On most weekends since the shutdown, my husband has Zoomed with two friends to do the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. Last summer, we all used to work the puzzle at a local pool. Zoom turns out to be a decent substitute: same banter, same mix of collaboration and competition, less sunburn. 

Now, something truly new: an interactive digital crossword in Yiddish.
The world’s first, as far as we know. Neat. 

This project started more than a year ago with a suggestion from a longtime Forward supporter, Irv Smuckler. Like my husband, Irv loves crosswords. Though (also like my husband) he doesn’t speak Yiddish, he thought it’d be cool to have a Yiddish crossword, and gave us a generous donation to create one. Our Forverts editor, Rukhl Schaechter, tapped her niece, Meena Viswanath -- an engineer fluent in both Yiddish and crosswords -- to figure it out, and Meena found crauswords.com, which makes puzzles in many. We debuted a year ago with a printable puzzle. “We originally thought about transliteration,” Rukhl recalled. “I said,’That’s not Yiddish, that’s what Americans would like Yiddish to be, but Yiddish has a Hebrew alphabet.”

The puzzle was indeed cool, but really hard. And flat -- who wants to print? Plus, puzzlers got stuck and didn’t like waiting a week to see the answers. So, with Irv’s continued backing, Meena kept plugging away, and now you can puzzle it out right there on the screen, getting help as you need. Try it via Zoom with a friend!

Yes, I decided to devote most of the newsletter to this distraction because it's been such a painful week in the news. But we've got that, too, of course. Rukhl’s deputy, Jordan Kutzik, took a look at another “antifa” -- a Zionist group of Jews and Arabs whose founding documents were in Yiddish, P.J. Grisar asked, “Should we really keep comparing Trump to Hitler,” and Aviya Kushner walked us through the history of Jews and curfews  If you'd rather read them over the weekend, click this blue button below to download or print a PDF.