Dictionary of Jewish Usage: A Guide to the Use of Jewish Terms is a unique and much needed guide to the way many Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic words and meanings are used by English speakers. Sol Steinmetz draws upon his years of dictionary editorial experience, as well as his lifelong study of Jewish history, traditions, and practices, to guide the reader through the essentially uncharted territory of Jewish usage. Dictionary of Jewish Usage clarifies the meanings of Jewish terms that have been absorbed into English, as well as the transliterated Hebrew terms from sacred texts that reflect...

This is the only book to seriously treat the intriguing linguistic and cultural phenomenon of the intimate contact between Yiddish and English over the past 120 years.

Yiddish arrived in America as the mother tongue of millions of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Not only did this language without a homeland survive in the great American melting pot, it infiltrated the majority language, English, with a wide variety of new words and expressions and helped to establish a new ethnic language called "Jewish English." New Yorkers, in particular, have adopted a long list of...

This book is a unique scholarly achievementuauthoritative original scholarship designed to be a useful reference source for the general reader as well as for an important etymological resource for the expert. With over 3,000 entries, the Dictionary covers over 25,000 root, or basic, English words, detailing the derivation of each in clearly written passages that interweave thousands of linguistic and historical facts to explain where words originate, how their forms have changed in English, and how their meanings have developed over time.