Best Yiddish Quotes & Sayings

Growing up in South London, we went to a school where there were not that many Jewish kids. I love being Jewish in L.A.; it feels really normal. The culture seems to be integrated into Hollywood. Everyone uses Yiddish words like 'schlep' and 'schmooze.' That's what I love about New York, too. — Hannah Ware

Six Lines

I know that in this world no one needs me,
me, a word-beggar in the Jewish graveyard
Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish?

Only what is hopeless on this earth has beauty
and only the ephemeral is godly
and humility is the only true rebellion — Aaron Zeitlin

If you want your dreams to come true, don't oversleep. — Nicky Gumbel

A wise man hears one word and understands two. — Anonymous

Eviction," Frieda said. "You can't pay, you can't stay." She said in Yiddish, "Es iz shver tzu makhen a leben." It's hard to make a living. — Amy Bloom

Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish. — Mike Myers

What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time. — Etgar Keret

I heard Yiddish when my father's family came to the house, which was as seldom as my mother could arrange it. — Joseph H. Greenberg

heard in America's streets. Yiddish theaters are still drawing crowds, and off-color humor fueled by vaudeville, jazz, and burlesque is flourishing in the Jewish Riviera resorts of the Catskills. Jewish humor — Paul Goldberg

When he thought of the word mercy, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones, whose root was rechem, the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child. — Julie Orringer

I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive. — Theodore Bikel

No, no," Arnie says. "Fondle--fondle is to touch. Everything sounds Yiddish to you. Far-fetched, far-flung..." "Farflung is Yiddish." "No," Arnie says, "it's not. — Nathan Englander

In one of the extras that come with the DVD version of the movie (Groundhog Day), Danny Rubin, who came up with the original idea and then wrote the script, says that the movie is about "doing what you can do in the moment to make things better instead of making them worse." Which might not sound like very much, but it's just about all you can do in life.

Which only proves that the world itself runs on Yiddish-speaking principles: the best way to get what you want and make all those bastards out there so jealous that they'll want to poke their own eyes out is to go out of your way to be nice to those bastards. That's the way to show them. That's how a mentsh gets revenge. — Michael Wex

The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

There is a Yiddish saying: If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Michael Chabon

The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light" (203): Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), p. 93. Yiddish's — Diane Ackerman

At age 11, I went to a Jewish school. I speak Yiddish. I'm Church of England Protestant. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. My wife is a Muslim. — Michael Caine

Yiddish is a cheerful language of not so happy people. — Boris Zubry

I tended to listen to doo-wop, but my grandmother would always have the radio on all day and she'd start with Yiddish and then move on to gospel and later to "make believe" ballroom music. I got to hear all kinds of music and my mother would get up to go to work listening to country music. That was her alarm clock. My dad was a jazz lover and listened to the man who wrote "Misty", Errol Garner. He loved piano players, so I got to listen to that as well. — Richie Havens

The songs I love to sing are story songs, from Yiddish songs to Tom Waits. — Mandy Patinkin

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. — Saul Rubinek

Well, you have children so you know: little children little troubles, big children, big troubles - it's a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too. — Grace Paley

The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window. — Steven Pinker

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. — Stephen Greenblatt

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. — Edith Hahn Beer

In the fall of 1932, Bergelson undertook the longest journey of his life. He traveled the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way through Siberia and beyond, disembarking just fifty miles shy of the border with China, in the budding Jewish autonomy of Birobidzhan. The Jews of Birobidzhan welcomed him grandly, as if he were a long-lost descendant of a royal Yiddish tribe. A plenary session of the settlement council convened in his honor. He toured the new collective farms in the company of local authorities. He participated, as a guest of honor, in the celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution - an unprecedented role for a foreign national. — Masha Gessen

We today can recognize the antiquity of astrology in words such as disaster, which is Greek for "bad star," influenza, Italian for (astral) "influence"; mazeltov, Hebrew - and, ultimately, Babylonian - for "good constellation," or the Yiddish word shlamazel, applied to someone plagued by relentless ill-fortune, which again traces to the Babylonian astronomical lexicon. According to Pliny, there were Romans considered sideratio, "planet-struck." Planets were widely thought to be a direct cause of death. Or consider consider: it means "with the planets," evidently a prerequisite for serious reflection. — Carl Sagan

There are nineteen words in Yiddish that convey gradations of disparagement, from a mild, fluttery helplessness to a state of downright, irreconcilable brutishness. All of them can be usefully employed to pinpoint the kind of individuals I write about. — S.J Perelman

I don't care if you care, I retorted. But in my religion, we're taught to admit our mistakes and to apologize for them ... Oh, and there's one other thing I'm sorry about, I added. I should've spit in your eye and called you a szhlob weeks ago. — Amy Fellner Dominy

Donald Trump did his usual softball interview on "Fox News" where the interviewer agreed with Trump that using that Yiddish vulgarity is going to be OK for him. — Lawrence O'Donnell

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. — Roy Blount Jr.