#1,001: How Do You Say "Bedbug" in Yiddish?

For people whose knowledge and familiarity of Jewish culture is based largely on Fiddler on the Roof and The Jazz Singer, Yiddish is nothing more than a quaint jargon spoken by men who wear fur-trimmed hats (streimelach - שטרײַמלעך) and married women who cover their hair with wigs (sheitln - שייַטלן). They are, of course, wrong. Yiddish is a real, honest-to-G-d language. Hell’s Bells, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Twain, de Maupassant . . . even Raymond Chander . . . have been translated into Yiddish, although it is beyond me why anyone would want to pal around with Feivel (Phillip) Marlow in Mama Loschen (the “mother tongue”). Linguistically, Yiddish is considered middle-high German (מיטל הויך דייַטש - mit’l hoych daytsch) an 8th-century language that provided the nascent Ashkenazi (German-Jewish) community with a vernacular fused with many elements taken from Hebrew and to some extent Aramaic, written in Hebrew letters. Over many centuries it adopted and adapted words derived from whatever European country Jews might find themselves living. Today, it is spoken mainly by the Orthodox.

Without necessarily knowing it, a lot of non-Jewish, English-speaking people freely use Yiddish words in everyday speech. Many of the words are pejorative:

shmuck, (a foolish or contemptible person);
shmendrick (a hapless fool);
putz (an idiot);
nosh (a quick bite);
shmegegge (a sycophant);
chutzpah (overweening self-confidence, grossly nervy);
mentch (a wonderful human being);
glitch (a minor malfunction) and
klutz (a supremely clumsy person).

This is just a minute sampling. Most Jewish Baby Boomers know little if any Yiddish beyond these kinds of words; their parents and grandparents only spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want their children or grandchildren to understand what they were talking about. In the Stone household, this was never a problem: neither our parents nor grandparents on either side of the family knew or spoke Mama Loschen . . . they were all American-born, hailing from such places like Minnesota, Chicago, and Baltimore going back to the 19th century. (I did manage to learn a bit of Yiddish myself while attending rabbinic school, in order to read Sholom Aleichem [the “Yiddish Mark Twain”] in the original. My mentor and guide to learning Yiddish was a professor with the delightfully Dickensian name of “Herbert Paper.”)

So what all does this have to do with the Yiddish word for “bedbug,” or JD Vance, the Republican nominee for Vice President, whose picture is at the top on the left? Well, in Yiddish, וואַנץ (pronounced “vontz’) is the “bedbug” . . . entomologically the Cimex lectularius Linnaeus, a blood-feeding parasite of humans, chickens, bats and occasionally domesticated animals. This is the definition one stores in the brain. Yiddish words and expressions, however, are often best “understood” in the kishkes . . . one’s stomach or guts. And it is in the kishkes where the parallel between “Vance” and “vontz” becomes clear. In Yiddish, to refer to someone as a וואַנץ is akin to calling them a disgusting, crazy person . . . as in “crazy as a bedbug.” It seems to me that any- and everyone who can go from calling IT “The American Hitler,” “The ultimate conman” or “insane” to becoming a blindly loyal MAGA straphanger is unquestionably a vontz.

Not only that: Vance/vontz is also, to teach yet another Yiddish word, טשודנע - tshudne - a weirdo. Unquestionably, JD Vance (a.k.a. “James Donald Bowman,” “James David Hamel,” “J.D. Vance” and [without the periods] “JD Vance) has belly-flopped his way on to the national political scene with less aplomb than Sarah Palin. While Vonts has attacked Democratic V.P. candidate Tim Walz for everything from being an “unabashed San Francisco-style Liberal” (he’s a Nebraskan who never so much as visited “The City” until recently) to being a “coward” after serving 24 years in the National Guard and becoming the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer ever to serve in the U.S. Congress. Moreover, Vontz has seen his favorability rating plunge to a record low minus 15 points . . . the worst in modern political history. Add to that Vonts’ comment about "childless cat ladies,“ his anti-democratic opinion that families with children should get more votes than the childless, and his having written a gushing forward to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ far, far right tome “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” which spells out precisely what IT is going to do to America in his next term, and you have the living, breathing example of a וואַנץ - a bedbug. (It should be noted that “Project 2025” is so utterly frightening and un-American that IT has disavowed any knowledge of it - one of the biggest and most obvious whoppers he has ever told.)

There are several well-known rules for selecting a vice presidential running mate, the most basic of which is “First, do no harm.” IT and his advisors have obviously broken this rule . . . presuming that he even pays attention to them. Had they done serious vetting of the man who made his tens of millions in San Francisco and then returned to Ohio to run for the United States Senate, they would have discovered his many liabilities, inconsistencies, and prior questionable comments about his running mate, women, mixed-race people, democracy itself. Many have come back to haunt him. It is doubtful Vontz will be able to attract any new independent/ undecided voters. He is doing quite poorly among suburban women and educated people in general. As a result, the Republican campaign has of late adopted a new strategy about Vontz: downplay his importance to the Republican ticket. In the words of It himself, “Historically, the vice president in terms of the election does not have any impact, I mean virtually no impact.” How’s that for a less-than-ringing endorsement? Then again, what can one expect to come from the mouth of a man (i.e. IT) who is currently undergoing the worst public psychological/political meltdown in the history of Presidential elections?

Permit me to close with a slightly altered blessing/curse from the mouth of טבֿיה די מילכיקע (Tevya the Milkman): “May G-d bless and keep Senator Vontz . . . far away from us.”