The year in Yiddish revivals, with a prologue by Molly Picon

Wow. It's been a year (pretty much to the day) since I revived this blog. I've covered everything from OTD Hasidim to masturbation mussar to the erasure of Jewish Communists from American documentary film. But my focus has always returned to my favorite topic: how we do and don't talk about Yiddish. The very first post I wrote for the blog was about an AP wire story on the 'revival' of Yiddish among college students. It's the story that keeps on giving, and give it did in 2012. Here is a surely incomplete survey of 'revival' stories from 2012.

• Tablet discovers Mendy Cahan doing what he's been doing for decades 

• Later that year Haaretz cracks the same story 

• Cuz 'It’s Yiddish revival time'  in Israel 

• And did you know?? "Programs for Yiddish-lovers are proliferating both inside and outside the academic world in Israel, despite many having written off the language." 

• But can Yiddish be revived among Arab Israelis if they never spoke it in the first place? 

• Don't forget about Canada 

• And this is not quite a revival story, but still working off the revival trope

I could list twenty articles like these to make my point: there is no revival. There is only a Jewish populace deeply confused about its identity and conflicted about the sacrifices it's made in the name of assimilation, Americanization, Zionism and the myth of a unified Jewish monoculture. The revival meme is a way of neutralizing those who would question the value of all those things; it frames their connection to Yiddish as cute, unthreatening, and incapable of maturing. To talk about Yiddish in terms other than its 'revival' is to tread on politically dangerous ground.

If my round-up of articles doesn't make my point, perhaps you'll be more impressed by the beloved pixie diva of Yiddish theater, Molly Picon.

In 1980 Molly Picon appeared on Israeli TV. There's a lot to unpack about her appearance (in which the show's host interviews her in English and she answers in Yiddish) but right now I'll just skip to the part where Molly herself proclaims a Yiddish revival. In 1980.

Around 3 minutes in Molly says that her Israeli hosts, including the Yiddish actor Shmulik Atzmon, are excited about the current Yiddish revival. All over the world, she says, there is a growing interest in Yiddish, especially among young people. They want to know 'Who are we?' and 'What have we lost?'

At Queens College, she says, six hundred students (!) study Yiddish and now in Europe and Israel, too, students want to learn Yiddish.

To which I have to ask, politely, what the hell? What in bloody hell happened between 1980 and today?

Well, for one, there has been an incredibly burst of creativity around traditional Eastern European music. Some call that the 'klezmer revival.'

And what about Yiddish language? The National Yiddish Book Center, established in the early 1980s, has obviously changed the face of Yiddish between then and now, systematically preserving Yiddish materials for future readers. But what about the classes where those readers will be educated? What about the learning? What about providing professional pedagogical resources for the next generations of Yiddish speakers? What about training the next generation of Yiddish teachers?

While there are some (too few) high quality resources for learning (and teaching) Yiddish today, it's nowhere near what you might think it would be for a language whose 'revival' was heralded over 30 years ago on Israeli TV.

More and more, real Yiddish literacy in the United States is in the hands of either academics (and quasi-academics) or the Hasidim who use it as a vernacular. These are the people who either have the resources to learn and use it or have a politico-theological reason for them to retain it as the language of everyday life.

As much as I love Molly Picon, even 600 students do not make a revival, or a revolution. A revival takes political will and institutional power. The day I see a Federation leader get up at the General Assembly and declare the importance of language transmission, the day I see a session devoted to planning for Yiddish language pedagogy at an educational conference, that's the day I will doff my Yiddish revival cap and herald a new age of Akvarious. Without these things-  communal prioritization, resources, a gigantic shift in our cultural conversation around Yiddish-  the much bally-hooed Yiddish revival is nokh vayt (still far off.)





Gawd, I depress myself sometimes.

Radical Camera and Red, White and Blue-washing

This winter the Jewish Museum mounted a terrific exhibit about the Photo League called Radical Camera. The Photo League (1936-1951) was a group of amateur and professional photographers who joined together to teach and exhibit cutting edge photography with a socially conscious point of view.

As the name of the exhibit hints, the Photo League, its members and the work it produced, reflected the progressive/Socialist/Communist currents of the day. Mason Klein's essay in the exhibit catalog argues that viewers should resist easy categorization of the League, and, he says, to generalize about the radical politics of the League is to make the same totalizing mistake of the blacklisting madmen who eventually destroyed it (along with many similar organizations.) He writes:  "To reduce such a vitally boisterous and dynamic association to its earliest iteration [which was more explicitly Marxist] is to echo the mindset of the U.S.attorney general's office, which falsely condemned and ultimately destroyed the Photo League as a subversive organization in 1947."

Fair enough. Art is a messy business and an artists' collective bears little resemblance to a political party. However, there is no question that the League and its members were "informed by a socialist sensibility and advocacy..." [catalog, p. 13].  This made the League no different than any number of magazines, clubs,  and fraternal organizations of this period, all with an over-representation of young Jews, most the sons and daughters of poor Eastern European immigrants.

As you can imagine, I loved the Radical Camera exhibit. The radical history and art of Eastern European Jews (and their children and grandchildren) is an important part of American Jewish history, one that can be appreciated without subscribing to its politics. (Indeed, to presume that investigating, discussing and appreciating the history of Jewish Communists should be taboo, and somehow implies an endorsement of Communism or, kholile, Stalinism, is a childish and willfully malicious manipulation of history for ones own political purposes. But that's another discussion.)

A new documentary has just arrived on the scene, also about the Photo League. The movie is called 'Ordinary Miracles' and I was excited to check it out recently at Quad Cinema here in New York. My excitement quickly turned to rank dismay. For one thing, the word 'Jewish' was mentioned once in the movie, as far as I could tell. How could a subject so richly Jewish as to be featured at the Jewish Museum be portrayed without addressing the Jewishness of its members? The mind boggles.

But that was only the beginning. The politics of the Photo League students and teachers isn't just toned down in Ordinary Miracles, it's almost entirely erased, only to emerge, toward the end of the film, out of nowhere, as a catalyst for the Photo League's prosecution and and ultimate dissolution. A viewer who knew nothing about the history of the Photo League would be baffled as to why the League would be targeted at all.

Instead of exploring the politics of the Photo League (an integral part of the League's approach to documentary photography), director Nina Rosenblum chose to spend large chunks of the narrative (in an already brief movie) on subjects only tangentially related to the story of the League, namely the visit of Lewis Hine to the League's New York headquarters and the military service of various League members during World War II. But why?

It seems to me there are two, complementary explanations, neither of which reflects very well on the film's maker. If you look at Nina Rosenblum's filmography, her previous documentaries include films on, you guessed it, Lewis Hine and soldiers fighting in World War II. Rather than tackle the tough subject of politics, Rosenblum does a cut and paste from her previous work, something we should all be wary of these days.

But there's something else going on in Ordinary Miracles. The director is clearly uncomfortable with the politics of the League, going so far as to erase it almost completely from the film. She focuses on the war time service of League members, and their implied patriotism, as well as using clips of interviews with a few League members who play down the role of politics in the League, decades later.  The effect of these narrative choices is to present a sanitized Photo League bearing little resemblance to the one portrayed in the Jewish Museum's Radical Camera exhibit.

Ordinary Miracles's is so brazen in its distortions as to inspire a genre all its own: Red, White, and Blue-washing.  It's a disingenuous, baffling dishonor to the work of the Photo League and, ironically, a betrayal of the very ideals of truth and documentary integrity at the heart of the Photo League mission.