Michael Wex > Quotes

“In one of the extras that come with the DVD version of the movie (Groundhog Day), Danny Rubin, who came up with the original idea and then wrote the script, says that the movie is about “doing what you can do in the moment to make things better instead of making them worse.” Which might not sound like very much, but it’s just about all you can do in life.

Which only proves that the world itself runs on Yiddish-speaking principles: the best way to get what you want and make all those bastards out there so jealous that they’ll want to poke their own eyes out is to go out of your way to be nice to those bastards. That’s the way to show them. That’s how a mentsh gets revenge.”
― Michael Wex, How to Be a Mentsh (And Not a Shmuck): Secrets of the Good Life from the Most Unpopular People on Earth

“Not only do Judaism in general and Yiddish in particular place an unusual emphasis on complaint, but Yiddish also allows considerable scope for complaining about the complaining of others, more often than not to the others who are doing the complaining. While answering one complaint with another is usually considered a little excessive in English, Yiddish tends to take a homeopathic approach to kvetching: like cures like and kvetch cures kvetch. The best response to a complaint is another complaint, an antiseptic counter-kvetch that makes further whining impossible for anybody but you.”
― Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods – The Essential Guide to Jewish Heritage, Survival, and European Folklore

“Up until the Nazis, poverty, not anti-Semitism, was considered the most serious problem facing the Jews, and much, if not most, modern Yiddish culture developed in an environment of almost incomprehensible deprivation.”
― Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods

“Makhn a tsimmes, “to make a tsimmes,” is a very common idiom meaning to make a fuss, a to-do, a big deal out of something that doesn’t deserve it.”
― Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods

“a meshugenem zol men oysshraybn un dikh araynshraybn—a maniac should be crossed off the register of madmen and you should be inscribed in his place”
― Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods

“There is almost no phase of human life that Yiddish takes entirely seriously.”
― Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods

“If the first chapter seems to talk more about the Bible and Talmud than bupkes and tukhes, it’s because the Bible and Talmud are to Yiddish what plantations are to the blues. The only difference is that blues left the plantations behind, while Yiddish—try as it still sometimes does—never escaped from the Talmud. A”
― Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods

“Go ahead and ask someone how they’re feeling; if they tell you, “Don’t ask,” just remember that you already have.”
― Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods