Joseph Berger to Lecture on Legendary Yiddish Author Chaim Grade at the National Yiddish Book Center

Joseph Berger will be lecturing on legendary Yiddish author Chaim Grade at a National Yiddish Book Center weekend course. The program is called Sabbath Days and Extinguished Stars.


Sabbath Days and Extinguished Stars: The Life and Work of Chaim Grade
A weekend course at the Yiddish Book Center with
Justin Cammy, David Fishman, and Joseph Berger


Friday, April 20, 2012 - Sunday, April 22, 2012 
$260 for members and $300 for non-members

Register here.

Forwards

Hey! I'm on the virtual pages of the Yiddish Forward. Pretty cool, huh? The English Forward also gave this blog a nice shout out the other day.

Yiddisher Than Thou

Have you seen this? 'Mother Tongue: A passionate, crusading Yiddisher tries to keep the Eastern European language alive in the cosmopolitan center of the Jewish state', appeared in Tablet magazine on January 12th. It's about the inimitable Mendy Cahan, he of the crooning and the Tel Aviv bus station, and the whole Yiddish against all odds in Israel thing.


Let's unpack, shall we?


Previous discussions of journalism about Yiddish (especially that of Joseph Berger) are useful here to show how vocabulary, style and rhetorical devices tell a story of their own, one that may or may not be in tune with that told on the surface of the text.


The baffling appearance of the word Yiddisher is the first thing to give us pause. Yiddisher? Is the author by any chance referring to Mendy's membership in a Jewish, anti-fascist street gang of 1930s London? Because I thought he wasn't talking about that anymore.


Or is this the quality of being more Yiddish than the next guy? Well, Mendy probably is more Yiddish than you, more Yiddish than I, more Yiddish than the mohel at Max Weinreich's bris. Mendy isn't Yiddisher, he's Yiddish-est.


Oh. Wait. Not Yiddish-est, but Yiddishist, I think, is the word we were looking for. A person for whom the use of Yiddish has both personal and political valence. Why did Tablet have to make up a word when there was a perfectly good, widely used term already available. But ok. Moving on.


The text of Mother Tongue confirms the existence of yet another category of bankrupt journalistic cliches about Yiddish. This one presents the hapless Yiddish administrator, one whose viability as a leader is as dubious as the half dead, mish-mosh creole he's single handedly reviving. 


We've seen this trope before, in Joseph Berger's story about CYCO, two summers ago. This is how Berger describes Hy Wolfe, director of CYCO:

Mr. Wolfe shamelessly admits that he is praying for a white knight to offer him free space. He wouldn’t object if that savior demanded his head in the deal. 

“I’m the wrong person for this job,” Mr. Wolfe admitted. “They need someone who knows what he’s doing on a computer. I can’t type. I only know Yiddish literature.”

Now take a look at how Daniella Cheslow characterizes Mendy:

[Mendy is] the first to concede he is not the best administrator: He owes roughly $40,000 to city hall for overdue property taxes, he smokes Camel cigarettes inside his library of 40,000 old books, and his meager budget provides the collection with no protection from Tel Aviv’s oppressive summer humidity.

Well, when you put it that way, let me get out my checkbook!

But seriously, reading these articles, what funder wouldn't be moved to pour money into Yiddish, the most quixotic of fool's errands?


From Berger: "Things have gotten so dire that Mr. Wolfe’s companion in the quixotic hunt for a new home is Shane Baker, a 41-year-old Episcopalian from Missouri who fell in love with Yiddish and leads a sister organization that stages folk-singing coffeehouses." 


From Cheslow: "But Cahan, who speaks Hebrew and English as well, also bears a quixotic passion for fully living in the half-dead language he loves."


Quixotic shmixotic. You gotta love a guy who sees the glass is half alive; a Yiddish optimist, if you will.


Mendy Cahan, son of Vishnitz hasidim, is a Belgian-Israeli song and dance man, proprietor of the world's only (I think) bus station based Yiddish center, Yung Yiddish, and all around Yiddish force of nature. Mendy is a one of kind talent who really does it all, poetry, performance, art, community organizing. I've had the pleasure of meeting him a handful of times when he was in New York, finding him to be as charming as you would imagine a man who writes and performs his own Yiddish translations of Jacques Brel. In a word, SWOON!


As Cheslow points out, Mendy has been organizing/collecting Yiddish books since 1990. His organization, Yung Yiddish, isn't just a repository of Yiddish books. Among many other things, it hosts a rocking klezmer melave malke in Jerusalem. And Mendy's Yung Yiddish Purim shpil was, in the words of a Jerusalem based friend of mine, 'off da hook.' 


Yes, Yung Yiddish is, and has been for years, on the edge of financial peril. At the same time, it is, and has been for 20 years or so, a dynamic source of creativity and fellowship in the Israeli Yiddish scene. 

Now, wait, before you get excited about somebody, anybody having some modicum of success in promoting and teaching Yiddish, remember it's our duty to remind them of their failure to achieve a wildly unrealistic goal they never set for themselves:

From Berger: "On a recent afternoon in a Riverside Park playground, a slender, dark-haired man was introducing his 2-year-old boy to hopscotch. The scene was classic American father and son, except that they were speaking Yiddish. The man, David G. Roskies, who teaches Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, has no illusions that he and the sprinkling of other Americans who are raising their children in this Jewish vernacular are sparking any major revival." 

From Cheslow: "For all the recent enthusiasm in Israel for Yiddish, however, its biggest champions acknowledge that reviving the language is an ongoing struggle. The generation of people who speak it as a mother tongue is aging." 

What is the point of this story? Is it to tell the story of Mendy Cahan and a Yiddish 'revival' in Israel? Because that story has been written many times. As in the United States, it can seem that Yiddish in Israel is only a legitimate subject of journalism when framed as 'dead' or 'reviving.' As I pointed out before, the narrowness of the Yiddish!Revival! narrative keeps the conversation about Yiddish at the stingiest level of superficiality, ever and always rehearsing the salient plot points of Yiddish's demise and resurgence; in this case, the official apparatus to suppress Yiddish in Israel, the vigilante violence against Yiddish speakers, the patronizing or vulgar voice in which Yiddish is invoked in Israeli popular culture, if at all. 


All of these things are true and and only partially true. For example, (according to Joshua Fishman) from the 1950s to the 1970s the publication of Yiddish books in Israel increased by 500%.  At the same time, the number of books published in Yiddish far exceeded the number published in other world languages. In 1970, 54 Yiddish books were published in Israel but only 8 in French and 6 in German. In fact, the world center of Yiddish publishing had shifted to the state of Israel. Not a revival of Yiddish as a vernacular, ober s'iz oykhet nisht keyn kleynikayt.


The position of Yiddish in Israel is a lot more complicated than toggling between 'alive-ish' and 'dead-ish.' Cheslow writes that Mendy is "determined to save the language from extinction in the Jewish state..."Though it's not as sexy, the future of any minority language lies not with any single person or project but with the emergence of a cultural will to preserve and institutional support to transmit. Mendy is a tremendous asset to the Yiddish community in Israel, but he cannot 'save' Yiddish. And I don't really think that's his goal. I suspect Mendy persists in his project for the same reason anyone is drawn to expressing themselves in Yiddish: it's a vital part of who he is. Within Yiddish the fragments of a modern identity are brought into conversation: French cabaret crooner, Hasidic bokher, twenty first century Israeli. Yung Yidish is as much a personal expression of one man's rooted cosmopolitanism as it a 'crusade' to save Yiddish.


What would happen if journalists were not allowed to talk about reviving, saving, or tekhias hameysim when it came to Yiddish. What if Yiddish had to be confronted as more than "a language often confined to old folk songs?" Unfortunately, most journalists writing about Yiddish don't know anything about Yiddish and kal v'khoymer, they don't know any Yiddish. Without any kind of grounding in the language and culture it is near impossible to go further. Cheslow can refer to Mendy's band Mendy Cahan and der Yiddish Express, but she can't offer any insights into his choice of songs, his interpretation, the possible resonances found in his Yiddish version of Ne Me Quitte Pas. 

Though these articles are written with the best of intentions and seek to bring attention to worthy organizations desperate for financial help, it is clear the journalists writing them (and the editors editing them) cannot (or will not) go deeper than the confines of the Yiddish!Revival! narrative. And, as demonstrated earlier, this narrative is not a friendly one. The revival narrative is patronizing and reinforces the very cliches about Yiddish which are used to marginalize and delegitimize it. Articles like Mother Tongue keep people talking about Yiddish, but that conversation, in my opinion, is going nowhere, fast.

Shane Bertram Baker via the magic of Vaudephone!

Check out this fantastic clip of Shane Baker performing astounding feats of mesmerism most foul.

If you like that (and even if you don't) you should see Shane live, this February 18-19, as he brings his show, The Big Bupkis! A Complete Gentile's Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville, to the JCC in Manhattan. 


But don't take my word for it. Read this totally impartial profile of Shane from a major national newspaper.

Men Act, Women Watch John Berger Talk About Painting

It's art history. It's Marxism. It's feminism. It's cultural criticism. With just a dash of fun, ironic fonts. This is John Berger's legendary BBC documentary, Ways of Seeing.

If In Search Of created a generation of paranormalists, Ways of Seeing launched the senior theses of a thousand wannabe radical art historians.

(This is the first of four pwogwams)

Tantshoyz Yiddish Dance Party, January 25th

Yiddish Party People! Tantshoyz is the best. Tantsyhoyz is da bomb. Tantshoyz will make your thighs burn for the next three days. I've said it before and I'll say it again, you make me feel like Yiddish dancin'.

Come out to the East Sixth Street Community Synagogue on Wednesday, January 25th at 8 pm.  Live band, live dancing, live booze. You got something better to do?

ס'קומט באלד אן

Two upcoming Yiddish events not to be missed:



This Thursday, a rare New York appearance by two men on the cutting edge of jumpsuit and beard technology, brothers by a different mother and father, Daniel Kahn (Detroit, Berlin) and Psoy Korolenko (Moscow, Outer Space).



At the JCC of Manhattan, Thursday January 12, at 8:00 pm. $20.*

And Sunday, January 29th at 1:30 pm at the Sholem Aleichem Center in the Bronx, California based operatic bass, Anthony Russell, performing the repertoire of Yiddish legend Sidor Belarsky. Belarsky is probably best known to the movie going public through the use of his version of Dem Milner's Trern in the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man.







*I may or may not be in the back pouring vodka shots.

Is This the Infamous Mussar Shmooze All the OTD Blogs Warned Me About?

This guy wants to warn us about the khilul hashem of masturbation. He delivers his shmooze with a deeply disconcerting sangfroid. Maybe that's how they get you. I mean, how do you respond to that? I'd stop, wouldn't you?


Also, once a week?  

Rootless Cosmopolitan, Born in the Final Days of Cut and Paste Publishing

In late 2002 I got some news from the ed. board of a magazine called 'Heeb'. My angry letter to the editor was going to be published in their next issue. However, the letter would be edited down to a shadow of its enraged glory. Well, rage that beautiful can't be locked away for long. I conceived of a vehicle for my angry 'Heeb' letter, as well as my angry rants, angry lists and angry doodles. Rootless Cosmopolitan, a 'zine about Roots and Culture (yes, I was dating a reggae musician at the time) was born. Full text of the angry letter which started it all is on the front page.

Get On My Bookshelf!

Hey, you guys learned about Dibbuk Boxes in Hebrew school, right? You know... haunted Jewish wineboxes. (Well, we didn't call it a haunted Jewish winebox in Hebrew school. We called it a haunted 'usish' winebox, but whatevs.) The Dibbuk Box contains mysterious tschotshkes and a couple bottles of liquor your parents got as housewarming presents in 1977.

And every time it's opened it it will fuck. shit. up.   ptoo ptoo ptoo.

OK, you remember all the words to Hatikvah and you don't remember your Dibbuk Box lessons? For shame. Good thing I'll be reviewing that shizz for the Forward.

A series of eerie events slowly unfolds when a wine cabinet sells at an estate sale in Oregon. It is soon sold and resold on eBay’s Internet auction, and each new owner becomes desperate to get rid of the box along with the health problems, accidents, or death they claim came with it.     Jason Haxton, the curator of a medical museum in a small Missouri town, learns of the mysterious cabinet and is intrigued by it as an artifact to be studied and researched. He places a bid on eBay and soon finds himself the proud owner of the dibbuk box. But as he carefully investigates and records everything he can about this unusual item said to be possessed by a Jewish spirit, Haxton discovers far more than he bargained for. In this true account, a dark story comes to light—a story that began at the time of the Holocaust and seems to have come full circle.

And here's something I won't be reviewing on account of it being edited by two of my favorite professors of all things Yid-ish, Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry, so I'm a little biased.  But take it from an impartial observer, you should read Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business and/or assign it for your Jewish studies classes. Pre-order now!!!