Sampling 10 Weirdest Hasidic Foods with Frieda Vizel, Brooklyn Tour Guide

Today we are joining Frieda Vizel, a former member of the Satmar Hasidic community who conducts tours of Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn. In this video she goes looking for the most exotic foods available in this Jewish neighborhood, or as she puts it, foods that have more of an acquired taste.

She tries fargliverta fish zaft, yapchik, galareta, kishka, herring and even a cake that in English translates to: "rag cake". It’s an unusual food tour on the hunt for the food that will most challenge the faint of heart!

1) 1:10 - Kuchinya [Hungarian] / Fargliverte Fish Zaft [Yiddish] / Fish Jelly 

2) 1:50 - Grieven / Chicken Scraps 

3) 2:38 - Yapchik / Overnight Potato Kugel with Meat 

4) 3:05 Galareta or P’tcha / Calves Foot Jelly 

5) 4:10 Shmaltz Herring with Kichel 

6 & 7) 6:23 Chollent and Kishka / Everything Bean Stew and Stuffed Intestines 

8) 7:31 Browne Eyer / Overnight Hardboiled Chollent Eggs 

9) 8:10 Falche Fish / Fake Fish, Imitation Fish made of Chicken 

10) 9:00 Shmata Cake / Rag Cake 

Lack of Yiddish Translators Leads to Mistrial in New York Bribery Case

As we have said many times, you just can't make this stuff up.

A shortage of Yiddish translators has resulted in a New York judge declaring a mistrial in a bribery and wire fraud case involving Democratic State Senator Malcolm A. Smith, who is alleged to have offered cash to Republican leaders to allow him to run for mayor on the Republican ticket.

So how does Yiddish get farmished (mixed up) in all this? It seems that the defense claims there is evidence contained in 28 hours of wiretapped Yiddish recordings that would prove the innocence of the defendant.

But according to a report in yesterday's Wall Street Journal by Hilary Potkewitz, even the few available Yiddish translators are not able to translate the Hasidic Yiddish dialect spoken by the Satmar Chasidim who figure in this case.

The New York State Unified Court System has one full-time interpreter who speaks Yiddish and Hebrew, and four on-call Yiddish interpreters. The court used a Yiddish translator 37 times in the first half of this year and 83 times in all of 2013, according to David Bookstaver, the system's director of communications.

Rockland County family court had the greatest need for the interpreters, he said, followed by Brooklyn family and supreme courts.

In Mr. Smith's case, "a number of translators we reached out to said the speech wasn't comprehensible to them," said Agata Baczyk, founder of Legal Interpreters LLC.

The recordings involve members of the ultra-Orthodox Satmar sect, a group that tends to speak a form of Yiddish often referred to as "Hasidic Yiddish." It is a speech pattern laced with religious references and Aramaic phrases, explained Prof. Joel Berkowitz, director of the Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

An interpreter who was an Orthodox Jew might have had a better chance understanding the recordings, Mr. Berkowitz said. But the bulk of the translation happened over the weekend, and Orthodox Jews observe the Sabbath.

In Mr. Smith's case, defense attorneys said they needed weeks to analyze the transcripts of the recordings, and too many jurors said they couldn't serve through the delay in the trial. On June 17, the judge declared a mistrial. Mr. Smith, a Democrat, will have another trial beginning in January.

The video below gives a brief summary of the case as jury selection began for the trial.

As the New York Times headlined on June 12, Oy Gevalt!

(A SPECIAL NOTE FOR NEW EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS:  THE VIDEO IS NOT VIEWABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE EMAIL THAT YOU GET EACH DAY.  YOU MUST CLICK ON THE TITLE AT THE TOP OF THE EMAIL TO REACH THE JEWISH HUMOR CENTRAL WEBSITE, FROM WHICH YOU CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON IN THE VIDEO IMAGE TO START THE VIDEO.)

Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish - Now Available as DVD and Instant Video Rental

The play Romeo and Juliet has been translated around the world. Now Eve Annenberg's gritty, funny feature film, Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish, sets William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in contemporary New York City with Brooklyn-inflected English and Yiddish spoken by a talented cast.  The movie has English subtitles.

The film is available from Amazon.com as a DVD and as an Amazon Instant Video rental. 

Ava, a wisecracking middle-aged emergency room nurse-and bitterly lapsed Orthodox Jew-undertakes a translation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in her pursuit of a Master's degree. In over her head, she accepts help from some charismatic and ethically challenged (a.k.a. scamming) young Ultra Orthodox dropouts, Lazer and Mendy. 

When another ex-Orthodox man enchants her apartment with Kabbalah magic that he is leaking, the young men begin to live Shakespeare's play in their heads, in a gauzy and beautiful alternate reality where everyone is Orthodox. In what might be the first Yiddish 'mumblecore' film, Annenberg creates a parallel universe (set in Williamsburg, Brooklyn), where Romeo and Juliet hail from divergent streams of ultra-Orthodox Judaism and speak their lines in street-smart Yiddish. 

The Bard may have never dreamed of the Montagues as Satmar Jews, but in this magical rendition, the story of feuding Orthodox families is strangely believable and timeless. The director conjures Chabadnicks (Lubavitch) as Capulets; the distinctions are subtle but astute viewers will be tickled by the detail. As they start to 'modernize' and act in the archaic play, the young men fall under its rapturous incantation.

Annenberg's meditation on life and love yields a rapprochement between Secular and ultra Orthodox Worlds and a compelling New York love story. By the end of this 92-minute confection-set to euphoric compositions by Joel Diamond, Lior, and Basya Schecter-family is redefined, Shakespeare evaluated, Ava is happier, and the viewer understands a little Yiddish. A delightful meditation on love and family-if the issues are not yet solved, they linger in the air like a little Kabbalah magic.

While the film is not rated, it does have some brief nudity and includes some F and S words, so we wanted to warn you in case you find that to be objectionable. The trailer, which doesn't include these scenes, is shown below.

(A SPECIAL NOTE FOR NEW EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS:  THE VIDEO MAY NOT BE VIEWABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE EMAIL THAT YOU GET EACH DAY ON SOME COMPUTERS AND TABLETS.  YOU MUST CLICK ON THE TITLE AT THE TOP OF THE EMAIL TO REACH THE JEWISH HUMOR CENTRAL WEBSITE, FROM WHICH YOU CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON IN THE VIDEO IMAGE TO START THE VIDEO.)