In July 2013, I posted about an interesting sign, apparently in Yiddish, in Toronto's Baldwin Village


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Torontoist's Kevin Plummer had a nice feature looking at one locus of Yiddish-language drama in Toronto.

As an expression of a new, secular Jewish culture, “Yiddish theatre served an important psychological function for the Jewish immigrant” in Toronto, historian Stephen A. Speisman writes in The Jews of Toronto: A History to 1937 (McClelland & ( Read more... )

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I was walking with a friend late last month around Baldwin Street when I saw, in the window of John's Italian Caffe at 27-29 Baldwin Street, this Hebrew script. I didn't recognize what it was. I naturally uploaded the picture to Facebook and asked my friends.

Erin found a February 2013 post by Walking Woman that identified the language as a ( Read more... )

• At Geocurrents, Asya Pereltsvaig takes on the provocative, if apparently ill-founded, thesis that Ashkenazic Jews trace their ancestry to the medieval Khazars of the Russian steppe by taking a look at the structure of the Yiddish language.
• Language Hat claims that, with the advent of electronic communications which make them difficult to insert into ( Read more... )