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From the archives

Language Shaped by Silence

The mind and craft of a deaf writer

Knock on Wood

Solutions don’t always grow in trees

Exclaim!

Pop punk in the key of eh

Michael Wex

Michael Wex is the author of Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (HarperCollins, 2006). His next book on Yiddish, Just Say Nu, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in the fall.

Articles by
Michael Wex

Red-Tinted Yiddish

How the USSR tried to Sovietize the Jews using their own language and traditions March 2007
Jews who hate Yiddish and Yiddish culture—a considerable number since the 18th century, most of them native speakers—are often at pains to point out that the use of this purely tribal language forms a barrier between the Jews and their gentile neighbours, a hurdle to mutual understanding that often contributes to the growth of anti-Semitism and virtually always gets in the way of Jewish…