Rebbe of Chabad, a branch of Hasidic Judaism, then based in Liadi, Imperial Russia. He was the author of many works, and is best known for "Shulchan Aruch HaRav", "Tanya" and his "Siddur Torah Or" compiled according to "Nusach Ari". He is also known as Shneur Zalman Baruchovitch, Reb Schneur Zalman, RaZaSh, … - Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914 - March 18, 1986) was an American writer. - Itzik Manger
Itzik Manger was a prominent Yiddish poet and playwright, a self-proclaimed folk bard, visionary, and ‘master tailor’ of the written word. - Uriel Weinreich
Uriel Weinreich (1926 - 1967) was a world famous linguist at Columbia University. Born in Vilnius (then part of Poland and now capital of Lithuania), he earned his Ph.D. from Columbia, and went on to teach there, specializing in Yiddish studies, sociolinguistics, and dialectology. He advocated the increased acceptance of semantics, and edited one of the most influential Yiddish-English dictionaries. Weinreich was the son of the linguist Max Weinreich, … - Aaron Lansky
Aaron Lansky (b. 1955) is the founder of the National Yiddish Book Center, an organization he created to help salvage Yiddish language publications. When he began saving books in the early 1980s, most experts believe that there were fewer than 70,000 Yiddish volumes extant. Lansky feared that this literature would be lost. The National Yiddish Book Center now has more than 15 million books. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989 for his work. - Abraham Cahan
Abraham Cahan (July 7, 1860 - August 31 1951) was an Russian-American novelist and labor leader. He was born in Podberezhye, Lithuania, into a Jewish Orthodox family. His grandfather was a rabbi and preacher in Vidz, Vitebsk; and his father was a teacher of Hebrew and Talmud. The family, which was devoutly Orthodox, moved in 1866 to Wilna; there young Cahan received the usual Jewish preparatory education for the rabbinate. - Mickey Katz
Mickey Katz (June 15, 1909 - April 30, 1985) was a U.S. Jewish comedian who received his first moments as fame in the 1940s as a member of Spike Jones and His City Slickers where he was most famous for his "glugging" vocal sound effects on tunes like "Cocktails for Two" and others. He later went on to perform his own parodic musical review and record highly popular "ethnic" comedy albums on the Capitol label where he would perform English-Yiddish parody songs. - Henry Sapoznik
Henry Sapoznik is also a record producer, composer, author and performer of traditional Yiddish and American music. A pioneering scholar and performer of klezmer music, he founded the Archives of Recorded Sound at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and was its first director from 1982-1994. - S. Ansky
Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport (1863, Vitebsk -1920, Otwock), better known by the pseudonym S. Ansky (or An-ski), was a scholar who documented Jewish folklore and mystical beliefs. He was born in Vitebsk, Belarus, then Russia, but travelled around much of the western part of the Russian Empire. Initially writing in Russian, from 1904 he also became known as a Yiddish author. Initially under heavy influence of the Russian narodnik movement, … - Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman
Beyle (or Bella) Schaechter-Gottesman (born August 7, 1920) is a Yiddish poet and songwriter. - Moishe Oysher
Moishe Oysher. He is considered one of the most entertaining chazanim (cantors) ever recorded. It is said that there were chazanim in his family going back six generations. In 1921, he traveled to Canada with his family and joined a traveling Yiddish theatrical company. In 1932. he started his own company and traveled to South America. After returning from South America to the U.S., he took a job as a chazan for the High Holidays at a Romanian synagogue in New York. - Hillel Halkin
Hillel Halkin is author of several books, and a prominent translator of Jewish literature. In 1987 he produced what has come to be the definitive translation of Sholem Aleichem's Yiddish masterpiece "Tevye the Dairyman", which was the basis for the hit Broadway musical "Fiddler on the Roof." He is the author of several books, including Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel. - Leo Fuld
Lazarus 'Leo' Fuld was a Dutch singer who specialised in Yiddish songs. Leo Fuld was born as the third of ten children and grew up in a poor Jewish family. His father, Louis Fuld, was a merchant. Fuld's talent for singing showed at early age during services at the synagogue. Fuld was a good student and was given a scholarship at the Dutch Jewish Seminar. His parents expected young Leo to eventually become hazzan ('cantor'). - Edward G. Robinson
Edward Goldenberg Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg, Yiddish: עמנואל גאלדנבערג; December 12, 1893 - January 26, 1973) was an American stage and film actor of Romanian origin. Born to an Yiddish-speaking Jewish family in Bucharest, he emigrated with his family to New York City in 1903. He attended Townsend Harris High School and then City College of New York, … - Ida Kaminska
Ida Kaminska, in Poland Kamińska "nee" Halpern, (September 18, 1899 – May 21, 1980) was an Oscar-nominated Jewish Polish actress. Born in Odessa, Russia (now Ukraine) she was the daughter of Yiddish stage actress Esther Rachel Kaminska (1870-1925) and stage producer, Avram Izhak Kashe. She is also the sister of musician Josef Kaminsky (1903-1972). Ida Kaminska began a stage career at the age of five. - Mike Burstyn
Michael Burstein (b. July 1 1945, New York City, USA) is an actor known onstage as Mike Burstyn. He is the son of the late Yiddish-language actors, Pesach Burstein and Lillian Lux. He is no relation to Ellen Burstyn (who was born Edna Rae Gilhooley and is of Irish descent). Burstyn started performing on stage at Yiddish theaters from childhood, in musicals and melodramas produced by his father Pesach Burstein, … - Solomon Mikhoels
Solomon (Shloyme) Mikhoels (real surname - Vovsi), ; (January 12/13, 1948) was a Soviet Jewish actor and director in Yiddish theater and the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Born Shloyme Vovsi in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils), Latvia, Mikhoels studied law in Saint Petersburg, but left school in 1918 to join Alexander Granovsky's Jewish Theater Workshop, which was attempting to create a national Jewish theater in Russia based on the Yiddish language. - Der Nister
Der Nister was the penname of Pinchus Kahanovich (פנחס כהנאָוויטש), a Yiddish author, philosopher, translator, and critic. Der Nister was born in Berdichev to a Hasidic family of merchants. He received a traditional religious education, but was drawn through his reading to secular and Enlightenment ideas, as well as to Zionism. Forced to avoid the military draft to the Imperial Russian Army, he hid in Zhitomir, … - Morris Rosenfeld
Morris Rosenfeld (born December 28 1862 in Bokscha in Russian Poland, government of Suwałki; died June 22 1923 in New York) was a Yiddish poet. His work sheds light on the living circumstances of emigrants from Eastern Europe in New York's tailoring workshops. He educated at Boksha, Suwałki, and Warsaw. He worked as a tailor in New York and London and as a diamond cutter in Amsterdam, and settled in New York in 1886, … - Abraham Sutzkever
Abraham Sutzkever (July 15, 1913 -) is a Yiddish poet and Holocaust-era partisan. (Alternate English spellings: Avrom Sutzkever, Avrohom Sutzkever,, Avrom Sutskever [used by Encyclopaedia Britannica]) Sutzkever was born in Smorgon, Poland (now Smarhon, Belarus). During the First World War his family fled to seek refuge in Siberia, then in 1922 migrated to Vilna (at that time, Wilno, Poland. He studied in cheder and attended gymnasium (academic high school), … - Mordkhe Schaechter
Itsye Mordkhe Schaechter was a leading Yiddish linguist, as well as a writer and educator who spent a lifetime studying, standardizing and teaching the language. Dr. Schaechter, whose passion for Yiddish dated to his boyhood in Romania, dedicated his life to reclaiming Yiddish as a living language for the descendants of its first speakers, the Ashkenazic Jewry of central and eastern Europe. Written in the Hebrew alphabet and containing Semitic, … - Chaim Grade
Chaim Grade (b. April 4 1910, in Vilna, Russian Empire now Vilnius, Lithuania); d. April 26 1982, Los Angeles, California) was one of the leading Yiddish writers of the twentieth century. Chaim Grade, the son of Rabbi Shlomo Mordecai Grade, a Hebrew teacher and "maskil" (advocate of the European Enlightenment), received a secular as well as Jewish religious education. He learned briefly with Rabbi Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz, the Chazon Ish (1878-1953), … - Abraham Ellstein
Abraham "Abe" Ellstein ("Avrom Ellstein", July 7, 1907, New York - 1963) was American composer for Yiddish entertainments. Along with Shalom Secunda, Joseph Rumshinsky, and Alexander Olshanetsky, he was one of the "big four" composers of his era in New York City's Second Avenue (Manhattan) Yiddish theatre scene. His musical "Yidl mitn fidl" became one of the greatest hits of Yiddish-language cinema. He was born on the Lower East Side, Manhattan, … - Itche Goldberg
Itche Goldberg (March 22, 1904 - December 27, 2006) was a Yiddish writer of children's books, poet, librettist, educator, literary critic, camp director, publisher, fundraiser, essayist, literary editor, Yiddish language and culture scholar, and left-wing political activist. He devoted his life to the preservation of the Yiddish language and secular Yiddish culture. - Jules Dassin
Jules Dassin (born Julius Dassin on December 18, 1911, in Middletown, Connecticut) is an American film director. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist. One of eight children of a Russian-Jewish barber, Dassin started as a Yiddish actor with the ARTEF ("Yiddish Proletarian Theater") company in New York, but became well-known for his noir films "Brute Force", "The Naked City", and "Thieves' Highway" in the 1940s. - Wolf Krakowski
Wolf Krakowski, Yiddish-speaking song-writer, singer, and guitarist, born in 1947 at Saalfelden Farmach, an Austrian camp for displaced persons, where his parents, who were Polish Jews who had managed to survive the Holocaust, lived for a short while after World War II. Soon afterwards they moved to Sweden, and the small town of Eskilstuna, where the family stayed until 1954 when they moved to Toronto, Canada. - Mordechai Gebirtig
Mordechai Gebirtig, born Mordekhai Bertig (b. 1877, Kraków - d. 1942, Kraków) was a Yiddish poet and songwriter, regarded as one of the most influential and popular writers of Yiddish songs and poems. Today, Gebirtig is perhaps best known internationally for his song, "S'brent" (It is burning), written in 1938 in response to the 1936 pogrom of Jews in the "shtetl" (small town) of Przytyk. - Edgar G. Ulmer
Edgar G. Ulmer (September 17, 1904 - September 30, 1972) was an Austrian-American film director. He is best remembered for the movies "The Black Cat" (1934) and "Detour" (1945). These stylish and eccentric works have achieved cult status, but Ulmer's other films remain relatively unknown. Ulmer was born in Olomouc, in today's Czech Republic. As a young man he lived in Vienna, … - Yechiel
Yechiel (Eli) Shainblum was a Montreal painter, sculptor and teacher. Though he was a respected and prolific artist who produced literally hundreds of pieces beginning in the 1920's and on through the early 1980's, Shainblum was much better known in Montreal as an elementary school teacher. His family reports that Shainblum derived great joy from teaching, and he put much more emphasis on pedagogy and his students than he did on promoting his artistic career. - Lawrence Bush
Lawrence Bush is author of six books of Jewish fiction and non-fiction and most recently provided updating and commentary for the millennial edition of Leo Rosten's classic, "The Joys of Yiddish". Bush edits Jewish Currents, a bimonthly magazine that is more than 60 years old, and is the former editor of Reconstructionism Today, the quarterly magazine of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement. - Peretz Markish
Peretz Markish (in Polonnoye, currently Ukraine - 12 August 1952 in Moscow) was a Jewish Soviet writer who wrote in Yiddish. His very distant ancestors lived in Spain. As a child he attended a cheder and was singing in the choir of the local synagogue. He served as a private in the Russian Imperial Army during World War I. In the early twenties together with Leib Kvitko and others, he was a member of the Kiev group of Yiddish poets. - Israel Joshua Singer
Israel Joshua Singer was a Yiddish novelist. He was born Yisroel Yehoshua Zinger the son of Pinchas Mendl Zinger, a rabbi and author of rabbinic commentaries, and Basheva Zylberman. He was the brother of Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer and novelist Esther Kreitman. Singer contributed to the European Yiddish press from 1916, and in 1921 became a correspondent for the leading American Yiddish newspaper "The Forward". - Moshe Teitelbaum
Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum (Hebrew: משה טייטלבוים) was the Rebbe of Ujhel in Hungary. According to Löw, he signed his name "Tamar", this being the equivalent of Teitelbaum, which is the Yiddish for "Dattelbaum" = "palm-tree." An adherent of the Polish Hasidic Rebbe, the Chozeh of Lublin, Rabbi Teitelbaum was instrumental in bringing Hasidic Judaism to Hungary.
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