Word: shtetl
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...expect prior knowledge and intelligence from his audience. The first act involves the history of the Jews that I would not have understood unless I had luckily taken Foreign Cultures 56: "Jewish Life in Eastern Europe Before 1914" this semester. After all, would any Joe Schmoe know what a shtetl is? As for the jokes, the one I still could not figure out is the line, "Bushes are steel...
...already a little past their prime. Ernst's paintings in America, with their ambiguous figures emerging like dream images from runny, blotted, metamorphic landscapes, hardly compare with his work in the 1920s. And though Chagall's Yellow Crucifixion, 1943, swarms with images of contemporary loss and persecution--the burning shtetl, the fleeing refugees, the sinking torpedoed ship--its formal softness indicates the turn his work would take after the war toward pious ethno-kitsch...
Even without resurgent anti-Semitism, nobody believes Jewish life in Central Europe will ever be what it was before the Holocaust. The world of the shtetl is lost; the Yiddish language is becoming as inaccessible as Welsh or Aramaic; the Jews of Marc Chagall's paintings are gone forever. ``You cannot revive Jewish culture here,'' says Russia's Gerber. ``You cannot revive something that is finished.'' Others are troubled that the youthful embrace of Judaism is only rarely a question of faith. ``A lot of them want to be Jewish without the religion,'' complains Rabbi Jozsef Schweitzer, head of Budapest...
...phrase equivalent to "jungle fever" exists to describe Jewish feelings about intermarriage. There are plenty of Yiddish words that refer a bit wryly to so-called "gentiles", but there is no such thing as "shtetl fever". (The shtetl is the Jewish, Eastern European "hood...
...yellow pages features a photo of a beaming, grandmotherly Zelda Fischer. But Gentlepeople, the dating service founded by Fischer ten years ago, bears little resemblance to the old village matchmakers of shtetl lore...