Yiddish Quotes

1. "And my friend Karen remembersas a little girlstudying Hebrew she inquiredof her refugee tutor who stroked his beardand said in Yiddish "if there is a godor if there isn't a goda Jew studies"--isn't that a good storybeloved, but the woman in mesays that the poet liesthe poet can afford to lie"
Author: Alicia Suskin Ostriker

2. "The tongue-in-cheek Yiddish-English "translation" for R.S.V.P. is "Remember to Send Vedding Presents."
Author: Anita Diamant

3. "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."
Author: Anne Lamott

4. "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."
Author: Ashley Bell

5. "Something always happened, you see. A Yiddish song on Hanukkah, a British rabbi's prayer on the radio, some kindness on a train or in the street that reminded me, no matter how far I retreated, no matter how deep into self-denial my fear drove me, that the Jews would always be my people and I would always belong to them."
Author: Edith Hahn Beer

6. "...all the pools are going batshit like you wouldn't believe.... Batshit... It's a technical term... Fleidermausscheisse, okay?"Fleidermausscheisse? Kelly silently mouthed the word, and as silently clapped her hands. With a dictionary and patience, she could read scientific German. Thanks to fragments of Yiddish from her folks, she could make a better--not good, but better--stab at speaking it than most of her anglophone peers. But she knew she never would have come up with that particular terminus technicus in a million months of Sundays."
Author: Harry Turtledove

7. "I'm Italian, but some people think I'm Jewish because I work the Yiddish. I also work the Italian, by the way."
Author: Joy Behar

8. "I shared my office on 57th Street with Dr Jacob Ecstein, young (thirty-three), dynamic (two books published), intelligent (he and I usually agreed), personable (everyone liked him), unattractive (no one loved him), anal (he plays the stock market compulsively), oral (he smokes heavily), non-genital (doesn't seem to notice women), and Jewish (he knows two Yiddish slang words). Our mutual secretary was a Miss Reingold. Mary Jane Reingold, old (thirty-six), undynamic (she worked for us), unintelligent (she prefers Ecstein to me), personable (everyone felt sorry for her), unattractive (tall, skinny, glasses, no one loved her), anal (obsessively neat), oral (always eating), genital (trying hard), and non-Jewish (finds use of two Yiddish slang words very intellectual). Miss Reingold greeted me efficiently."
Author: Luke Rhinehart

9. "Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater."
Author: Mandy Patinkin

10. "Love great first lines and paragraphs. From The Yiddish Policemen's Union:Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker."
Author: Michael Chabon

11. "Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish."
Author: Mike Myers

12. "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."
Author: Robert Giroux

13. "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."
Author: Roy Blount Jr.

14. "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."
Author: Saul Rubinek

15. "Becky, are you studying conversational Yiddish?"
Author: Shannon Hale

16. "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."
Author: Stephen Greenblatt

Yiddish Quotes Pictures