All you need is a celebrity or politician to throw a Yiddish word around, and suddenly everyone is a buzz and kibbitzing. NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently quoted a top Democrat as saying "I'm telling you, man, it's something about our party, the shtetl mentality."
Of course, most people have no idea what "Shtetl" even means. Thanks to Maureen Dowd "Shtetl," a Yiddish word meaning "a 19th-century Eastern European Jewish village" is currently the #4 most searched word on the internet! Could you plotz?
Read Maureen Dowd's entire NY Times article here.
Feel free to kvetch or kvell in the comments section.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Shtetl Mentality
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1 comment:
That's very funny. I'm not fainting--I've noticed that a search on "shtetl" brings more readers to one of my blogs (Q&A with Lilian Nattel) than anything else. But I wonder, what exactly is shtetl mentality? When I was in China, bargaining in a market, more than anything I was reminded of a shtetl market!
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