The Future of New Jewish Culture: Panelists Speak Up

Hey Peeps! Starting Tuesday, April 17th, the people at Speakers' Lab are going to be posting statements by the panelists of the upcoming Now What: The Future of New Jewish Culture event. You can get 'em here and at the Forward's Arty Semite blog. I hope you'll check in each week and get some interesting convo going!

Now What? The Future of New Jewish Culture

There's a great project coming from our friends at the Posen Foundation. It's called Speakers' Lab and the first Speakers' Lab event is a 'town hall' conversation about new Jewish culture on May 15th.

But Speakers' Lab isn't just about events. They've got a super snazzy website with artist interviews, panelist statements and other really cool content. Call me totally biased and partial just because I'm one of the panelists, but I'm really diggin' it.

Here's their description of the event:

Ten years ago, a new generation of young, proud, irreverent Jewish artists and writers began redefining American Jewish identity. The movement was called New Jewish Culture, and it created an explosion of music, literature and art that pushed the boundaries of American Jewish identity. 

But after recent foldings of major New Jewish Culture enterprises, the culture is at a crossroads. What is its future? What can emerging Jewish artists expect from the next decade? Join us on May 15th at 7pm at the 14th Street Y for a moderated town hall event with nine panelists at the forefront of New Jewish Culture. Raise concerns. Ask questions. Join the conversation. 

Free and open to the public. Reserve a ticket now!

These are the cupcakes of our affliction

Something happens to me when I go shopping for food on peysakh. It's like I enter a dream where kosher for passover baby powder is a rational thing and I wonder if I'll eat anything for the next week. And then I go home and eat a whole bunch of chicken salad on matze crackers and stop worrying about it.

Som

Lord knows you'll want a refund once you taste their cup "cakes"

$7.99

For the pious family looking for a baby's butt kosher enough to eat from

Is it neros or neronim? Stop messing with my head?

Jet Setting

Hey! You guys know how much I love Reboot/Stereophonic/Idelsohn Society, right?

So, I was delighted to be a guest on Beyond the Pale, a terrific radio program on WBAI, to talk about the newest IS project, Songs of the Jewish-American Jet Set. I was joined by co-guest, the effervescent, and youthful, Ariel Federow, with the incomparable Jenny Romaine conducting the whole shebang.

We had great time in the studio, listening to tracks from the CD as well as related tunes. There's some So Called, some Mickey Katz and a couple of fun surprises.

We also dug into questions of mystification, nostalgia and the uses of material culture. You should definitely give it a listen. Beyond the Pale podcast here! (And iTunes downloads here)

Dual Language Public Schools: an upcoming conference sponsored by the Berman Jewish Policy Archive

As some of you probably know, next to Makeup Alley, BJPA is my absolute favorite internet resource. If I've spouted a piquant anecdote, a piece of historical trivia, a statistic about the apathy of Jewish Americans, you can bet it probably came from the massive holdings of BJPA.

Tomorrow (Monday) they're having a sure-to-be fascinating conference about dual language public schools. Over at the BJPA blog, the ever-thoughtful Seth Chalmer excerpted some relevant articles. He's got one on the crisis of Jewish language illiteracy, by Leon Wieseltier. And another by conference participant Adam Gaynor, about the potential for a multicultural approach to bring Jewish (and non-Jewish) students into frequent, and deeper, contact with Jewish content.

I wrote a brief response to Seth's post. Here's part of it:

There was a time when Jewish leaders pushed very hard to have modern Hebrew taught in American public schools. You can read the fascinating story in the work of historian Jonathan Krasner. From the turn of the century up to the immediate post-war era, Samson Benderly and his disciples fought to create an American infrastructure for Tarbut Ivrit (Hebrew Culture.) This included getting Hebrew accepted in American public schools. And, as Krasner notes, it was almost a complete failure. For complex reasons, American Jews rejected modern Hebrew, both as a public school option, and, on the larger scale, as noted by Wieseltier. 

The failure of Benderly and his followers to introduce Tarbut Ivrit into schools brings up an important question: if Jewish content is to be introduced into mainstream spaces, *whose* Jewish culture will be represented? One of the reasons for the failure of Benderly's project is that modern Hebrew had precious little relevance to Yiddish speaking immigrants and their children. 

Benderly's program was quite explicit in its ideology. It was not the Hebrew of Torah and prayer that would be taught, rather, the modern Hebrew of (then) Palestine. The plan was not just to make American Jews bi-lingual, but bi-cultural, with Palestine supplying a new mode of Jewish life in America, in the spirit of Ahad Ha'Am. This was obviously in conflict with the needs and concerns of the average American Jew who was, at most, a passive supporter of the Zionist project.  

Today, the ideology behind American Jewish educational initiatives is often much more obscure. "Jewish content" sounds nice in the context of multiculturalism, but, I ask, whose content? For example, what are the chances that I, a Yiddish identified modern Jew, would see anything that represented easten European life (which Gaynor omits from his article entirely) as more than the tired tropes of oppression and darkness? What are the chances that I would hear any Hebrew in other than the now standard modern Israeli pronunciation? 

The assumption that there is a monolithic Jewish culture is, in part, a legacy of Benderly and his followers who were quite clear about the way that American Jews would look to modern Hebrew as the future of American Jewish life. However, today, even more than at the turn of the century, the assumption of monolithic Jewish culture (and language) hinders real educational innovation.

What do you think about the state of Jewish literacy? Do you think there's a crisis? Do you think the answer lies in the public sphere or in a revisioning of the Jewish school experience?

Dybbuk Revival

My review of the new book, The Dibbuk Box, is up at the Forward's Arty Semite Blog.

There's still time to register for the Yiddish Farm Summer Immersion 2012

The deadline for registering for Yiddish Farm Summer has been extended. Get yourself over to Yiddish Farm and apply now!

Yiddish Farm:

A unique chance to spend the summer in a pluralistic, Yiddish-speaking community. Participants spend their days studying Yiddish language, literature and theater as well as working the land. 

What are you waiting for?

From Cleveland to the New York Times

You guys know about Bert Stratton and Cleveland's own Yiddishe Cup Band, right? But Bert isn't just a talented musician. He's also a Cleveland real estate mogul and a damn good writer. And by damn good writer, I mean, he casually publishes an op-ed in the New York Times like it ain't no thang.

Aside from his op-ed in the New York Times, Bert wrote this lovely Mother's Day piece about buying his mom junk food, also for the Times. Reading it, I thought of my own mom and how she always seemed to have a pack of Pepperidge Farm Milanos at the bottom of her huge black bag. Sniffle.

Bert also keeps a hilarious blog called Klezmer Guy, about his life in real estate and gigging around the Midwest. You should definitely check it out.

Psoy Korolenko and his Dialect(ic) Humor

Hey, lookit! I wrote a profile of the incomparable Psoy Korolenko for the Forward.

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.