Yiddish Revival in a Bus Station? Oy Gevalt!

Oy Gevalt is right.

Rootless Cosmopolitan special Israeli correspondent Shayna sent this to me. It's a Times of Israel piece about Mendy Cahan's Tel Aviv bus station Yiddish center. (By the way, the article calls it a museum. Is that what we're calling it now? That seems new. And significant. But anyway.)

Yung Yiddish has been the subject of numerous, basically interchangeable, articles in the last few years. Tablet, Haaretz (2008), Haaretz (2012), Eretz, Israel Story (Public Radio). If you don't feel like reading those, you can read my breakdown of the standard Yiddish in Tel Aviv Bus Station narrative here.

I like this story. You get two excitingly hacky tropes for the price of one.Yiddish!Revival! as well as Yiddish!In!A!Bus!Station! What's always funny about these revival stories is that the headlines says revival, but the language of the piece is always so dour, so ahistorical, so indicative of anything but a bright future for Yiddish.

My mother always says that Yiddish is the music of the soul and language of the soul,” said [musician Gal] Klein. “It’s burned into our tradition. It doesn’t matter who we are and how far away we get away from it, it’s always a part of us.” 

But it’s a fading part. In the Diaspora, Yiddish was the glue that held communities together, a shared language and culture. In Israel, there’s no need for that shared identity.
“We’re at a point we have a country and a culture here, so the culture from long ago is a lot less important,” said Klein, who tours around the world with his band Ramzailech, a fusion of ecstatic rock and klezmer. On Tuesday, he played with his other band, the Di Gasn Trio, which means “The Streets” in Yiddish.

"In Israel, there’s no need for that shared identity. 'We’re at a point we have a country and a culture here, so the culture from long ago is a lot less important...'" I mean, I literally LOL-ed. LLOL. I find the total ignorance, and erasure of recent history, to be funny.

For the record, Yiddish didn't just happen to end up occupying the literal margins of the Israeli body politic.The position of Yiddish within Israeli culture and life is highly politicized-- it is a product of history and politics and conscious language planning. You can't really engage with Yiddish in Israel without understanding the context of what you're doing. Or... you could, and then you would get every asinine article ever written about Yiddish in Israel. So, yeah. There you go.

Nearly Lost Language Found By Intrepid Students Again. And Again. And Again.

Nearly lost Yiddish language increasingly popular among Jewish college students

This article from the JNS says that college students are getting in touch with their Ashkenazi heritage through the academic study of Yiddish. (No word on those Yiddish students whose heritage is outside the pale of Ashkenaz.)

You know, I feel like I've seen this somewhere before...

On the bright side, the author had the wisdom to get quotes from serious Yiddish teachers like Agi Legutko and Gennady Estraikh. (Agi and Gennady also happen to be friends of mine. And wonderful teachers.)

Anyway, once again, Yiddish is on the brink of extinction, young people are Columbusing it, and the Jewish institutional world continues to ignore Eastern European culture and history as an obvious point of spiritual renewal.

Ho hum....

A Ghost of Yiddish Revivals Past

I just discovered an interesting magazine called Jewish Quarterly.

Published in London since 1953, The Jewish Quarterly is one of the foremost Jewish literary and cultural journals in the English language. Its spectrum of subjects includes art, criticism, fiction, film, history, Judaism, literature, poetry, philosophy, politics, theatre, the Holocaust and Zionism.

I'd never even heard of the Jewish Quarterly until today, and now I'm wishing they'd put the entire archive on-line. I was flipping through issues from 1958 and found a ton of Yiddish poetry in translation, literary criticism and other socio-cultural pieces of interest.

Of particular interest was a 1958 article by A.A. Roback called 'Conference on Yiddish Studies.'  In it he reports on a Yiddish Studies conference convened at Columbia University in honor of the 50th anniversary of the 1908 Czernowitz Conference.

Roback's two page report on the conference could've been written yesterday, save for the fact that in 1958 the last living attendee at the Czernowitz conference was still around and the second to last (Sholem Asch) has passed on a few months back. 

In order to counter what Roback saw as pessimism around the future of Yiddish, he frames the conference in terms of its resurgence:

The conference itself provided one more proof, if proof were needed, that my hopes for the growth and consolidation of Yiddish are not a figment of the imagination, as some of my readers and critics seem to have made up their minds it was.

In other words, revival renaissance huzzah!

Sigh. 

Of course, we could not insure ourselves against the coming of Hitler, or of Stalin, nor for that matter against the immigration restrictions in our own country. But therein exactly lies the miracle: that despite the holocaust we still have a growing literature in a language that gains in appreciation from year to year. If this appreciation will be coupled with other constructive efforts, it will achieve practical results, for the younger generation will discover new values in, and through, the Yiddish language. [emphasis mine]

Ah yes, the always elusive 'constructive efforts.' It would be another ten years before the first session of the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture would be held by YIVO. Not for lack of interest, but because rarely in modern American history has Yiddish scholarship been seen as valuable or even instrumental in terms of promoting American Jewish identity. And yet! Though it's fought for funding, not only has the YIVO zumer program always been fully subscribed by eager students, it has spawned imitators all over the world to meet demand for high quality Yiddish pedagogy. 

So, rather than speaking of revivals and such, maybe we'd be better off talking about a slow, inexorable progress in the growth of academic Yiddish infrastructure, even as the number of non-Hasidic, native Yiddish speakers in the United States drops rapidly. 

At the end of Roback's review of the conference (in which he laments the infelicitous scheduling of papers, poor coordination of similarly themed presentations and lack of press coverage), he mentions a paper by Judah Joffe called "Metanalysis in Yiddish:

The Dean of Yiddish philology is still very active as the co-editor of the definitive Yiddish dictionary. Let us hope that he will live to see several volumes of this Dictionary in print.

Sigh.

Well, Dr. Joffe lived to see part of the four volumes of Alef published of his Groyser Verterbukh fun der Yiddisher Shprakh.  I wonder if I will live long enough to see the rest of the Groyser Verterbukh published.

Though time, politics and history ain't exactly on the side of Yiddish, Roback closes his article with a hopeful note and a good reminder to all of us:

... the conference proved once more that with an efficient organization a great deal can be achieved. Good intentions are not enough. It took more than two years to prepare the conference.... If we had efficient organizers, not just writers or scholars but enterprising and dynamic men, Jewish culture would soon acquire a new look. The Conference on Yiddish Studies was a good beginning and could serve as a model for other cultural ventures."

This has never been more true than today. I know too many organizations which flounder because the people who should be researching, performing and leading are also responsible for publicity, fund raising and event clean up. There's never been more work to be done for American Yiddish.  We have the people who can do it. What we also need is recognition of the importance of that work and the funds, and skilled support, to actually get it done. 




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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.

Gevalt! Yiddish Is (kind of) Alive in Canada

It's Khanike (Chanuka/Hanukkah) time and you know what that means? Obligatory article about the survival/struggle/revival/renaissance/zombie stagger of Yiddish in North America.

Last year that article was from the AP and called 'Gevalt! U.S. college students lead surprise Yiddish revival.'  The story was picked up all over the place, in newspapers and TV station websites. Khanike and Yiddish 'revival' stories go together like latkes and sour cream, I suppose.

This year we're shaking it up a bit. 'Yiddish Finding a Way to Survive in Canada' appeared this week in the Canadian Globe & Mail newspaper.

I don't have a lot to say about this genre that I haven't said before. Though at least they didn't call it a 'surprise' this year, so that's progress.

Nonetheless, I'm happy to see Kalman Weiser getting props in a national newspaper. He's a wonderful young scholar and, from what I hear, a great teacher. So, right on Kalman! 

And as a yomtov bonus, here's a terrific little clip of him speaking in Yiddish about speaking in Yiddish: 

The guttural tongue of their ancestors

Memes of the Yiddish Atlantis: As stated in the fine print of the Geneva Convention, journalists may not discuss new Yiddish entertainment or Yiddish academic news without invoking at least one meaningless cliche about the language and culture. 

Here's the thing. These little nuggets of common wisdom aren't just filler. They're signals that the writer has nothing to say on the subject and not the smallest bit of curiosity about it. Reciting the memes substitutes for any real context for the story and relieves the writer from the work of making something like a real historical, artistic or aesthetic judgment. After all, that would require actual knowledge of Yiddish language and history and, c'mon, that's just meshugene.

Grapevine: It’s Yiddish revival,  Jerusalem Post

Yiddish culture appears to be enjoying a revival in many parts of the world, including Eastern Europe, where it was stifled for so long; Western Europe, where it all but disappeared; and even Israel, where, under David Ben- Gurion, it was publicly banned.Now it is being taught in Israeli universities and other institutions, and in fact has been for some time.....

[Legendary Yiddish theater artists Mike Burstyn, Shmuel Atzmon and Bar Ilan University President Moshe Kaveh] will be part of strategic planning team proposed by Kaveh, with the aim of advancing Yiddish language and culture within and beyond academia.

Yiddishspiel, the Israeli Yiddish theater, has been in operation since 1987, 25 years. Yung Yidish (the Tel Aviv bus station based Yiddish organization run by Mendy Cahan) has been around for almost 20 years. What was arguably the most important Yiddish literary journal of the second half of the twentieth century, di goldene keyt, was published from Israel until 1995. The State of Israel is, and has been for decades, an important center of Yiddish culture and publishing. The new (and really interesting) partnership at Bar Ilan and the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies is part of that long history. Why are we not allowed to recognize it as such?

Making Yiddish Theatre Matter in 2012, TDF Stages: a Theatre Magazine

From a review of the Folksbiene's new mainstage production, The Golden Land:

Although American Jews are arguably more assimilated than ever before, Yiddish—and by extension Yiddish culture—is enjoying a bit of a renaissance. Young Jews are increasingly studying the guttural tongue of their ancestors and seeking out live Yiddish entertainment in an attempt to reconnect with their immigrant heritage.

Just. Ugh. Guttural tongue? Really?

Bonus points, though, for working in a bunch of our other favorite memes. This includes the passive (aggressive) invocation of unspecified 'critics,' the ones who think anyone who does anything with Yiddish is fighting a losing battle rather than, oh, fulfilling an artistic mission or trying to make a buck. 

Yet Mlotek admits that some critics think he’s fighting a losing battle trying to keep a dying language and culture alive. “I have that argument all the time,” he says. “It’s no longer the lingua franca of American Jews, so what’s the point? The answer is simple: It’s not about reviving something that was popular once upon a time. It’s about bringing this culture to new audiences in a way that they can appreciate.

 Joe Berger would be proud.

נישט אהין און נישט אהער

Nisht ahin un nisht aher... neither here nor there


Back before he was writing the Letter from China for the New Yorker, Yiddish-surname-having journalist Evan Osnos was churning out his own version of the Yiddish Revival article. His was in 2002, for the Chicago Tribune. 


In contrast, Soviet Premier Nikita "mistakes were made, Yiddish poets were murdered" Khrushchev was firmly against a Yiddish revival.


This Sunday, February 26, a unique program at the Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center. Theater director Moshe Yassur will speak in Yiddish on "The Paradox of Yiddish Theater in Romania Today".

Yassur for many years directed the Bucharest Yiddish Theater in the 1990s and 2000s.

In addition, Maida Feingold will sing Yiddish songs. 

Sunday, February 26th  2012   1: 30 PM at 

The Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center

3301 Bainbridge Avenue, Bronx NYC   1 block from Montefiore Hospital

information:  917-930-0295

If you're closer to Dnepropetrovsk than you are to the Bronxopetrovsk, then be sure to check out the incomparable Psoy Korolenko.

But if you're somewhere between the Bronx and Dnepropetrovsk, then you may be interested in this fascinating new theater piece about the Russian-Jewish experience in the United States:

The Lost & Found Project presents ДOROGA, an interactive play that explores personal family stories about the Russian-Jewish immigrant experience through a series of dramatic snapshots and a dialogue between the past and the present.

Performance dates:  

March 8th, 8:00PM --PREMIERE@ JCC in Manhattan Tickets 

March 14-18th, 8:00PM and Sat & Sun Matinees- 3:00PM@ The Gene Frankel Theatre Tickets

The Lost & Found Project is an experimental theatre troupe featuring Russian-Jewish actors born in the 70s-80s in the former Soviet Union, who immigrated to the United States with their families. Through the process of investigation into personal family histories, weaving together family narratives, legends and personal stories, a play emerged.  

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.

Straw Man

As noted in my previous post, the theme of Yiddish!Revival! is a journalistic evergreen, no matter how long the so-called revival has been going or how often the same article is written.

Any 'revival' is contingent upon death. The phoenix isnt reborn until he has become ash. Thus Yiddish!Revival! articles must invoke, to some degree, the death of Yiddish, whether by Holocaust, by assimilation or by simple neglect.

For some writers, however, invoking Yiddish's death, or futility, becomes more than just a perfunctory genre element, but a theme all its own. The most mundane story can be transformed into a referendum on the legitimacy of Yiddish merely by employing a false or disingenuous counterpoint, otherwise known as a straw man argument.

What's a straw man argument? For instance, if a man (or woman) tells me that Feminism is irrelevant because all feminists hate pornography, or all feminists do this or believe that.  My actual, feminist, opinion on the subject is irrelevant, to say the least. At that point I know we're not having a conversation or even a debate. I'm merely serving as target practice for his (or her) wisdom. A straw man argument signals both a lack of interest in a subject and, often enough, lurking hostility.

When it comes to Yiddish, straw man arguments often include (but are not limited to) the propositions that 1. Yiddish can never be revived as a vernacular  and, relatedly 2. Yiddish culture is a futile or quixotic pursuit.


I don't know any Yiddishist, no matter how hardcore (and I know the hardest of the hardcore), who claims his efforts will, or are intended to, revive Yiddish as a vernacular among a significant portion of the Jewish population. And I've never met a Jewish musician who spent any time worrying about whether or not his/her efforts could replicate the vibrant Jewish culture lost in the machinery of Americanization. The musicians I know are too busy recording, jamming, writing, and sometimes even practicing, to waste time worrying. 


The Yiddishists I know 'do' Yiddish for the pleasure of speaking the language and for the richness it brings to their lives and to their communities. Not to convert the masses to Yiddish, not to diminish Hebrew, not to return everyone to the muddy streets of Pinsk.


And yet I find an odious 'on the other hand' too often injected into stories about the vibrant, forward looking world of Yiddish arts and culture. As a result, otherwise optimistic narratives acquire a musty, lugubrious tone and an innuendo of failure whispers behind what should be considered success stories. A few examples:

"It would be misleading to suggest that the crowd of 25 that listened to Mr. Levitt the other day was as fervent as a mosh pit. With all those illnesses, there was a weary, fatalistic air about the room..."(Lifting Spirits with Music Passed Down Through the Generations, Joseph Berger, New York Times, 11/30/2010)

"To some the enterprise could seem pointlessly nostalgic, since Yiddish is flourishing only among the Hasidim, for whom it is the lingua franca, and virtually vanishing elsewhere with the passing of Jews who came to the United States from Poland and Russia before and after World War II.... The resurgence of klezmer gives everyone a sliver of hope." (No Need to Kvetch, Yiddish Lives On in Catskills, Joseph Berger, New York Times, 11/25/2010)

"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."  (For Yiddish, a New But Smaller Domain, Joseph Berger, 10/11/1987)

"The survival of Yiddish in America is an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand story. Yiddish, once the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe, is undoubtedly moribund, with its last full-throated speakers, Holocaust survivors, now well into their 80s and 90s. (A smattering of their children speak it through sheer willpower whenever they can buttonhole a comprehending ear, but some, like this writer, grew up nagging parents to speak English and regrettably saw their first language wither.)" (Shop Speaking Tevye's Language Needs Rich Man's Aid, Joseph Berger, 8/25/2010

In each of these articles the 'other side of the story' only serves to undermine its subjects. Dave Levitt has no interest in causing senior citizens to mosh. David Roskies wouldn't claim to be interested in sparking a full scale revival of Yiddish as a vernacular. And the woes of the CYCO bookstore owe less to the 'death of yiddish' than to the mass digitization of Yiddish literature. (No one wants to pay if they can get it for free, a problem shared by the music, motion picture and television industries.)

But this straw man is impervious to facts and, to my own great dismay, it observes no respectful distance in the darkest times.

Last week we lost a woman who was, among her many achievements, at the heart of modern Yiddish music, Adrienne Cooper. Amid the grief of the community she helped create, it was a not-insignificant comfort to see Adrienne's life recognized with an obituary in one of the most influential newspapers in the world, the New York Times. But even in this, her unparalleled achievements could not be allowed to stand unchallenged:

Though the movement Ms. Cooper helped start in the 1970s and ’80s was often described as a Yiddish revival, less sentimental observers acknowledged that a true revival of the spoken language among secular Jews was unlikely, given that people who had learned it in their homes, like Holocaust survivors and children of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants, were dying out. But because of the teaching and organizational work of Ms. Cooper and a handful of others, klezmer has become a popular current of the music mainstream and Yiddish courses are given at scores of colleges.(Adrienne Cooper, Yiddish Singer, Dies at 65, Joseph Berger, 12/28/2011) 

And that's the third paragraph.


Who are these 'less sentimental observers'? Who are these people who cannot encounter living, breathing Yiddish culture without also cursing it by passive-aggressive clap trap? Who on earth, I ask, would come to praise an irreplaceable cultural icon by calling her life's work "quixotic"?

Inserting these dour straw men isn't a matter of good journalism. After all, the articles cited above are soft, human interest pieces ostensibly intended to celebrate their subjects. Any 'controversy' therein is a projection of the author.

If I may take the liberty (and I'm sure I'll hear from those who feel I cannot), I think I can safely say that for those of us who engage with Yiddish culture in some sort of meaningful, creative way, what we want is to have our projects taken seriously by the Jewish community. We want resources and respect for projects which are successful on their own terms. We want to have our music, our play groups, our institutions, our lives' work judged, if they must be judged, on their own merits, not against some bullshit  'common wisdom' which isn't so wise, or so common.

But when you frame it as Berger does with such relish, Yiddish culture today is a 'wistful' (a favorite word of his) failure. 


But whose failure is it? Is it ours? Or is it the failure of the author who writes that he, himself, regrets nagging his Holocaust survivor parents to speak English and who wishes he hadn't let his first language, Yiddish, 'wither away'. 

With friends like these, Yiddish needs no enemies.

Oy Gevalt! Yiddish is definitely alive. Or dead. Or in purgatory. Or hiding in Switzerland for tax purposes.

Greetings, theoretical readers. Long time no blog, eh? Though I resolved to stay away, a slew of recent news stories about Yiddish has dragged me back to the blog o'sphere.

You probably saw this story, right? Either your friends and family emailed it you. Or a million people innocently posted it on your Facebook wall, saying 'hey, this made me think of you!' Which is sweet and I'm always happier when my friends think of me than when they've forgotten me. However.

The story, titled 'Gevalt! U.S. college students lead surprise Yiddish revival,' was an AP wire piece that showed up in an astonishing variety of places, including TV station websites, the New York Times and Salon. There's nothing that's actually new, or news, in the story, but I guess it was Khanike time and everyone is looking for sentimental, feel-good Jewish 'content' like the kind bubbe and zeyde used to consume back in the day.

It opens like this:

A group of American college students stands in a semicircle, clapping and hopping on one foot as they sing in Yiddish: "Az der rebe zingt, Zingen ale khsidim!"

"When the rebbe dances, so do all the Hasidim," the lyrics go.

Like any well-written piece of journalism, the opening two paragraphs signal where this ship is heading. The first image is endearingly unthreatening. College students standing in a circle, singing and clapping. Awwwww. Singing and clapping is cute. College students speaking Yiddish is cute. Yiddish is so gosh darn CUTE!

The cuteness is smudged a bit if you know that 'Az der rebe' is not a simple khasidic folksong but a hostile parody of one. It's an anti-khasidic/misnagdish send-up of the mindless devotion of the khasidim to their various rebbeim. Whatever he does, they do. Also, the author mistranslates even this elementary Yiddish lyric. 'Az der rebe zingt' means 'when the rebbe sings' not 'when the rebbe dances.'

Ahem. Don't get me wrong. Song and music are important pedagogical tools for learning a language and I recall how effective, and fun, it was to learn Yiddish songs when I was a student at Brandeis. Nonetheless, the singing and clapping students are more than a pedagogical stage, they are part of a set of inviolable tropes for talking about Yiddish, of which the cuteness of Yiddish is just one.

The revival of Yiddish by students (or by anyone) is another. For example, way back in 1987 Joseph Berger wrote one of these non-stories called 'For Yiddish, a New But Smaller Domain. In it, he noted that Yiddish was experiencing an 'academic revival' and that "There are now 60 college campuses offering Yiddish, where 25 years ago there were five." And that was 24 years ago.

Gevald, you say, this time for real. How many times can the patient be revived?

Good question. There's this. And this. And this. And hey, even this. And what's cuter than college students learning Yiddish? College students speaking it with the elderly!

You'd think any editor with two seconds of access to the googles would hesitate to assign (or buy) an article on such a hackneyed non-theme. But then we wouldn't have the Canadian answer to the AP's Gevald article, 'Yiddish Lives on Canadian Campuses.' Author Josh Dehaas writes "Today, Yiddish contends with the fact that its keepers are mainly Bubbes and Zeydes of the diaspora, who may not be around much longer." This is flat out wrong, but for argument's sake, we'll listen a bit further.

According to Statistics Canada, between 2001 and 2006, the number of Yiddish speakers declined from 37,010 to 27,605 nationally. More than a third of those who remained—9,305—were over 75 years-old. Only 1,345 were under age five.

Which is it? Are grandparents the keepers of Yiddish? *Or* are only a third of Canadian Yiddish speakers over 75, according to Statistics Canada (which almost certainly undercounts a significant source of Yiddish speakers under the age of 18, the Canadian Hasidic population.) Is the future of Yiddish being passed from a mythical generation of ever and always elderly speakers to eager young university students enrolled in an astonishing, or not astonishing, expanding or not expanding, selection of academic university courses?

Is this a revival or a just a 'bisl resurgence?'

Obviously, I'd say none of the above, with the additional caveat that the phrase 'a bisl resurgence' is not safe for minors or those with compromised immune systems.

There is no resurgence, no revival, no renaissance, no renewal, no retrenchment, no bringing back from the dead, no zombie Sholem Aleykhem. Genug. Shoyn. I've said it before, more eloquently, in an op-ed I wrote for the Forward last year, The Revival is Over, Let's Talk Continuity.

Sure, to some extent journalism is shaped by deadlines and too often relies on cliches and recycling common wisdom. But after seeing the same story, and the same 'memes' repeated about Yiddish, over and over, decade after decade, it's clear that there are things one can say about Yiddish and things one cannot. And one of the things you can say is that Yiddish is being revived. Doesn't matter that someone else said it five minutes ago, five months ago or 24 years ago.

When you frame popular interest and engagement with Yiddish as a 'revival' you are, ironically, declaring that Yiddish will never move past the most elementary and superficial level of general Jewish interest. Oy! Bubbe! See Dick and Jane Learn Yiddish! Yiddish is good for a semester or two, to learn a few curses or songs, that's pretty much it. Nothing has been disturbed in the American Jewish status quo. Monolingualism still rules. No calls for more serious support or investment in Yiddish are presented or considered. The deep reasons why so many Jews (and non-Jews) are seeking out Yiddish are presented as a side-note, if at all.

Indeed, there's a whole set of things one cannot say in an article about Yiddish:

Yiddish deserves substantial financial support from the Jewish community.

Jewish language literacy is a life or death matter for the Jewish community and as such both Yiddish and Hebrew should be taught, with the same seriousness and respect, in Jewish day schools.

A Diaspora-based Jewish identity is just as legitimate as a Jewish identity rooted in Zionism or anti-Zionism.

Yiddish is essential to the lives and educations of millions of Jews around the world because it is their yerushe (inheritance). Without access to Yiddish, Jews of Ashkenazi descent are missing something absolutely vital to their identity as Jews and as global citizens. Ashkenaz, not Israel, holds the coordinates for the recent history of millions of American Jews. To denigrate that history, to reduce it to a fuzzy, abashed footnote, is to diminish our families, our histories and ourselves.

The anti-Yiddish cultural narrative is wide and deep. You can see it at work even in stories (like these latest ones) which purport to celebrate the tenacity of the Yiddish language. Despite the good will no doubt behind them, the cliches they recycle are toxic. The finished product, posted and reposted endlessly, is another drop in the poisonous cultural conversation around Yiddish.

American Jews (and Ashkenazi Jews around the world) need Yiddish. They need to know who they are and where they came from and they need to learn it at home, not on the street, where the kids are all high on shelilat ha-golah (negation of the diaspora.)

In 1916 a man named Robert Hess was a teacher at a Folkshule (a non-religious Jewish school associated with labor zionism) in Milwaukee. The enrollment of the school had exploded to the point where they had outgrown their rooms in the local settlement house and had to waitlist many would-be students. So, Hess and his school petitioned the local school board to have use of a public school building on the weekend. In essence, Hess was saying all the forbidden things I mentioned above: Yiddish is not a novelty but a serious language with a serious literature and history. It should be taught. It is important to the Jewish identity of American Jewish youth. It deserves resources.

Though the school board agreed to allow the weekend use of the school, the Folkshule request was met with violent protest. That protest came entirely from the established Jewish community. At bottom, it flowed from a belief that Yiddish was a zhargon, it was ugly and uncivilized and ultimately, un-American. Robert Hess, the teacher from the Milwaukee Folkshule, wrote about the controversy and this is from the conclusion of his piece:

"... we say, and we say it boldly but sincerely, that you cannot build either healthy Jews or Jewesses unless you permeate the youth with a healthy self-respect, and that you cannot hope to make men or women respect themselves unless you tell them who and what they are and from whom and from what they originate, who their people were, what their language is and tell them something of the history of their past. Ludicrous though it may seem, it is none the less the fact that our youths or at least many of them are under the impression that all Jews are either the proverbial peddler or rag-picker, and you cannot hope to have them think otherwise unless you teach them otherwise."

So, yes, let's celebrate the initiative of young people reclaiming the yerushe that belongs to them. And after that we can begin a new communal conversation about why and to what end Yiddish has been pushed to the margins and how a decades long 'revival' is really the kind of continuity the Jewish community says it is dedicated to supporting.