Word: yiddishe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shows usually offer a variety of delights: Lily Tomlin and Whoopi Goldberg impersonated scores of different women; Victor Borge played the piano between monologues. Jackie Mason is only Jackie Mason, a hunched and tuneless figure towering some 5 ft. 4 in. above sea level and speaking with the Yiddish locutions of an immigrant who just completed a course in English. By mail. His targets are ecumenical. On Jews and Christians: "You show a gentile carrots and peas, he eats carrots and peas. You show a Jew carrots and peas: 'Wait a minute. Why are there so many carrots compared...
...such popular favorites as Linda Ronstadt (he actually sneers when he mentions her name), Frank Sinatra ("too hip for me") and Ella Fitzgerald. "Unquestionably a beautiful voice," he says of Ella, "but I never got a sense she connected with the lyrics. She never churned my kishkes -- that's Yiddish for intestines." His list of favorites is just as idiosyncratic. It includes Minnelli, of course, but also Rosemary Clooney ("she does everything a singer should do"), Gogi Grant ("she has an emotional intensity and is much underrated") and Martha Raye ("her voice was like a flute"). Gogi Grant? Martha Raye...
...Reed established publishing companies intended to expand the idea of what texts and which authors make up the canon of American literature, a national literature which includes "Chicano and Chinese, Yiddish and Native American, Anglo-Saxon and Afro-American, multicolored and multivocal," says Reed...
...Jewish dialect which seems like an alien tongue to most of the actors, as they try to wrap their mouths around convoluted phrases like "So bad I never imagined you could be!" One small complaint, only for purists, is that there is not one single Yiddish word uttered in the course of the play. Come on, Clifford, that's where all those weird constructions come from. What are these people, goyim...
Michael Cooperson '87 says his childhood was "just not normal. My Mom sang Greek hymns in the kitchen. At one point my Dad went around speaking Yiddish to everyone, even though we couldn't understand...