Quotes About Yiddish

#1. No, no," Arnie says. "Fondle--fondle is to touch. Everything sounds Yiddish to you. Far-fetched, far-flung..." "Farflung is Yiddish." "No," Arnie says, "it's not.

Nathan Englander

#2. Yiddish for gall, nerve, arrogance-whatever

Howard Fast

#3. Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater.

Mandy Patinkin

#4. There is a Yiddish saying: If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#5. My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.

Stephen Greenblatt

#6. I heard Yiddish when my father's family came to the house, which was as seldom as my mother could arrange it.

Joseph H. Greenberg

#7. My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle's cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera.

Amy Bloom

#8. The language spoken by New Yorkers was changing almost daily. Phrases culled from British thieves' cant intermingled with German, Dutch, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages to form "flash," a

Lyndsay Faye

#9. The songs I love to sing are story songs, from Yiddish songs to Tom Waits.

Mandy Patinkin

#10. I abandoned my second novel completely. Writing 'Kavalier & Clay,' I had several moments of utter collapse. Same with 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.'

Michael Chabon

#11. Yiddish is a cheerful language of not so happy people.

Boris Zubry

#12. Six Lines

I know that in this world no one needs me,
me, a word-beggar in the Jewish graveyard
Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish?

Only what is hopeless on this earth has beauty
and only the ephemeral is godly
and humility is the only true rebellion

Aaron Zeitlin

#13. He was distressed to learn that the Pottery Barn Kids gift registry did not extend to children's books in Italian or Yiddish.

Sylvain Reynard

#14. The kind of people who spoke mostly Yiddish, which is a combination of German and phlegm. This is a language of coughing and spitting; until I was eleven, I wore a raincoat.

Billy Crystal

#15. I was raised to be kind. My parents were underdogs. Immigrant Jews. I spoke with an accent. I didn't speak English even - I spoke French and Yiddish mostly. I was picked on.

Saul Rubinek

#16. I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time.

Carlos Santana

#17. Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish.

Mike Myers

#18. Bringing you 'raisins and almonds' and words (from a Yiddish lullaby

Rona Simmons

#19. husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light" (203): Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), p. 93. Yiddish's

Diane Ackerman

#20. My dad knows every single accent from being an old Yiddish grandpa to being Indian or Jamaican. It was very cool to grow up with that.

Ashley Bell

#21. Isaac Singer always wrote in Yiddish. He was so unsure of his English at the beginning that he was easy to edit and he learned fast.

Robert Giroux

#22. I'm Italian, but some people think I'm Jewish because I work the Yiddish. I also work the Italian, by the way.

Joy Behar

#23. There are nineteen words in Yiddish that convey gradations of disparagement, from a mild, fluttery helplessness to a state of downright, irreconcilable brutishness. All of them can be usefully employed to pinpoint the kind of individuals I write about.

S.J Perelman

#24. When he thought of the word mercy, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones, whose root was rechem, the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child.

Julie Orringer

#25. Often, the teachers would ask me what language we spoke at home. This was a not-so-subtle way of discovering if we spoke Yiddish (which we didn't) and were therefore Jewish (which we were).

Edith Hahn Beer

#26. On a crowded bus in Israel, a mother was speaking to her son in Yiddish. An Israeli woman reprimanded her. "You should be speaking Hebrew. Why are you talking to him in Yiddish?" The mother answered, "I don't want he should forget he's a Jew."

Kirk Douglas

#27. They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.

Anne Lamott

#28. Eviction," Frieda said. "You can't pay, you can't stay." She said in Yiddish, "Es iz shver tzu makhen a leben." It's hard to make a living.

Amy Bloom

#29. Well, you have children so you know: little children little troubles, big children, big troubles - it's a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too.

Grace Paley

#30. Growing up in South London, we went to a school where there were not that many Jewish kids. I love being Jewish in L.A.; it feels really normal. The culture seems to be integrated into Hollywood. Everyone uses Yiddish words like 'schlep' and 'schmooze.' That's what I love about New York, too.

Hannah Ware

#31. Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship.

Elizabeth McCracken

#32. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#33. Michael Chabon has long moved easily between the playful, heartfelt realism of novels like 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh' and 'Wonder Boys' and his playful, heartfelt, more fantastical novels like 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' and 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.'

Cathleen Schine

#34. English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

Roy Blount Jr.

#35. The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#36. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love ... In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#37. The prejudice is still there, but it's breaking down. You have writers like Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union. He's a writer who's determined to break down genre barriers. He's done amazing things.

George R R Martin

#38. Donald Trump did his usual softball interview on "Fox News" where the interviewer agreed with Trump that using that Yiddish vulgarity is going to be OK for him.

Lawrence O'Donnell

#39. To me the Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it are identical.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#40. It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#41. One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#42. The one thing an audience always has in common with a comedian is troubles. The Yiddish word for that is tsuris. You're always putting your tsuris on stage whether you like it or not. No one is untroubled, unless they're just, you know, an imbecile.

David Steinberg

#43. When I was a little boy, I thought when I grew up I would talk Yiddish. I thought little kids talked English, but when they became adults, they would talk Yiddish like the adults did. There would be no reason to talk English anymore, because we would have made it.

Mel Brooks

#44. Romanian-Yiddish cooking has killed more Jews than Hitler

Zero Mostel

#45. A Jewish deli should specialize in, first and foremost, Yiddish foods, the foods of the Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. So, if it's a place that specializes in pizza or chicken wings or diner food and then does a corned beef sandwich on the side, it's not a Jewish delicatessen.

David Sax

#46. Yiddish has a down-to-earth quality that makes it remote from high-flown rhetoric, and it has a catch-as-catch-can charm derived from its stunning variety-of syntax, spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary-from region to region.

Israel Shenker

#47. It's self-effacing, it's hard-luck, the shtetl stories. All those Coasters things are an amalgam of Yiddish and black humor.

Jerry Leiber

#48. Becky, are you studying conversational Yiddish?

Shannon Hale

#49. The tongue-in-cheek Yiddish-English "translation" for R.S.V.P. is "Remember to Send Vedding Presents.

Anita Diamant

#50. I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive.

Theodore Bikel

#51. Yiddish is the voice of exile, the tongue of ghettos, but I'll shed a tear when it joins ancient Greek and dead Latin. For gossip and insult, you can't beat Yiddish.

Linda Barnes

#52. At age 11, I went to a Jewish school. I speak Yiddish. I'm Church of England Protestant. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. My wife is a Muslim.

Michael Caine

#53. heard in America's streets. Yiddish theaters are still drawing crowds, and off-color humor fueled by vaudeville, jazz, and burlesque is flourishing in the Jewish Riviera resorts of the Catskills. Jewish humor

Paul Goldberg

#54. I never publicise in advance what I'm going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish.

Mandy Patinkin

#55. A wise man hears one word and understands two.

Anonymous

#56. If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living.

Yiddish Proverb

#57. If you want your dreams to come true, don't oversleep.

Nicky Gumbel

#58. True poverty does not come from God.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#59. I don't care if you care, I retorted. But in my religion, we're taught to admit our mistakes and to apologize for them ... Oh, and there's one other thing I'm sorry about, I added. I should've spit in your eye and called you a szhlob weeks ago.

Amy Fellner Dominy

#60. God made man because He loves stories

Yiddish Proverb

#61. Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history won't get bogged down in blood and marrow again?

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#62. A soldier who serves an emperor has to have a uniform, and this also applies to a soldier who serves the Almighty.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#63. His eyes reflected a softness I had already forgotten in America.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#64. What concrete steps can I take now?" I asked the voice, and it replied: "Go to a house of prayer and pray."
"Without faith?" I countered, and the voice said: "You have more faith than you know.

Isaac Bashevis Singer