The Happiest Toddler on the Block" by Harvey Karp and Paula Spencer ($22.95, Bantam). Three-year-old Freya Wood wanted a Hershey\’s Kiss. And she wanted it now.
Anne-Marie Baila Asner decided that she was going to reinvigorate Yiddish by writing and illustrating cute, brightly colored children\’s books that would help people develop an affinity for the language.
For playwright Miriam Hoffman, Yiddish is hardly a dying language. \”It just doesn\’t want to die,\” said Hoffman, who will teach Yiddish at the Dec. 14-20 intensive language/culture immersion courses at UCLA and the University of Judaism.
\”Yiddish was always a problem since its birth,\” said Hoffman, who writes children\’s books on the subject, lectures at Columbia University and writes for the Yiddish-language newspaper, Forvertz. \”It had to compete with the sacred language, which is Hebrew. Yiddish carried [Zionism] on its back for 1,000 years.\”
Janet Polyak was born in 1937 in Odessa, Ukraine. She came to the United States with her family in 1977 and first settled in Portland, Ore.
Californians have reached new levels of accommodation for cultural and other differences, but some of our officials still speak unashamedly in stark racial and ethnic terms.
Writer Amy Hirshberg Lederman became obsessed with learning Hebrew, spending every hour of the day — in the classroom, on the streets, at home, even in her sleep.
File under Incongruities, Major: One of the latest luminaries in the world of grand opera is an Orthodox mother of four from Brooklyn.
Try this experiment: Put your hands in your pockets and try to explain to someone — verbally — how to tie shoes. It\’s an exercise in frustration, because there are certain things you can learn by description, and there are others that can only be learned in the doing — learned not by words and concepts, but by involving fingers, hands and heart.
"The Palestinian uprising and subsequent Israeli offensive in the West Bank stirred enormous sympathy for the Palestinians throughout the Arab world…. Over the past year, scores of Egypt\’s top singers have come out with songs about the Palestinian uprising.
Here\’s what you miss when you go on an organized mission to Israel: You miss the closed-top market in Rosh Ayin, where sellers out-shout
each other over megaphones, "Underwear, girls\’ underwear, three for 10 shekels."
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