Yiddishkeit

alternative yiddishkayt · alternative yidishkayt · alternative Yidishkeit · alternative yidishkeyt

1. uncountableJewishness; the Jewish way of life, particularly Ashkenazi and Yiddish culture.

   2000, Curt Leviant (translator), “The Shochet’s Wife” in More Stories from My Father’s Court by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1956), New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 17, He wants a loose girl, a bareheaded piece who doesn’t keep Yiddishkeit.

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   Wait! my Ezekiel will be Bar-mitzvah in a few years; then you shall see what I will do for that Shool. You shall see what an example of Yiddishkeit I will give to a link generation.

   1892, Israel Zangwill, chapter 12, in The Grandchildren of the Ghetto, London: J.M. Dent, page 175

   1969, Chaim Potok, The Promise, New York: Anchor Books, 2005, Chapter Six, “In America, everything is called Yiddishkeit,” Rav Kalman said. “A Jew travels to synagogue on Shabbos in his car, that is called Yiddishkeit. A Jew eats ham but gives money to philanthropy, that is called Yiddishkeit. A Jew prays three times a year but is a member of a synagogue, that is called Yiddishkeit. Judaism”—he pronounced the word in English, contemptuously: Joo-dah-eeism—“everything in America calls itself Judaism.”

   Antonyms: goyishkeit