Top 20 Yiddish Quotes

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.

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.

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

In his 70s, when I was in my 40s, my father still read me the stories he wrote about his childhood. His intonation, his pronunciation of Yiddish, our cackling at his jokes live on.

My dad was raised Orthodox in Atlanta. He speaks Hebrew. He speaks Yiddish. He married a Jewish woman who is not Orthodox, so I was brought up by two different kinds of Jews.

My father was Mickey Katz, who worked with Spike Jones and then went on to improvise some successful Yiddish parodies, some of which I perform. My favorite was ‘Geshray of the Vilde Kotchke,’ his version of ‘Cry of the Wild Goose.’

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

Growing up in California, my best friend was Morris Rabinowitz and we often went to the Yiddish Theater.

I know very little about my great grandparents, who came through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, settled in Baltimore, and spoke only Yiddish.

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

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.

Brandeis is so fast and loose and informal, I didn’t have any problem offering a history course as a biologist. The barriers would be far more formidable, unscalable, at other institutions. But this is a user-friendly place. It’s ‘Shmedrik University‘ – that’s a Yiddish word for even worse than schlemiel.

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

I never learned to speak Yiddish, ever.

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

In Yiddish, we say, ‘Nisht ahin un nisht aher.’ It’s neither here, it’s neither there. I get more nerves than on anything I do when I’m doing multi-camera. But single-camera, I love very much.