(Jewish Group) The Jewish word that no one uses anymore

[Behind the Aegis]

There is a Yiddish word that our grandparents used that has fallen out of use.

The word is shanda — shame.

Some would say: Good riddance.

For several generations, the idea and living reality of shanda served as fuel in our personal and communal Jewish engines.

Consider the way that we used that word.

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An unusual article, but thought I'd drop it off here.

[question everything]

1. I am surprised that the author is not given since it is written in first person

[agingdem]

2. My parents were Holocaust survivors...

they met in the states, married because it was time and to replace the families they lost..my father was Lithuanian, my mother Polish..he was fluent in many languages..English was not one of them...she had a better command of the English but she trilled her R's when she spoke and the letters V and W were flipped.."we" was pronounced "vee" and a vault was a "walt".. Yiddish was my parent's common language and they spoke only Yiddish in our home and so my sister and I were very well acquainted with "shande".. a "shande" was anything they found repugnant: Joe McCarthy was a "shande" as was Joseph Kennedy, Henry Ford, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, the Vietnam War, and our neighbor, a raging antisemite..

If my parents were alive today, and thank G-d they're not, they would call the entire Republican Party a "shande", buy they would reach into their memories of unspeakable horror and tag Donald Trump "America's Hitler"..and they wouldn't be wrong