Professor Miriam Hoffman: Curious Rabbinic Tales: The Shortest Tall Stories

Professor Miriam Hoffman is a retired professor of Yiddish language, literature and film, Jewish culture, Yiddish humor, and classical and minor Yiddish writers. She is also a known Yiddish journalist and worked as a feature writer for the Yiddish Forward from 1982 to today. Now, with her latest book, she brings us the magic of storytelling. Folktales belong to the earliest folk literature, predating Jewish sources. Once they were adapted into the Jewish setting, the tales were integrated into our own mythology. Folktales were told as parables with a moral undercurrent to expose human frailty and strength, vanity, and heroism. Anything that was not said openly was disguised as a parable or a folktale.