FOLK SAYING: “Some scholars are like donkeys: they merely carry a lot of books. - Leo Rosten

Yiddish became the Jews’ tongue via the Jewish mother, who, not being male, was denied a Hebrew education.

Jews participated in the ownership of human beings right up through to the nineteenth century, and biblical texts were quoted by some Civil War–era American rabbis to justify the South’s “peculiar institution.

The sense of differentiation is so acute in Yiddish that a word like, say, paskudnyak has no peer in any language I know for the vocal delineation of a nasty character. And Yiddish coins new names with ease for new personality types: a nudnik is a pest; a phudnik is a nudnik with a Ph.D.