PBS or Heeb? Take This Quiz!!!

Dear PBS,

When your website content is almost indistinguishable from that of Heeb, it's probably time to stop farming out your website work to the unpaid interns.

PBS is promoting its new documentary The Story of the Jews, narrated by Simon Schama. So far, so good. It's the kind of thing my dad would TiVO so we could watch together and I would secretly roll my eyes at how they get everything wrong about Eastern Europe.

In any case, I haven't seen it. And if they want to make it appealing to snobs like me, this is probably not the best way. It's a quiz called How Well Do You Know Your Yiddish. It has 15 questions, testing your knowledge of well known 'Yiddish' words. Unsurprisingly, many of the Yiddish words are actually Yinglish, the 'translations' are mostly appalling, and the whole thing is mainly a quiz of how hard you can cringe through 15 mouse clicks.

The worst part is, it's not much better than Heeb's 2010 Test Your Jew IQ game. Remember that gem of American-Jewish cultural pride?

Know the lyrics to If I Were a Rich Man? Can you distinguish between actual Yiddish words and plain mumbo-jumbo? Heard of any Israeli cities besides Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv? If you’re not feeling nauseous by now, then this is probably the game for you!

Yes, because what self-respecting Jew doesn't feel nauseated by knowing common Yiddish words and Israeli cities??? 

PBS doesn't quite articulate it so clearly, but How Well Do You Know Yiddish quiz has the same self-hating minstrel vibe. Its mish mosh of Yiddish, Yinglish and fake definitions reeks of the same peculiar American Jewish shame.

A little side by side comparison of the games:

PBS:

Futz is not a real Yiddish word. It is Yinglish.

Heeb:

PBS:

The actual expression is 'hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik' and roughly translates to 'stop banging on about it.'

Heeb:

PBS:

Shtik means piece. 

And it just goes on and on...

Honestly, if PBS can't do any better than Heeb, I don't have a lot of hope for mainstream Jewish pop culture. As the well known Yiddish saying goes, 'We're fucked on both ends.'

UPDATE:

PBS has removed the Quiz from its website.

Heebits and Hobbits

The Hobbit was recently translated from English into Yiddish and Heeb is here to tell us about it:

Hey, some people collect stamps; Some people build model railroads; And some people translate epic fantasy series into a language that hasn’t been widely spoken for nearly a century

Herp derp.

As usual, Heeb is about as edgy as a third grade bully.

On the eve of WW II (1939) there were approximately 13 million Yiddish speakers. After the war, that number was drastically reduced, but still numbered in the millions. And today, estimates have the number of Yiddish speakers at a million. It's true, the majority of those Yiddish speakers are some flavor of Haredi (and not the target audience for der Hobbit), nonetheless, they live and breathe and probably own the loft you want to rent in East Williamsburg.

Anyway, there's an interesting story in the transmigration of Hobbit to האביט, but as usual, the clever kids at Heeb can't figure out how to take a story beyond pointing and laughing.  To them, Yiddish is a punchline. I get it. Like bullies everywhere, they hate what's different and threatening to their sense of themselves.

So, you know, fuck them. Let's give the mic to Prof. Jeff Shandler. In his book Adventures in Yiddishland, Shandler notes that moving back and forth between languages (code switching) "constitutes a definitional Jewish activity."

"Since the beginnings of modern Yiddish belles lettres in the mid-nineteenth century, translation practices involving Yiddish-- both as a target language (i.e., translating into Yiddish) and as a source language...-- generate innovating meanings out of code-switching, as they engage new kinds of texts and create new kinds of readers. In particular, translation practices can be seen as exemplary Jewish engagements with modernity-- both expanding the frontiers of Yiddish literacy and presenting it with unprecedented potential for its dissolution."

Maybe you think translating The Hobbit into Yiddish is a waste of time. Heeb seems to think so. But Shandler opens his chapter on translation with a pertinent quote by the great Yiddish literary critic, Shmuel Charney. "One language has never been enough for the Jewish people."  Maybe one Hobbit wasn't enough for us, either. Who am I to judge?

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.