Suzanne Shepherd, "The Candle"

This Yiddish story, The Candle, is less of a joke and more of a special treat. The performer, Suzanne Shepherd, is a renowned character actress and acting teacher. This is a one-woman show.

Also, when we ran the last Yiddish joke, I erroneously suggested that Yiddish was a form of German. Luckily, Paul Glasser, of the Max Weinrich Center at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, caught my error and was willing to contribute a small piece to correct it. He writes: Yiddish is the language of Ashkenazic Jews, whose roots are found across the northern half of Europe. It was born about the year 1000, when Jews who had migrated through what is now France and Italy, and probably spoken Romance-based Jewish languages, settled in what is now Germany. At its height, Yiddish was spoken from the Netherlands in the west, through France, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia. After the emancipation of Jews in western Europe in the early 19th century, they gradually switched to the local languages. In eastern Europe, Yiddish was widely used until the Holocaust. Eastern Ashkenazic immigrants also brought the language (back) to western Europe, to the Americas, South Africa, Palestine/Israel, and even Egypt. While Yiddish is no longer the main language of the largest segment of the Jewish people, it is still spoken daily by hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, as well as by a small but loyal contingent of secular and modern Orthodox Yiddishists.

Thank you, Paul!

Category:

Comedy

Tags:

• jews
• jokes
• funny
• comedy
• old
• old jews
• catskills
• yiddish

[BERGlur4life]

yikes