Put down the Matisyahu and pick up the Y-Love.

"This is Babylon," the new album from Hasidic emcee Y-Love (AKA Yitz Jordan), seamlessly blends rhymes in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, and even Aramaic, all the while mixing sounds and beats evocative of DJ Shadow, The Streets, Mos Def, Chuck D, and a host of others. Thought-provoking political verses reside naturally beside electronic dance tracks. Y-Love calls it "global hip hop," and considering that he's a convert to Judaism, he can spit some pretty fast Yiddish.

The album functions on a couple of levels: You can chill with it and meditate on his words, or let them seep in as you move. Fresh and inspired, Urb calls "This is Babylon" a "soundtrack to social progression" and describes it as "a head nodding, fist lifting, wake-up and do something kind of record."

Already available for download on iTunes and Amazon, the album will be in stores on Tuesday, April 29.

Previous: God in the Wilderness: Rediscovering the Spirituality of Nature with the Adventure Rabbi 

Jewschool recently tipped us off to a Yiddish version of Monopoly that can be purchased in Hasidic Brooklyn. Instead of Park Place, Boardwalk, and hotels, you can land on a “shtreiml gesheft” (a place to buy shtreimels, I assume) Hakhnosas Orkhim (hospitality), tzedoko, and yeshiva/kollel squares. But the best part is the “soul searching” cards. Jewschool has posted translations of some of the bad ones:The Monopoly Guy: does kinda look Jewish

“Yiddeshe Tokhter! Du host aroys gelakht ven mener hoben gehert! Zeyer a groyse pritzus! Shtel dokh in ‘mikhutz lamakhane’ un blayb aroys 3 gang.” (Jewish daughter! You laughed when men could hear you. Very immodest! You’re excommunicated! Lose three turns.)

“Geredt English tzuvishin zikh! Yiddish redn taylt up fun di goyim! Shtel dokh in ‘mikhutz lamakhane’ un blayb aroys 3 gang.” (You spoke English amongst yourselves. Speaking Yiddish separates us from the Gentiles! You’re excommunicated! Lose three turns.)

“Geleynt a treyfene bikhl! Tomey, Tomey! Arayn in Gehenom un blayb aroys 2 gang.”Ungevoren di 2 tayereste pletzer vos du host.” (You read an unkosher book. Unclean, unclean! Got to Hell and lose two turns. Lose your two most valuable properties!)

“Geholfen di Tziyonistishe medinah! Fun a shaykhes tzu reshoim kumt keyn guts nisht aroys! Nor shoden! Tu teshuvah! Zitz in a yeshivah 2 geng, un tzol far di yeshiva vifel es kost far yededn aroys gebliben gan $50 far tzedokoh!” (You helped the Zionist country! No good can come out of an association with evil people, only bad! Repent! Sit in a yeshivah for two turns, and pay $50 tuition per day to charity).

There's more about the game here.

Cunning Linguists: That's "cunning Yiddish linguist" to you.This week, some interesting ideas were raised and discussed in the comments section of Matthue Roth's post which gave us a round-up of Limmud UK. In the post, Roth writes, "Former Speaker of the Knesset Avrum Berg's assertion, while reading I.B. Singer's Nobel address, that Yiddish is a language without words for violence. That, he says, should be our model for building a Jewish state and a model for its future -- with all the corollaries that come with that. (After our session, I pointed out to him that one of the first Yiddish phrases I learned was potch in the tuchus. He said it didn't count.)"

Out of the six that were posted in response to Roth as of this late hour I'm writing, the comment that really stuck out to me was Portnoy's original comment, the very first comment, a comment in direct response to this particular item on Roth's bullet-pointed Limmud UK summary list. Portnoy wrote:

"This is a load of crap. Yiddish has numerous words and expressions for violence which range from the ever-mild barnes (noogies) to aroysnemen a mashkante af emetsn (to hold someone down and beat the shit out of them, - literally, to take out a mortgage on someone), not to mention all the variants that deal with nase arbet (murder, or, literally, wet-work). The notion that Yiddish doesn't have words for violence is also illogical, since as the victims of violence Yiddish speakers would, at least, have words for what was done to them. But Yiddish speakers also did unto others as was done unto them and a significant lexicon exists for it. Just because milquetoasty Avrum Burg is a frayer for buying into the fantasy that Yiddish speakers are passive, doesn't mean you have to be. His comment may be a nice platitude, but it's not based in reality. It's Yiddish disinformation."

Yiddish social-lingual structures and dynamics? Yes please. The lingual nerd in me enjoyed this comment immensely, to be sure, as it conjured up all sorts of linguistic essays I've long wanted to delve into writing (or try writing, in any case). But surely such rumors, extracted from either nothing or from tiny threads of misunderstanding, surely they exist around other languages, too? You bet. Like the notion that the Irish have no word for sex (Hat tip to Tamar for uncovering this fabulous article that only gets better and better as it continues.) and the many other fascinating articles (if you geek out on such things, too) on Language Log like John McCain's assertion that Eskimos have no word for robins, or the 46 Somali Words for Camel-- which includes this beautiful line about assumptions, "...hackneyed rhetoric and banality of thought... the unmotivated assumption that cultural interest always translates instantly into multiplication of vocabulary..." Not that that line as anything to do, per se, with the comment of the week, my original jumping off point, but it's a good line in any case. On that same thread, please let the record show that I can't actually decide if I love "Yiddish misinformation" or "milquetoasty Avrum Burg" better.

For some reason this year has produced a bumper crop of Hanukkah-themed CDs. Why? And are any of them any good? We got young adult novelist Matthue Roth to investigate. Check back all week for more reviews.

Hooked on Chanukah: My menorah is more fabulous than your menorah.Under consideration today:
Various artists, Hooked on Chanukah

Last night we had a Chanukah party. We didn’t plan on it being this way, but it turned into a marathon—from the family-first moments where my sister and cousin were there and we were setting up, to the first shift (parents with little kids), the second (the party kids—you know who you are), all the way till the end of the night, when it was just a few of us sitting around, drinking up the last of the mulled wine (Manischewitz, of course). My wife Itta put on the new CD we’d just gotten—Hooked on Chanukah, Sameach Music’s holiday comp and possibly the most true-to-Scriptures compilation, featuring songs like “Al Hanisim” and “Lichtalach” alongside standards like “Macabee” and, of course, the ubiquitous “Maoz Tzur.”

At first, it was oddly appropriate for the end of the night mood—jazzed, sort of bouncy, but mellow, just the right combination of laid-back harmonies, acoustic guitars and keyboards that you’d expect a CD with a neon yellow menorah on it to offer.

The real surprise came when Daniel, our downstairs neighbor—who, by the way, is half Filipino and half Chinese—began to belt out the generations-old Yiddish-tinged melodies. In Yiddish.

Daniel, it turns out, speaks more Yiddish than anyone else here (including, I would like to point out reproachfully, my Yiddish-educated wife, whose parents spoke in Yiddish when they didn’t want her to understand what they were saying. Yeah, way to pass on our people’s traditions). He started studying the language with a friend, half as a dare, half a way to fill up free time constructively. As a matter of fact, our first conversation was predicated on us comparing our apartments’ gas hookups and me seeing the Yiddish word “pripetchik” written out on it….

So, that was the end of our party. I’m cleaning up dishes, my wife’s moving chairs back into place, and Daniel is belting out “Lichtalach” in a voice usually reserved for particularly intense rounds of Rock Band. The salsa horns of “Yevanim” simmer in the background, fading into the Billy Joel-like piano of “There’s a Light”—except, not the version from Rocky Horror. Yes, as someone raised on secular music, I still find it slightly creepy that prepubescent boys are used to hit the high notes in songs—the “women’s parts,” if you will. But the music and the general air of party-ness on this compilation are good-natured and convivial. It almost makes you want to get hooked on Chanukah. Almost.

This week we read the story of Noah, and then we read about the Tower of Babel. You may recall the end of the story in Genesis 11:Is It Me: Or does the Tower of Babel look a lot like the Leaning Tower of Piza?

6And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

So we’re all scattered around speaking different languages. Actually, though, language diversity is shrinking every day. Some estimates say that over 90% of the languages spoken today will die out by the end of century. It may not sound like such a travesty, but if you think about all of the hard data that it’s in any languages, as well as the nuance and cadences that’s so important and different in every language, it’s a really depressing statistic. Most of the languages that are dying these days are languages and dialects spoken by small rural groups. In Australia, scientists are struggling to work with Aboriginal people to identify various species of birds and insects that have long been named in Aboriginal languages, but are not yet scientifically classified.

I come from a family of linguists, and we’re serious about recording and learning endangered languages. These languages, by the way, include both Yiddish and Ladino.

To find out more about endangered languages, and to donate money to linguists and social scientists who work to preserve dying languages, check out the Society for Endangered Languages (fyi, some of the site is in German) and the Foundation for Endangered Languages. I also recommend Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley, with an awesome chapter on the Yiddish revival, and the National Geographic Enduring Voices project.

Note to self: Build modern day Tower of Babel→save Ladino?

Although Philip Roth struck out miserably in his latest novel, Exit Ghost, literary Jewry may yet have some reason for celebration. America’s least Jewish novelist, (with some very fierce competition from John Updike) Cormac McCarthy, has brought a little bit of Yiddish with him into the post-apocalyptic universe.

In McCarthy’s most recent, and miraculously stunning, novel The Road, the reader is made witness to the blackened sphere that is the Earth after Armageddon. A father and son trod west across America, trying to outrun the onslaught of a deadly winter. And the onslaught of a deadly everything else too. The book is so absolute in its bleak evocation of hell on earth that it very nearly defies description. As the old expression goes: it’s like describing the color blue to the blind. There’s no humor in the conventional sense. There’s no black humor or sick humor either.

There’s wall-to-wall violence and abomination of religious proportions. There are nightmares made daymares made flesh. However, amid the death with a side of death and a glass of death to wash it down there is a heightened sense of the tender, the precious, and the fragile. And this is about the only reason I can imagine for McCarthy’s inclusion of the otherwise laughably out of place sweet Yiddish word tuckus in the text.

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Folk-rock golden boy Devendra Banhart has collaborated with everyone from Beck to Yoko Ono. Now he's hard at work on a new album and recently told Rolling Stone about the linguistic adventures he's going on during recording the followup to 2005's Cripple Crow.

Banhart is so devoted to his craft he even learned Yiddish. He decided to learn the language for the song "Shabop Shalom," which he describes as being about "a Jamaican boy who falls in love with a Jewish princess." No word on on whether he means Jewish-American princess. Seems appropriate for a guy who is signed to Young God Records, no?

My own heritage is British Guyanese: my mother left Guyana just after it gained independence. If there is one thing I know about Guyana is that the people there have a word for everything. I had to call my mother and get the linguistics lesson.  If your background is Black and Portuguese there’s a word for it: "santantone" (which actually refers to San Antonio – a slave ship stopover point).

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- White House spokesman Tony Snow fired back at former President Bill Clinton after Clinton charged that the Bush administration believes the law is a "minor obstacle" in the "Scooter" Libby case.

"I don't know what Arkansan is for chutzpah, but this is a gigantic case of it," Snow told reporters in an off-camera briefing Wednesday.

Webster's New World dictionary defines chutzpah as "shameless audacity; imprudence; brass."

I don't know what Arkansan is for chutzpah, but I often wonder what's Kennebunkportan for shmendrik, gonif and paskudnyak.

Yiddish: I speak more than I understandMy confession this morning, about how there are lots of Jewish terms I can use in a sentence but not really define with confidence or authority, got me pondering all the words I don't really know, but throw around.

And that got me thinking about Yiddish.  Because recently, a friend of mine admitted on a list serve that she'd spent her whole childhood using the word "kibbitz" wrong.  She had always assumed it just meant "chat idly" when in fact, it means "to give unwanted advice."    But SO MANY people on the list stepped forward to admit that in their houses, growing up, kibbitz had also just meant "chat".

For me, Yiddish is a scary language, full of terms I feel I should have some fluency with, and occasionally pretend to understand.  But in fact nobody in my family ever used Yiddish at all.  So I'll admit here and now that any comfort I have with Yiddish comes from books and movies.  I don't really know for sure what any of it means.

So I thought I might offer a short vocabulary list here for some of the most commonly used Yiddishisms,  (taken from this site).  I'm also including some great links below.  In case anyone else grew up without the benefit of suitably old-world grandparents, and wants to know what's up...

Bupkes Literally means "beans" in Russian; usually translated as "nothing," but it is used to criticize the fact that an amount is absurdly smaller than expected or deserved. Examples: "I was assigned to work on that project with Mike and he did bupkes!" or "I had to change jobs; the work wasn't bad, but they paid bupkes."

Chutzpah Nerve, as when the Three Stooges say, "The noive of that guy!!! Why, I oughta…" It expresses an extreme level of bold-faced arrogance and presumption. Example: "She asked me to drive her home, and once we were on the road she told to stop at the supermarket so she could pick something up. What chutzpah!"

Frum Observant of Jewish law. Almost always used to describe someone else; almost never to describe yourself. "He wasn't raised very strict, but when he went away to college he became very frum." The Yiddish name "Fruma," derived from this word, was once quite popular.

Nu An all-purpose word that doesn't really mean anything, like "well," "so" or "wassup?" I usually hear it as a prompt for a response or explanation. A friend of mine who worked for a Jewish history museum joked that they answered the phone "Jew mu, nu?" When someone takes too long to respond in an online chat or trails off in the middle of a thought, I might type "nu?" (are you still there? are you answering?) If someone says something that doesn't seem to make any sense, you might say, "nu?" (what's that supposed to mean?)

Shmutz Dirt. Refers to a trivial amount of nuisance dirt, not real filth. Example: "You have some shmutz on your shirt; brush it off."

Shmooze Having a long, friendly chat. Can be used as a noun, but is usually used as a verb. Examples: "Come to our party! Eat, drink and shmooze!" or "Our salesman is very good at shmoozing the clients."

Tchatchke 1) Little toys; knick-knacks. 2) A pretty young thing, like a trophy wife. Examples: "The collector had so many tchatchkes that he had to buy a bigger house!" or "when my mother visits, she always brings tchatchkes for the kids" or "The boss divorced his wife; now he's dating some little tchatchke." The Yiddish spelling of the word uses the letter Tsadek, so it should be pronounced "tsatske," but I've always heard the word pronounced as if it were the "ch" in "chair."

Further reading:

A HUGE Yiddish-English dictionary online

Here's a good long list, with brief definitions!

Another list

In case you shoulod want to join a "Yiddish Club"

A list of some AWESOME Yiddish phrases, including gems like "Good health to your belly button!"

List of English words borrowed from Yiddish (meaning they're fair play in Scrabble!

Buy a "Yiddish phrase a day" calendar

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Yesterday, at 2pm, I was nearly arrested for taking a picture of a synagogue. Just two hours later I plugged into a nascent group of Yiddish scholars who are reviving the language in the same way as happened in the States 10-15 years ago. I’ll let you figure out which is the best, which the worst. Gregg and I decided to walk through the old Ashkenazi immigrant Jewish neighborhood, Once, which houses three premiere pieces of Buenos Aires Jewish architecture—the huge old Ashkenazi synagogue, the old Sephardic synagogue, and AMIA, the Jewish cultural center that was blown up in 1994 and has since been rebuilt. Once now serves as the home of black-hat, ultra-Orthodox Buenos Aires Jewry. We took the subway a few stops to the neighborhood and emerged in Shmattaville. For those ...

The Solomon Sisters, a klezmer caberet sister act from the U.K. is making their U.S. debut in New York on Monday at the Makor Cafe. Not to be confused with the glam rock-infused sound of The Scissor Sisters, this duo have their roots in "old school New York Yiddish theatre."

From the write-up on their MySpace page:

A live mix of Yiddish song, original material and swinging Klezmer will leave you breathless and desperate for more.

The last part of this description might not be all that different from 90% of band promo material out there, but I have a feeling this act might live up to the hype. If not, then you can always go The Scissor Sisters lesbian confusion excuse route for rationalizing yet another lame Monday night.