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How Yiddish and Savta Sarah shaped my Jewish journey
I first fell in love with Jewish languages as a Fulbright fellow at Tel Aviv University.
I was fascinated by the many languages that had converged in Israel: Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish, Darija, Russian, Amharic and Ladino. I learned about different communities’ language and history, which built meaningful connections with the people who brought them to life in the present.
Learning Yiddish felt especially profound: the knowledge that it had once been the most widely spoken Jewish language in the world, and that millions of its speakers had been killed in the Holocaust.
I was a Roman Catholic from Texas. Moving to Israel was my first sustained exposure to Jewish life, and I was welcomed into it with a warmth that felt both casual and profound — Shabbat dinners, holiday tables and conversations that stretched late into the night.
About a year into my time there, I met my now-husband, Sagi. Through him, I met his grandmother, Sarah. He called her Savta Sarah (savta is Hebrew for grandmother), so I did too.
On Shabbat afternoons, we’d visit her home. She spoke Yiddish, Polish, Russian and by that time, primarily Hebrew – always with a Yiddish inflection – and little English. My Hebrew was still rudimentary. But I knew German, which is still intelligible to a Yiddish speaker. This became our shared language.
Savta Sarah taught me words like nudnik, mentsh, takhles, shtinker, meshugas, fargin — and pointed out how Yiddish lived on in Israeli slang over the decades. Yiddish, she told me, was a language of cynicism and humor, a way of making life’s tsuris bearable.
Sarah taught me how Yiddish articulated a sense of resilience through cynicism, poking fun at everything in life from the tragic to the banal – for example – “Ikh vil dos nisht haltn, efsher vet emitser dos ganvenen” (“I don’t want to keep this, but hopefully someone will steal it”) can be used when you’ve been given something you don’t want, but feel too guilty about throwing it away.
I also loved “der mentsh trakht, un got lakht” (Man supposes but God disposes)” – used when bad things happen, to remind the hearer, mostly with humor, of the futility of mortality, but it can also refer to a sense of faith, despite the circumstances.
Cynicism was how people survived. This mentality existed alongside warmth in a culture rich with hospitality that always made sure to pause on weddings, bris-milah, holidays and Shabbos to celebrate life.
Sarah embodied that sensibility: perceptive and generous, yet direct and unsentimental. She was also the single Holocaust survivor of her immediate family.
Her memories occasionally surfaced without warning. We would be talking about something mundane, and suddenly she would shift into the past.
Sarah was born in the 1930s near today’s Polish-Ukrainian border. Her mother was murdered by the Nazis in a mass execution of Jewish women and children. Sarah, my mother-in-law told me, survived by luck.
Afterwards, during the chaos of a violent attack on the forced labor camp, Sarah was separated from her father, who was killed. She hid in snowy fields for days, later being taken back to the camp. There she reunited with cousins who smuggled her scraps of food. She was still a child.
After the camp was liberated by the Allied Forces, Sarah was sent to a refugee camp in Cyprus. A first attempt by Jews to escape to British Mandatory Palestine failed when the government turned back ships carrying Jewish refugees. Sarah considered joining an aunt in Venezuela, ultimately trying again to land in eretz-yisroel, at last immigrating in 1947, a year before Israeli independence. She built a life — marrying, raising children, and lovingly witnessing her grandchildren reach adulthood.
I never asked her about the Shoah, but her memories emerged in fragments during our visits. Once, Sarah recalled guarding a loaf of bread in her bed in the camp, only to wake and find it stolen. She told it plainly, without visible emotion. And yet, she joked often and radiated pride in the family she had helped rebuild.
Over time, my relationship with Savta Sarah became part of my own spiritual journey. What began as curiosity about Judaism deepened into a desire to convert. After years of learning, I entered a Modern Orthodox conversion program called “Project Ruth” and will soon immerse in the mikveh to complete the process.
There isn’t just one reason for that decision. But Savta Sarah, a very secular woman, is part of it — not because she argued for faith, but because she embodied a form of Jewish resilience and continuity through her stories and through the Yiddish she taught me. From her, I learned what it meant not just to inherit a tradition, but to participate in rebuilding it.
I have always been a spiritual person who has felt close to God, and feel drawn to Judaism’s daily prayers and the intimacy of putting on tefillin. I was drawn far less to kosher laws. But when I think of Jewish history and my journey that has led me into the Jewish people, stories woven together like the braids of a havdalah candle, it makes sense to be observant. I’m not doing it just for myself, but also as a way of honoring past generations and paving the way for future generations.
When Sagi and I left Israel in 2022, we visited Sarah one last time. By then, she understood we were a couple as two men, though we’d never needed to formally explain.
As we were leaving, she pressed several crisp hundred-dollar bills into Sagi’s hand, smiling mischievously. “This is for both of you,” she said. Then, more seriously: “Look out for each other, that’s all you have in this world.”
Savta Sarah died a few years later. Since then, I’ve continued learning Yiddish, slowly and informally. Language and memory have become central to how I understand my place in the Jewish story.
A century ago, Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe could not have imagined who might one day take up their language. As fewer native speakers remain, the future of Yiddish may depend, in part, on unexpected inheritors.
And for me, that is an incredible honor.
The post How Yiddish and Savta Sarah shaped my Jewish journey appeared first on The Forward.
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Mike Stoller and Iris Rainer Dart talk ‘Beaches’ and reviving their Yiddish musical
A Peanuts poster in the background of our video call reminds Iris Rainer Dart of her brief time starring in a musical.
“I was the understudy for Judy Kaye in the L.A. company of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown,” recalled Dart, 82, the author of the bestselling novel Beaches and the book and lyrics for the new Broadway musical based on it. “She wanted to go home for Thanksgiving, and so they let me go on one time to see if I could do it. And then for Thanksgiving, I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then went on as Lucy!”
After that, it was curtains. “That’s my distinguished acting career,” Dart said. “Boy, am I glad it gave me up!”
But Dart never gave up on musicals, which she started writing as an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon with an up-and-coming composer named Stephen Schwartz. She worked as a writer for Sonny and Cher’s variety show, and used Cher as a partial model for the character of Cee Cee Bloom, the brassy diva whose friendship with the more refined Bertie White is the center of Beaches. (There’s a bit of Dart in Bloom, too — namely the Jewishness.) Years later, after Garry Marshall directed the 1988 film version of Beaches, Bette Midler, who gave life to Cee Cee on screen, asked Dart to write a new vehicle for her.
Searching for subject matter, Dart remembered her stint as a replacement teacher at her daughter’s Jewish school in her largely Judenrein neck of California. She felt unprepared to take over — “The understudy doesn’t know the lines” — but she got mailers from Jewish institutions to develop her lesson plans. One was a catalog of Yiddish films.
Growing up in Pittsburgh with Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents, she didn’t need subtitles to watch them. Inspired, she wrote what would become The People in the Picture, a memory play of Yiddish theater and the Holocaust.
Midler wouldn’t go on to star in the show, which debuted on Broadway in 2011 with Donna Murphy, but she made the shidduch between Dart and Mike Stoller, the legendary songsmith who, with lyricist Jerry Leiber, penned “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Yakety Yak” and, yes, a tune called “Charlie Brown” for the Coasters.
When it came time to adapt Beaches, a story built in part around backstage drama, and an enduring friendship that grows out of it, Dart reconnected with Stoller after working with a different composer on a previous run of the show.
Stoller, 93, has had his music feature in many Broadway musicals — mostly of the jukebox variety, long after they had already been hit records. He says he approaches crafting an original score differently, writing for characters rather than an artist like Elvis. With Beaches he set out to write a “musical-musical,” that was traditional and book-driven. In the case of both Beaches and People in the Picture, there’s a heaping helping of Yiddishkeit.
One line that has audiences rolling in the aisles comes when Cee Cee (played by Jessica Vosk) pays a visit to her friend Bertie (Kelli Barrett), whose mother is dying at a Catholic hospital. She tells the nuns “my mother used to point you out to me on the street and say, ‘At least they married a Jewish guy.’”
Stoller spent some of his early years living in the converted basement of his grandparents’ house in Bell End, Queens. His grandmother spoke Yiddish, Russian, Polish and English with a Cockney accent.
“She left Bialystok and moved to Whitechapel in London on her way to America,” Stoller explained.
Stoller never had a bar mitzvah, and learned his father didn’t either. It was only when the family moved to California that Stoller learned his dad, A.L. Stoller’s, full name.
“I was thrilled to find out that his name was really ‘Abraham Lincoln Stoler,’” Stoller recalled. “In a way, it sounded Black, and I was working primarily with African American people when I started writing along with Jerry, and those were the singers that inspired us, and so I felt additional pride in his name.”
The People in the Picture brought Stoller to tears. Beaches, which (spoilers for a 41-year-old story) ends with Bertie’s untimely death, has audiences cracking up before they reach for a Kleenex.
The one song Stoller didn’t compose for the show is “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” which became a standard from the film. But beyond that, the story stays truer to Dart’s novel than the movie did.
“I always knew, because I wasn’t writing it, that it would not be the story that I wanted to tell,” said Dart of the film version. “The story I wanted to tell was in the book and in this musical.”
In the meantime, Stoller and Dart want to bring back People in the Picture. Dart said she has a new draft ready to go.
“I’m hoping that maybe we can get Jeff Goldblum, who says he loves Yiddish,” Dart said. “He’s from Pittsburgh also, and I think his father, Dr. Goldblum, may have been the doctor to my family, to my mother. Because there were two Dr Goldblums, and one of them was an eye doctor, and my mother was always trying to fix him up with my cousin.”
“Need I say more?” Dart asked.
The post Mike Stoller and Iris Rainer Dart talk ‘Beaches’ and reviving their Yiddish musical appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Says Iran ‘Should Wave White Flag of Surrender’ as Shaky Ceasefire Holds Despite Exchange of Fire
US President Donald Trump speaks during an event to sign a memorandum in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, May 5, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Evan Vucci
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday dismissed Iran‘s military capability and said Tehran “should wave the white flag of surrender” but is too proud to do so.
Trump’s comments to reporters in the Oval Office came as the United Arab Emirates said it was under attack from Iranian missiles and drones, even as Washington said a shaky ceasefire was intact despite an exchange of fire the previous day as US forces attempted to force open the Strait of Hormuz.
Despite the escalation, Iran‘s military has been reduced to firing “peashooters,” Trump said, adding that Tehran privately wants to make a deal despite its public saber-rattling.
“They play games, but let me just tell you, they want to make a deal. And who wouldn’t, when your military is totally gone?” he said.
Trump heaped praise on the US blockade of Iranian ports in the region. “It’s like a piece of steel. Nobody’s going to challenge the blockade. And I think it’s working out very well,” he said.
When asked what Iran would need to do to violate the ceasefire, Trump said: “Well, you’ll find out, because I’ll let you know … They know what not to do.”
Trump argued that Iran “should save the white flag of surrender,” adding, “If this were a fight, they’d stop it.”
The US military said it had destroyed six Iranian small boats, as well as cruise missiles and drones, after Trump sent the navy to escort stranded tankers through the strait in a campaign he called “Project Freedom.”
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the operation to protect commercial ships was temporary and the four-week-old truce was not over. “We’re not looking for a fight,” he told a press conference. “Right now, the ceasefire certainly holds, but we’re going to be watching very, very closely.”
Iran fired missiles at US ships on Monday and attacked the UAE, a key regional ally of Washington, with missiles and drones. After issuing a new map of the Strait of Hormuz with an expanded Iranian area of control, Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards warned vessels on Tuesday to stick to the corridors it had set or face a “decisive response.”
Shortly after Hegseth spoke on Tuesday, the UAE’s defense ministry said its air defenses were again dealing with missile and drone attacks coming from Iran.
‘RIGHT TO RESPOND’
The Gulf Arab state’s foreign ministry said in a statement that the attacks were a serious escalation and posed a direct threat to the country’s security, adding that the UAE reserved its “full and legitimate right” to respond.
There was no immediate comment on that from Iran, though earlier its parliament speaker, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, had said breaches of the ceasefire by the US and its allies endangered shipping through the strait, which carries a large share of the world’s oil and fertilizer supplies.
“We know well that the continuation of the current situation is unbearable for the United States, while we have not even begun yet,” he said in a social media post.
The Strait of Hormuz has been virtually shut since the United States and Israel began attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, triggering disruptions that have pushed up commodity prices around the world.
Iran has effectively sealed off the strait by threatening to deploy mines, drones, missiles, and fast-attack craft. The United States has countered by blockading Iranian ports and mounting escorted transits for commercial vessels.
Hegseth said the US had successfully secured a path through the narrow waterway and that hundreds of commercial ships were lining up to pass through.
The US military said two US merchant ships made it through the strait, without saying when, with the support of Navy guided-missile destroyers.
Iran denied any crossings had taken place, though shipping company Maersk said the Alliance Fairfax, a US-flagged ship, exited the Gulf under US military escort on Monday.
Several merchant ships in the Gulf reported explosions or fires on Monday, and an oil port in the UAE, which hosts a large US military base, was set ablaze by Iranian missiles.
Iran also said it fired warning shots at a US warship approaching the strait, forcing it to turn back.
Reuters could not independently verify events in the strait as the two sides issued contradictory statements.
General Dan Caine, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Iranian attacks against US forces fell “below the threshold of restarting major combat operations at this point.”
PAKISTAN’S MEDIATION EFFORTS CONTINUE
The war has killed thousands as it spread beyond Iran to Lebanon and the Gulf, and has roiled the global economy. The head of the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday that even if the conflict ended immediately, it would take three to four months to deal with the consequences.
US and Iranian officials have held one round of face-to-face peace talks, but attempts to set up further meetings have failed.
Iranian state media said on Sunday that the US had conveyed its response to a 14-point Iranian proposal via Pakistan, and Iran was reviewing it. Neither side gave details.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said peace talks were still progressing with Pakistan’s mediation and warned the US and the UAE against being drawn into a “quagmire.”
He was traveling to Beijing on Tuesday for talks with his Chinese counterpart, his ministry said. Trump is also due to visit China this month.
A senior Pakistani official involved in talks said: “We have put in a lot of efforts – actually both the sides have narrowed gaps on a majority of the issues.”
Trump has said the US-Israeli attacks aimed to eliminate what he called imminent threats from Iran, citing its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and its support for terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
Trump has insisted Iran must surrender its enriched uranium stockpiles to prevent it producing a nuclear weapon – an ambition Tehran denies.
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UK’s Starmer Convenes Community Leaders to Fight Antisemitism After Attacks
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street on the government’s response to a stabbing in which two Jewish men were wounded, which police said was a terrorism‑related attack, after a man was arrested in connection with the incident on Wednesday, in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer urged leaders from across society on Tuesday to work together to eradicate antisemitism “from every corner,” as he convened a meeting following the stabbing of two Jewish men and a string of other attacks.
The attacks have left Jewish communities fearing for their safety and piled pressure on Starmer to show he can tackle them. The opposition Conservative Party has called antisemitism a “national emergency.”
Moments after Starmer began speaking, counter-terrorism police confirmed they had launched an investigation into an arson attack at a former synagogue in east London. The incident was the latest in a series of arson attacks on Jewish targets since March, most of them in north London, some of which authorities are examining for possible Iranian links.
Starmer told the meeting – which brought together representatives from business, health, culture, higher education, and policing for talks with members of the Jewish community – that investigators were examining whether a foreign state could be behind some of the incidents.
“Our message to Iran or to any other country that might seek to foment violence, hatred, or division in society, is that it will not be tolerated,” Starmer said, adding that the government was fast-tracking legislation to tackle threats.
TERRORISM-RELATED DEATHS ON THE RISE
Starmer, whose wife is Jewish, said last week’s stabbings formed part of a broader pattern of rising antisemitism against Britain’s 290,000 Jews, leaving many feeling frightened and angry.
In response, the government has raised the national terrorism threat level to “severe” and announced an additional 25 million pounds ($34 million) in funding to bolster protection for Jewish communities.
A new 1-million-pound support package was announced to target antisemitism in high-risk areas, with a further 500,000 pounds allocated to the local authority covering the area where the stabbings took place.
Starmer also announced new requirements for universities to publish details of antisemitic incidents on their campuses and the steps being taken to address them.
“Only by working together, we eradicate antisemitism from every corner,” Starmer said.
The Global Terrorism Index has said terrorism-linked deaths fell globally in 2025, but surged 280% in Western countries, largely driven by antisemitism, Islamophobia, and political terrorism.
In Britain, government data published last year showed sharp rises in hate crimes against the Jewish community in the months following the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war.