When Allen Ginsberg famously began his idiosyncratic eulogy of his mother by asking the reader to imagine him “up all night, talking, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles,” he did not pause to explain what exactly this thing called Kaddish was or why he would have been reading it aloud in his mother’s memory. Nor did he need to: there is no Jewish prayer better known to the non-Jewish world than Kaddish, and the concept of saying Kaddish “for” someone has entered the American lexicon of cultural phrases known to all and used freely without the need to translate or explain. Neither Imre Kertesz’s Kaddish for an Unborn Child nor Leon Wieseltier’s 1998 bestseller Kaddish provides a translation or explanation on the dustjacket, for example, the assumption being that anyone cultured enough to want to read either book—and surely not only Jewish readers—would know what the word means and what its use as the title implies about the book’s content. Nor did Leonard Bernstein seem to feel the need for any explanation when he named his third symphony “Kaddish,” and left it at that.