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.

Abie mitn Fidl

Like a lot of Yiddish culture in America, the origin of much Yiddish music is now generally so unfamiliar as to be easily dismissed as 'folk music,' as if the lyrics to 'Oyfn Pripitchek' were found on an anonymous clay Sumerian tablet. On the contrary, many of these 'folk' songs have well established authorship. For example, 'Oyfn Pripitchek' was written by Mark Varshavsky, a colleague of Sholem Aleykhem and a fellow maskil.

In the US, the Yiddish stage was the source of the musical pop culture for Eastern European immigrants. Many of these songs were so well crafted that they far outlived the shows they were written for and are still known to the grandchildren and great grandchildren of those same immigrants. Abe Ellstein, one of the Big Four composers for the Yiddish stage, may not be a well known name today, but his songs are still familiar, even if his name isn't. Ellstein wrote the music for Yidl mitn fidl, Mamele, Zog es mir nokh a mol, and many, many others.

While much of his work for the Yiddish stage has been recorded time and time again, he also composed lesser known symphonic pieces, as well as an opera based on the story of the Golem of Prague. Unlike Yidl mitn fidl, recordings of those pieces are much harder to find. Enter the beautiful people at the Milken Archive. The fine folks there have issued recordings of Ellstein's classical work and you can even see a clip of a live recording of Hassidic Dance here. How cool is that?

Gey shray khay ve-kayem

Presented without comment, our favorite voice of reason and moderation in all things klal yisroel related:

“Everyone must act in accordance with the custom of his ancestors… Al titosh Torah imecha… Ailu v’eilu divrei Elokim chaim… However,” said Rav Yosef, “when Moshiach comes, all will follow the minhag of theSefardim.”

“We cannot decide until Moshiach comes for everyone to do the same. Only Moshiach will do it. He will tell them: What do you say, ‘Burich atu‘? Say, ‘Baruch atah‘!”And when he says it, they won’t be able to disagree. …Avrohom, Yitzchok and Yaakov will arise. What will they say? They werechalabim… They didn’t say, ‘Burich atu.’ They said, ‘Baruch atah.’ You’ll say, ‘Baruch atah,’ and all Ashkenazim will be chozer b’teshuvah.”

Kulturfest 2015

Hey! There seems to be a big pile of Yiddish related news items to get outraged about. Not that I'm outraged about Yiddish, but at the inevitable (it seems) cliches applied to it.


So:


Exciting news from the Folksbiene. At the theater's big gala few weeks ago,  plans were anounced for a festival named for the gala's honoree, Chana Mlotek. Kulturfest: The First Chana Mlotek International Festival of Jewish Performing Arts is scheduled to open in 2015.  According to the New York Times, Kulturfest will be "A weeklong festival with 100 events including concerts, film screenings and theater."


It's kind of amazing that New York doesn't already have something like this. Toronto has the biennial Ashkenaz festival. Krakow has its yearly Jewish Culture Festival, just to name two of the most important. New York City is the global capital of Jewish culture. Why don't we have a Jewish festival on par with Toronto or Krakow? A good question, but one unanswered in the Times article.


Like with many of Joe Berger's articles about Yiddish, Felicia Lee of the New York Times can't write about a Yiddish related topic without using an 'on the one hand- on the other' framing of the relevance of Yiddish. On the one hand, you have amazing, ground breaking news from an important cultural institution. On the other hand, you have some spurious, bull shit straw man argument that Yiddish is dead/dying/only spoken by the undead of Williamsburg and, what's more, Yiddish will never again be a vernacular so therefore just GET OVER IT ALREADY.


As Felicia Lee learned at the Joe Berger school of writing about Yiddish, the context and import of this announcement must be secondary to passive aggressive beard stroking about the futility of Yiddish. For expert commentary, Lee got novelist Thane Rosenbaum:

Mr. Rosenbaum, who moderates an annual series of discussions on Jewish culture and politics at the 92nd Street Y, predicted that Folksbiene’s “interest in memorializing Yiddish culture and making it relevant” will turn the festival into a “pep rally” for the more than 1,000-year-old language.

Pep rally? Is this a joke? What does that even mean? Whither flows such toxic, and unbecoming, condescension, Mr. Rosenbaum?


You would hope that the Times and its meticulous, in-depth research would explore some of the reasons why we should devote large sums of money and resources to promoting Yiddish culture. You would also be disappointed.  Let's see what the Times has to say about the contemporary relevance of Yiddish:

Yiddish, a Germanic-based language, has contributed terms like "oy vey," and "bagel" to the English vernacular and is still taught.

Rakhmune litzlon. If that's the best the New York Times can come up with, we're all fucked. To hell with Sholem Aleykhem and Peretz and Mendele. Who gives a shit about Inzikh and di Yunge. Not the New York Times, not Thane Rosenbaum, not every ignorant putz who feels compelled to piss on something that makes them feel guilty and defensive:

“It is still a dying language,” Mr. Rosenbaum said, noting that Yiddish has few speakers outside Hasidic enclaves. 

Ah yes, the "still a dying language" trope. I think I've seen that before.  And, did he just imply that Hasidim are not actually living? Gevald.


In any case, claiming that Yiddish is dying is a red herring that's been invoked by many people, for many purposes, for at least a century, if not more. What's so wrong with admitting that Yiddish is the cultural inheritance of the majority of American Jews and thus matters, whether it has 100 (non-Hasidic) native speakers or 100,000? No one's proposing to send Thane Rosenbaum  to a Yiddish re-education camp [not yet -ed.] Yiddish is no threat to him. Can't we just let the death of Yiddish die already? But no, we can't, because the casual delegitimization of Yiddish is not quite complete. Rosenbaum asks:

“Are there original plays being written in Yiddish?”

Well, are there? [crickets]   


Aside from a few recent Folksbiene productions, no mention is made of contemporary theater being made in Yiddish. Because, you know, that's got nothing to do with this story, except it's got everything to do with the story. The Folksbiene is planning a massive, 100 event festival inspired by Yiddish theater and the thrust of the Times story is that contemporary Yiddish theater does not exist (or didn't leave a forwarding address) and a so-called Jewish culture 'expert' is hard pressed to hide his contempt for it.


For the 'other hand' part of the formula the Times did consult with an honest to goodness voice of authority on contemporary Yiddish theater :

Shane Baker, executive director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, founded to promote Yiddish culture, argued that Kulturfest is groundbreaking because it is interdisciplinary and international, both scholarly and artistic, and has the Yiddish component. 

“To bring together all the arts is a wonderful and brilliant idea,” Mr. Baker said. “There has to be a dialogue. I imagine one of the things they’ll be looking at is what is Jewish culture. I’m a gentile fluent in Yiddish, and I play in Yiddish theater.”

What the Times leaves out is that Baker doesn't just play in Yiddish theater (and would have much to say on what might be programmed in Kulturfest) but he himself is a creator of new Yiddish theater, answering Rosenbaum's no doubt rhetorical question about whether such a thing even exists.


So, to sum up: the New York Times will cover the announcement of a major new culture festival for New York City, but only if it can invoke the same old, irrelevant, cliches about the supposed death of Yiddish at the expense of reporting on what the actual content of the festival might be.


And they say all publicity is good publicity. Ugh.

Time Capsule Thursday

OK, so I've been otherwise occupado with things non-bloggy. I will have some very fresh and frisky new content up here, very soon. In the meantimes... I thought it would be fun to re-publish my (infamous?) letter to Heeb, from all the way back in 2002. It was Heeb's editorial response to my epic which set me off to create my own humble publication, Rootless Cosmopolitan (a 'zine about Roots and Culture). 

I do want to say that in the intervening decade I have refined and reconsidered my feelings about non-Jews and Jewish culture, so I just want to apologize in advance for the harshness of Rokhl c. 2002, at least when it comes to issues of cross-cultural cooperation. She was full of piss and vinegar and too much law school. Rokhl of 2012 values and honors her friends and comrades in the Yiddish world, from all countries, all backgrounds, all religions. 


So, here's the letter (and some bonus content if you read all the way to the end):


(Summer, 2002)

OPEN LETTER TO HEEB


To the cats at Heeb:

OK, I get it. 1. Jewish kids dig black culture (Word to Your Bubbe, Beatbox in Ramallah ad nauseum.). 2. Jews can be vulgar, too (Al Goldstein, and hey, what happened to the Annie Sprinkle feature?) 3. Fundamentalists are dumb (Tammy Faye Starlight, see also 2. Jews can be vulgar, too). Duh, duh and no shit, Sherlock. For this the Jewish institutional world should be forking over the big bucks?


I did enjoy some of your features in issue two, including the interview with Naomi Klein. Klein is right; people, and hey, let's not beat around the bush in a magazine explicitly aimed at Jews, Jewish people long for community based on something more than buying power - the JAP model- or the deferred culture insurance plan- Israel. So what does our rootless, cosmopolitan, mind bogglingly rich and exilific history have to offer the comparison culture shopper? According to Heeb, not much besides trendy cooptation of other, mostly darker, cultures and the opportunity to be as narcissistic as you wanna be. That is, Jewishness is only interesting so far as it allows you to see yourself everywhere. Elvis? Yup, technically we might be related. Black folks? Hey, avadim hayinu, we were once slaves, too! Esperanto? Invented by, you guessed it! Serial killers? No problem, I've got Berkowitz' s prison address, I can get you an exclusive interview.


According to your submission guidelines, this is the point of "The New Jew Review"; to seek the "inadvertantly", "tangentially" Jewish. Further, you say, it's easy to point out what's Jewish about "pastrami, klezmer, dating frustrations and neurotic families." Right, we wouldn't want to be too Jewish, even in a forum devoted to celebrating the very notion.


Look, I'm glad you drew the pastrami line in the sand. No tips on where to find the best knishes, no review of the Woody Allen oeuvre, no agonizing nose job justifications. Thank god. Not only are these things excruciatingly obvious, they are meaningless. Jews eat knishes. Nu? But pointing out the "glancingly" and "tangentially" Jewish at the expense of authentic Jewish culture? Let's not kid ourselves, it's only one notch above yet another rehash of Woody as the neurotic, nebbishy, supposed uber-Jew. With no there there, Heeb is a very expensive elaboration on Adam Sandler's Hannukah Song.



But who's to say if there is such a quantifiable thing as authentic Jewish culture, apart from the participants? What the fuck, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that such a things does exist. Indeed, it's much more than the sum of whatever Jews happen to be doing at the moment:  boxing, publishing pornography, whoring for tobacco or just plain whoring. After many lonely Saturday nights deep in the culture lab I have finally discovered the foolproof test for determining whether an independent Jewish culture actually exists.  Here it is: take a look around and see if SOME OTHER LONELY FUCKER DECIDES HE/SHE WANTS TO BE LIKE YOU. Will he/she travel thousands of miles to learn a language your grandparents spoke? Is he/she fucking the culture heroes you won't even look at when you pass them on 106th Street? Is he/she identifying with you, your people and your history as a way of rebelling against his/her own soulless culture? All over Northern Europe, yahoos are paying money for, and MAKING MONEY OFF OF, Jewish culture.


Wake up, sons and daughters of Strong Island! We have something worth co-opting. Take a minute to let that sink in. Some schmuck in Berlin, at this very moment, is singing, dancing and putting on his version of black face and tapping his tootsies to what belongs to you, me, us. I am referring, for the most part, to the truly phenomenal interest in Klezmer music and Yiddish which you find all over Northern Europe. There's even an analog to the wanna-heebs T of Northern Europe. A similar, even more exploitative movement of interest in all things Ladino has taken hold in Spain and Portugal. (Exploitive because often these people know nothing about Ladino or Jews but happily cash in on the wave of interest.)



Yet, I open the music section of Heeb to find? Mogwai, Joey Ramone, Jon Spencer Fucking Blues Explosion? And what is the level of Jewish engagement (if I may take the opportunity to sound like an even bigger asshole) in their work? The High and Mighty "betray their roots" by referencing Chinese food. That young man who wrote to you from Driftwood, TX, is starving for cultural nourishment, and you've just given him the equivalent of a scallion pancake- junk that'll probably give him the trots an hour later. I'd say we left shanda long ago; this is a criminal waste of resources.



There it is, I've betrayed my own little prejudices. For me, Yiddish and Klezmer music are where it's at. These things aren't just hobbies or accoutrements, they are major points of engagement with my Jewishness. When I listen to a klezmer record I'm listening to how the artist engaged with the tradition. I'm plugged into the way the music references (or doesn't) the modes of synagogue music. I may even think about the way function influenced form and the way the music developed alongside ritual and dance. But screw all this intellectual crap, I'm plugging into something joyous and meaningful that many generations before me, and hopefully, many after me, will also be a part of. The specifics matter.



Are the things I mentioned the only real ways to experience Jewish culture? Of course not. At this point, playing Kool and the Gang's Celebration at a Bar Mitzvah is, in itself, tradition. But what's missing from Heeb is any critical engagement or challenge to its material. What makes the Rabbis of the Los Angeles Jewish Commission on Sweatshops any different from other anti-sweatshop activists? The article makes no guess. If there's no difference, why have a specifically Jewish anti-sweatshop organization? There's a sensational story, a really tough story, in there about the conflicts between Jews as bosses and Jews as activists. What kind of moral authority can the AJC wield when it uses such obnoxious tactics as shutting down a whole organizations to squash internal conflict?



Here it is- the bosses, the AJC fat cats, and the Rabbis are all expressing, in some way, their struggle with how to be Jewish and be a boss/activist/worker/sexy jeans entrepreneur etc. The conflict arises because that Jewishness, that peculiar interplay between text, tradition and exigency, no matter how it's lived, has a meaning we share with each other and share with those who came before.



I would think that in New York City, a group of people putting together a magazine by and about contemporary Jewish culture would be faced with an embarrassment of riches. Unfortunately, you've managed to choose material which merely affirms your own, frankly boring, take on modern Jewish culture. And that's just an embarrassment.



Sincerely,

Rachael Kafrissen




Whew. That chick was PISSED!


Sof kol sof, she (I) saw that she would have no real voice in a publication like Heeb so she (I) decided to take it to the streets, in the form of a self-published 'zine. This is the email I sent to a select group of friends, announcing my new plans:

I'm sick of this kind of empty-headed, narcissistic, celebration ofknow-nothingness dressed up in the guise of knowingness. I'm sick ofcooptation masquerading as cultural renewal (there is a difference between cooptation and synthesis!) And I'm sick of Timothy fucking "Speed" Levitch. I want to know who this guy is doing that he gets so much attention in the pages of Heeb. Damn.


So, the first issue of Rootless Cosmopolitan is actually going to be about something. The theme will be Culture Heroes, Old and New. Mine include: (but are not limited to) Ben Katchor, Daniel Pinkwater, Maurice Samuel, Gershon Legman, Tuli Kupferberg, Gershon Breastman, Wolf Krakowski, Gershon Assman... you get the drift. I know my list is heavily male right now. I'd love to see some ladies and womens on the list. So send me your love letters and mash notes to the men and women who make jewish culture so fucking awesome.


 ikh vart oyf aykh ale,

 rokhl

FILTERED IN WILLIAMSBURG!

You've been waiting for weeks. Three, to be exact. Finally, the video of 'Now What: The Future of New Jewish Culture' (A Town Hall Meeting) is available on the Speakers' Lab website.

My Satmar friends have to watch it illicitly on their Blackberries, but YOU can watch it in the comfort of your wide screen Mac Air. So don't delay. Watch real, live (on video) women and men on the same stage, using the same microphones, talking about Jewish culture. Do it now, before Town Hall policy events are ossured like bicycles in a Williamsburg elementary school.

The Idelsohn Society and the Problem of Cultural Reclamation

The Jewish Week just published my critique of the Idelsohn Society. Won't you go read it?

Is Willy Loman Jewish? And did Arthur Miller speak Yiddish?

(3/15) UPDATE: Willie Loman shall indeed speak Yiddish when the New Yiddish Rep brings their new Yiddish language production of Death of a Salesman to the Castillo Theater! 

Please go read this fascinating article by the wonderful Sam Freedman (also my former teacher), Since the Opening Curtain, a Question: Is Willy Loman Jewish? As the name hints, the article explores the ambiguous Jewishness of Willy Loman, the everyshmo at the center of one of the most famous plays in the American theater, Death of a Salesman.

The question of Willy's Jewishness has been alive pretty much every since the play was first produced in 1950. Freedman notes that even Arthur Miller's view on Willy's Jewishness changed over the decades. This in itself seems to be material for some graduate student's paper. Does Miller's perception of Willy change because his perception of his own Jewishness changed over the years? And why did Miller only write about Jewish topics when it related to anti-Semitism or the Holocaust? How much does Miller's Jewish identity reflect the ambiguous Jewishness of millions of non-Marilyn Monroe marrying, average American Jews?

One unasked question popped out at me. Freedman notes

Some critics have singled out Linda Loman’s famous speech about Willy — “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person” — as having a distinctively Yiddish cadence.

I dunno. Maybe yes, maybe no. The obvious question is, did Arthur Miller speak Yiddish? We're told he grew up in a traditional Jewish atmosphere, but what does that mean? If we're really going to get into that kind of textual analysis, I think it's an important question.

And I thought this quote from director Mike Nichols was also really interesting:

“Willy has no forebears,” Mr. Nichols said in an interview this month. “He’s not from any country. He has no holidays of any religion. So you have to assume Miller’s making a point. We who are struggling to sell enough have to drop everything — religion, nationality, family. There is nothing except, as Willy puts it, being known and being well-liked.”

"We who are struggling to sell enough have to drop everything — religion, nationality, family." To that I would add language, too. As many, including the great Max Weinreich, have noted, the Yiddish language isn't just a language but the transmitter of the whole of Ashkenazi way of life, religion included. The muscular monlingualism of America leaves us all much poorer, and at a loss, much like Willy Loman.

Is Hipster Trolling the New Hipster Racism?

I can't decide if this asinine post over at Hipster Jew is worth an entry in my 'Memes of the Yiddish Atlantis' file. Is this supposed to be .... funny? Ironic? A parody of the kneejerk Yiddish haters? Yeesh.

From Yiddish is a dead language, let's move on:

I like Yiddish. I like saying putz and schmuck and shiksa. Sparkling your vocabulary with a few prime, semi-ironic Yiddish phrases is very important to keep up the appearance of being a culturally relevant Jewish person. But we have NYC, where a bagel with ‘lox and shmear’ isn’t an uncommon phrase. You know who still speaks Yiddish? Crazy Hassidim who live in bumblefuck parts of NYC, who fear technology, women, and anyone not closely related to them. Sorry Yiddish, but you’ve lost. It’s 2012. Let’s give you a round of applause and call it a day.

What a charming fellow. I wonder if he calls his grandparents every week just to say 'Ya dead yet?'

Welcome to America - H. Leivick is Back on the New York Stage

As I mentioned before, there's a new production of H. Leivick's classic play Shmates. This new English language version is called Welcome to America and I've reviewed it for The Forward. Check out my review here!