This Yiddish Word Is the Answer to Our Quest for All Things Cozy

The first time I heard the word “heimish” I was standing in a fluorescent lit conference room that would serve as a venue for some kind of Jewish speaking engagement. I was part of the team helping to plan the event, and the hosts noted that they wanted the room to feel “heimish.” I nodded like I knew what that meant, wrote the word down — maybe I could find some tablecloths or something that matched their vision? —  and looked it up as soon as I got back to my computer.

Heimish, I learned, had nothing to do with tablecloths, really. From the Yiddish word for home (heim), it’s a concept with no direct translation from Yiddish that means something like homey or cozy.

At the time, I was inspired beyond the dingy conference room. This was at the tail end of the hygge craze (hygge being the Danish coziness concept that had the world buying thick socks and scented candles in search of some of that world famous Scandinavian-chic happiness). I was not immune to its draw, but now I was learning Jews had an untranslatable coziness concept, too? I didn’t need to be turning to Scandinavians to achieve maximum coziness, I just needed to look within. Plus, I had always dreamed of a world that didn’t see the Jewish aesthetic as blue and silver Stars of David ad nauseum. Was this our moment? Who was going to wrap up this concept in a shiny package and send it out into the world?

But there’s more to heimish than coziness (just as I’m sure there was more to hygge than fake sheepskin throws, but I’ll let the Danish lifestyle sites thread that needle). The 1968 book “The Joys of Yiddish” breaks down the nuance: Not only does the word mean informal, cozy or warm, it also refers to “having the friendly characteristics or kind of rapport that exist inside a happy home” and can be defined as “unpretentious, putting on no airs.” The opposite of heimish, he writes, is snobbish, supercilious and charismatic. He finishes the entry with this: Jews put a high value on being heimish. 

So no, you can’t $40 candle your way to heimish (though with the help of Boy Smells I have certainly tried) the way you can with cozy. But every fall when we break out our pumpkin scented candles and thick house slippers and post the picture of Billy Crystal in his aspirational chunky white sweater, it’s not just the physical feeling of coziness we’re trying to achieve, is it? In our pursuit of cozy, are we actually chasing heimish?

The Jewish designer Jonathan Adler, known for his whimsical menorahs and ceramic jars for drugs, has a page in his 2012 book “100 Ways to Happy Chic Your Life” that explains how to have a heimish home.

“Always start with a chic and classique foundation,” he begins, which you have to admit sounds straight from the shtetl. “But then add a dash of humor, a pinch of quirk, a soupcon of folly. Family and friends are more important than objects. But those objects, and how you deal with them, can provide the setting in which to kibitz, dine and decompress with your haimisher menschen — yiddish for the people you feel (insanely) comfortable with. You should never want the meal, the conversation, or the fun to end.”

Despite Adler’s best efforts and a surge of interest into coziness, capitalism hasn’t come for heimish the way it did for hygge — if it had, I might have been able to order some decorations for the heimish speaking engagement in the fluorescent conference room. But as much as I love buying a candle and a new sweater, I kind of hope it doesn’t. Heimish is so much more than all that.

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