I wanted to make sure you're all aware of a truly special conference coming up on November 4th:
Rokhl Oyerbakh, The Bridge Between Wartime and Postwar Testimony
Presented by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University Library
I just got the official program and it looks amazing. Talks go from Oyerbakh's formative years as a public intellectual to her participation in the Oyneg Shabes group in the Warsaw Ghetto to her tireless work gathering testimony and evidence in the post-war period.
Oyerbakh is a hero of mine and I wrote a little bit about her legacy here. I'm very much looking forward to this groundbreaking examination of her life and work.
Once he was asked why, being so critical of the United States, he did not move to the Soviet Union. “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country,” Robeson said, “and I am going to stay right here and have a part of it.”
This year two anniversaries are bringing attention to the life of one of the towering American personalities of the 20th century: Paul Robeson. It's the 100th anniversary of his graduation from Rutgers University as well as the 70th anniversary of the Peekskill Riots, a shameful chapter in New York history sparked by a benefit concert at which Robeson was the headliner.
This week, my Golden City column is on the theme of Robeson and Yiddish. As usual, my only problem was too much material and not enough room. But I still managed to feature some great stuff and I hope you'll click over and read and enjoy. It's disheartening that these days, more often than not, when Paul Robeson is the subject of serious discussion, it's being done by people who are pursuing an anti-Communist agenda, and, by extension, pursuing their case against Robeson as a tragic Stalinist dupe. For these people, the tragedy of Robeson's life was Stalinism. I hardly think we need to gloss over Robeson's mistakes or apologize for his apologetics. As a matter of respect, we should be able to remember Robeson as a real person, who, along with his outsized talents, had his very human flaws. But let me be clear. there was one great tragedy of Paul Robeson's life, and one alone: American white supremacy. Imagine that he was exactly one generation removed from American slavery and managed to get himself to a prestigious private college where he was only the third African-American to ever attend.
At Rutgers Robeson was the star football player, yet, he had to be benched when the team from Washington and Lee wouldn't take the field against an African-American player.
He was Rutgers valedictorian and a Glee club member but couldn't travel with or socialize with the Glee club
After law school he suffered similar humiliations at the white law firm he joined. He finally left the law after a white stenographer refused to take dictation from him.
In 1924 he was starring in a Eugene O'Neill play in Greenwich Village but couldn't find a restaurant in the neighborhood that would serve him.
In 1940, when in Los Angeles to give a concert, he was refused a room at the fancy 'Whites Only' hotels. The Beverly Wilshire finally rented him a room, but at a much higher price, and on the condition that he registered under a fake name.
And on and on and on. This is only the tiniest sample of what Robeson, an extremely privileged and visible African-American of his time, experienced. You could literally be the most famous man in the world, but in the eyes of white Americans, and American law, you were just another *******. To me, the emphasis from some quarters on Robeson's 'crimes' seem like a diversion away from those with real power, the people who created and sustained systems of inequality and oppression, both in the US and the USSR.
Even if Robeson had repented and issued his own denunciations of Stalin? Would that have saved Feffer? Or Mikhoels? Or one human being? The only thing that stopped Stalin's madness was his own death. The outsized denunciations of Robeson ascribe to him a level of power that borders on delusional.
Anyway, there is still much to be explored in Robeson's work and legacy and I hope you'll click over to my piece and be inspired.
In the last few years we’ve seen a mini-explosion of new films entirely or partly in Yiddish: Felix and Meira, Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish, and Menashe to name a few. I asked Sara Feldman, preceptor in Yiddish at Harvard University, what she thought these films had to say about the future of Yiddish cinema. Feldman teaches a course on Yiddish cinema at Harvard, one of few such academic courses in the world. She told me that “much of the current revival of Yiddish film is not conscious of its connection to classic Yiddish films, but rather emerges from a desire to portray the lives of contemporary Yiddish-speakers in Haredi communities. …”
It's understandable that filmmakers will be inexorably drawn to the stories of the modern Hasidic community. It's an exotic world apart, right there in the middle of Brooklyn. And it also makes sense that those who want to create new Yiddish drama will set their stories in a community where the presence of Yiddish is natural. But it's a challenging proposition for outsiders to pull off. First, there's the question of who will be in their Yiddish movie? A number of fine Yiddish speaking actors have emerged from the ex-Hasidic community recently. As I was researching this latest column I messaged my friend Eli Rosen. He's in Berlin right now shooting a new mini-series based loosely on the story of Deborah Feldman, a Hasidic woman who left the community and moved to Germany. The production is in English and Yiddish. Eli only started acting recently but he's been busy with many Yiddish speaking roles, appearing in numerous plays, tv shows, independent films and more. Then there's the question of the outsider's gaze upon the Hasidic world. There's a very real danger of falling into romantic and exoticising tropes about the 'tragic' lives of those on the inside. And filmmakers who don't speak Yiddish may end up making artistic choices that create unintended subtexts, as in Menashe. The director chose to cast one of the main roles with an actor who came from outside Hasidic Brooklyn and speaks a distinctly different kind of Yiddish. Young Ruvn Niborski was a fantastic find for the role of Menashe's son, but his presence is an interesting slippage of the mimetic veneer of what I called the first Yiddish mumblecore. I spoke to Harvard Yiddish professor Saul Noam Zaritt about Menashe and the figure of the Hasid in modern Yiddish cinema. He pointed out that it was Menashe Lustig (who plays Ruvn's father, the title role of Menashe) who had to conform his Yiddish to Ruvn's, because young Ruvn wasn't going to be able to speak Borough Park Yiddish. This raises questions about the impossibility of 'authenticity' of modern Yiddish cinema as it tries to square the circle of 'ethnographic fiction.' “This authenticity is so important to the film maker trying to repair the objectification of the Hasidic figure. But in clinging to this authenticity they usually reconstitute these objectifications.”
Zaritt told me, “Menashe is a movie that begins from a documentary perspective, and so it evokes a sense of perfect mimesis. All parts of the film have to conform to that conceit, even if the reality is a bit messier.” The film “invades his most intimate of worlds”, yet Menashe Lustig as Menashe the movie character “must change the way he speaks in order for it to remain legible as ‘Yiddish’ film, in order to preserve the sanctity and coherence of that world.”
I don't think outsiders should stop trying to make movies about the Hasidic/Haredi world, but it's important we unpack the narrative and cinematic implications of outsiders telling these stories.
One story I'd love to see told in Yiddish is that of Sarah Schenirer, mystic visionary, mother of the Bais Yakov school system. I see her story as akin to another mystical visionary who joined a community of women: Hildegard of Bingen, a woman powered by wild talents and driven to serve God in radical ways. Surely there's some former Bais Yakov girl out there who went to film school and watched too many Ken Russell films...
...Eric Goldman started researching his foundational book Visions, Images & Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Presentin the late '70s, when any scholarship on the field was scattershot and difficult to find, forget about actually locating the movies! Since then, there has been some amount of scholarship on Yiddish cinema, including J. Hoberman's essential Bridge of Light. But the corpus of Yiddish film has exploded in the last few years, and even Goldman's 2010 revised edition is now out of date. Given recent exciting developments in academic Yiddish studies overall (as with the journal In Geveb) it looks like the scholarly study of Yiddish film may finally catch up. When I asked Harvard's Sara Feldman where she saw the academic study of Yiddish film going, she said "...I expect that the new generation of young, queer Yiddishists will expand the work that has already begun regarding queer subtexts in Yiddish film..." At this point I have to give a shout out to drummer, bandleader and film archivist Eve Sicular, who has been researching and presenting on queerness in Yiddish cinema for years and really laid the groundwork. She speaks frequently on the Yiddish celluloid closet and has generally broadened the way we think about the tradition. She's also a maven of movie music in general and if you're in DC this week, you can catch her Music in Yiddish Cinema lecture and concert at the JxJ festival. LATE ADDITION**I just learned that there will a couple very special pre-screening events including: Sunday 26 May at 3:50 - Shane Baker introduces The Dybbuk Wednesday 5 June at 12:30 - Shane Baker sings comic Yiddish songs with Steve Sterner at the piano as an introduction to American Matchmaker Sunday 30 June at 1:35 pm - Shane Baker recites the Yiddish bullfight poem by way of introduction to Overture to Glory Sunday 23 June at 3:10 - Yiddish film historian Jim Hoberman introduces Mir Kumen On
My latest GOLDEN CITY is up and it celebrates the hidden heroes of the Yiddish world: the archivists. Really, it was just an excuse to go downtown and finally see the new home of the Forverts and, most importantly, hang out with Forverts archivist, Chana Pollack.
(1944 Forward Association board ballot, courtesy of the Forverts photo archive)
I won't say too much about my visit with Chana because I want you to read the column. But even given the ups and downs the Forverts archive has been through, its very existence something of a gorgeous miracle. In this age of declining heritage media, it’s far from certain that a publication will even be able to retain its own archive. The recent case of Johnson Publishing, the parent company of Jet and Ebony, is an object lesson in the vulnerability of magazine archives..
Since 1942 Johnson has been the owner and publisher of Ebony and Jet. Over the decades it assembled an astounding archive of some five million photographs. (Compare that to the 40,000 photos held by the Forward, many of which were purchased from news services.) As the climate turned sour for magazines in the last few years, Johnson Publishing tried to use its photo archive to stabilize its finances. It first tried to sell the archive outright and then used it as collateral for a loan from a venture capitalist firm. That firm happened to be run by Mellody Hobson, a high powered financier who happens to be married to a director you might have heard of, George Lucas.
Johnson Publishing ended up defaulting on the loan. The latest news from various law suits related to Johnson's finances make it look like the photo archive will be acquired by Hobson and Lucas. In recent court filings, they argued that, despite the archive’s high-tech preservation system, it was sitting on uninsured rental property and thus incredibly vulnerable. That may be lawsuit filing exaggeration but... still. Y i k e s.
This article says the archive may yet end up in a museum. It’s not a terrible outcome, or rather, no worse than the many sad endings of many other beloved publications and their associated commodifiable assets. Ebony and Jet will continue in some form, with new owners. But considering how integral their photographs were to their identity, their future seems questionable. The archive will take on a new kind of life elsewhere, possibly with a new audience for its riches.
But consider this: At one point Johnson Publishing was the largest African-American owned business in the country. Its photography documented the Civil Rights struggle and won Pulitzer Prizes. Johnson’s five million photograph collection is far larger than the 300,000 photographs at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the mere 37,000 items held by the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. Johnson Publishing’s photo archive could be the largest extant photographic archive documenting African-American life. Its dispersal via lawsuit may turn out to have serious, unintended consequences. The constitution and control of archives are of utmost importance in writing history, all the more so when it comes to minorities and marginalized peoples.
I'm reminded again that with no Office of Patrimony (or something similar), precious American historical materials can end up at the mercy of the free market. As legacy publications face uncertain futures in the face of declining ad revenues (and the domination of social media) I hope that the story of Johnson Publishing's photo archive will spur a conversation between commercial publications and archival and museum specialists. How can these different sectors come together to make long term plans for commercial archives?It remains to be seen...
Brief post to say I have a think piece up at Tablet about the remarkable new movie Who Will Write Our History. The movie is part dramatization, part documentary, which manages to balance story telling with traditional talking heads. In the piece I argue that WWWOH isn't just essential viewing, it can, and should, make us reevaluate the state of Holocaust education.
Today, as even the youngest generation of survivors reaches old age, anxiety about the disappearance of firsthand testimony has risen, and we’re seeing more public concern about a looming demographic reality: “The youngest survivors are in their mid-70s, with most in their 80s and 90s. In a future no longer beyond the horizon, no one will remain to testify firsthand to Nazi Germany’s systematic effort to exterminate the Jews in the territory it controlled.”
Some have turned to technology to fight the clock. The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center recently unveiled their New Dimensions in Testimony oral history project, featuring holograms of 15 Holocaust survivors. Each of the 15 participants has gone through a rigorous filming and testimony process, making it possible for museumgoers and students to ‘interact’ with the simulated survivors.
...
There’s no question that first person survivor testimony will continue to have an important place in contemporary Holocaust education for Jews and non-Jews. But the release of Who Will Write Our History has the potential to effect a sea change in the way we think about Holocaust education. Indeed, I would go so far as to call it the most important Holocaust movie in decades. Who Will Write Our History is the first Holocaust documentary that centers victim stories along with the written and visual materials they created to document their lives.
Of course a 90 minute movie cannot begin to communicate the whole story of the Oyneg Shabes as told by Sam Kassow’s book or the vast treasures of the archive. This beautiful and sensitively done documentary adaptation of Kassow's book is, in a sense, an appetizer, an introduction to the story that is only now finally available to Jews all over the world. We should see it as an invitation to rethink our relationship to the Jews of Poland, not as a faceless mass of victims created between 1939 and 1945, but individuals shaped by life before the war, and who fought to live, and die, with dignity.
I have a new piece up at Hey Alma about one of 2018's most intriguing documentaries, Three Identical Strangers. I found the movie compelling, but, as you will see in my analysis, I was disappointed that the filmmakers didn't, or couldn't, explore the particular Jewish dimensions of the story:
Three Identical Strangers is a story about power: the power of social service agencies to create, and destroy, families, as well as the power of the scientific establishment to turn human beings into subjects. One of the urgent questions raised by the movie is what, if anything, will it take to force the powerful to admit fault to the powerless?
That all the players in the triplets’ story — social service agency, scientists, parents, babies, even the newspaper editor who broke the story — were themselves Jewish, makes the whole thing even more disturbing. In this story, rather than conflict between Jews and non-Jews, the key distinctions fall along lines of social standing, education, and class. And yet, the filmmakers seem reluctant to explore the deep, complicated Jewishness of the story.
There's one aspect of the story, or my take on it, that didn't make it into the piece. Three Identical Strangers is a movie propelled by the question of nature versus nurture and the belief that the nature/nurture equation could be solved if we just had enough data.
But what seems equally important to me is a third variable, self-knowledge. The ability for a human being to know who they are, and where they come from, is as crucial to the fulfillment of human potential as genes or environmental blessings. The triplets and twins in Peter Neubauer’s study were cruelly denied that self-knowledge.
In 2019, American Jews, especially those of Ashkenazi heritage, are similarly adrift, cut off from their specific histories. If you've been a reader here before, you already know the many ways and wherefores of this situation. I was reminded again of our dilemma of historical amnesia at the gorgeous, recently closed Jewish Museum exhibit CHAGALL LISSITZKY MALEVICH. The exhibit, on tour from the Centre Pompidou, is a fascinating look at the city of Vitebsk, a second tier provincial city which, for a few years, was at the cutting edge of modern art. What you don't get from the exhibit, though, is that the city was almost 50% Jewish and Yiddish speaking.
I'll bring just one example of how the exhibit misses an opportunity to bring out the particular Yiddish quality of Vitebsk and its art scene. An entire set of Lissitzky's Had Gadya lithographs is on display. It was published by the Yiddish language culture organization the Kultur-Lige. The lithographs themselves are captioned with the Yiddish words on top and the Aramaic on the bottom.
iz gekumen di kats un fartsukt dos tsigele
At the Jewish Museum, however, the explanatory cards that accompany the series of lithographs only refer to the Aramaic text. I started grumbling out loud and ended up talking to a couple of older ladies next to me. They had no idea that there was Yiddish in the illustrations, or even that Yiddish was written with Hebrew letters.
If the curators can't even be bothered to accurately describe the artworks, no wonder they describe the Kultur-Lige- the Yiddish cultural organization of the early post-Revolution period par excellence- as "an organization that promoted Jewish culture."
ARGH!
Despite the care and resources put into the show, these errors of omission end up obscuring as much as they illuminate, and for an American Jewish public, which, in the main, cannot tell the difference between Aramaic and Yiddish, this is yet another tragic missed opportunity to educate.
I'm two-thirds of the way through the new Amazon Prime mini-series A Very English Scandal and let me say, I'm kind of obsessed. I'm not usually that interested in political scandal stories, but if you're any kind of Anglophile, you will be sucked in immediately by its dry, semi-horror semi-comic tone, sweeping green vistas, and numerous cozy pubs. In between the buggery, attempted murder and the endless search for one National Insurance card. Also, Hugh Grant is a revelation as Jeremy Thorpe.
But, this isn't about that. First, let me say, there's absolutely nothing Jewish about A Very English Scandal. Isn't that the whole point of being an Anglophile? The fantasy world where one's own angst is blissfully non-existent?
HOWEVER.
I was indeed taken aback in episode one, when the Hugh Grant character (Jeremy Thorpe) takes his new would-be lover, Norman Scott, back to his *mother's* house and, once there, woos him (??) by playing this duet with his mother, I mean, Ursula.
(Apologies for the very stupidly shot video. Stay with me.)
Anyone who's spent a minute in the world of klezmer would recognize this tune, sometimes labeled as a Cirba and usually as Hora Staccato. I know it from versions by Moishe Oysher, Oysher and the Barry Sisters, as well as Dave Tarras.
Here's Moishe Oysher and the Barry Sisters absolutely killing it. Apologies for the video; I couldn't find the version I wanted on Youtube.
In the past, it had never occurred to me that this tune that felt so incredibly Yiddish might actually be... not.
But, it did occur to me just now, when the producers of A Very English Scandal decided to use it for a particular emotional moment. This very powerful man, Thorpe, has brought home a very vulnerable younger man, Scott, and is in the process of wooing- or more like wowing- him into doing what he wants. But, still, it struck me as odd that the producers would choose this tune, of all things, for that moment, especially when Hugh Grant appears to be struggling to keep up with his violin finger miming. Why pick a piece that was so difficult to pull off? And so Jewish???
A little more research showed me that this Hora Staccato is not by Moishe Oysher, or even Dave Tarras, but was composed in 1906 by a Roma violin virtuoso named Grigoraș Dinicu. The tune probably gained its greatest fame with another virtuoso, Jascha Heifetz. Heifetz often saved Hora Staccato as a show stopping encore number.
So, that makes a lot more sense. Thorpe was a very confident, indeed, arrogant man. Of course he'd pull out a literal virtuosic show stopper to try to impress his young friend, and of course he'd think he had the chops to pull it off. Faster, he cries. That moment so perfectly encapsulates Thorpe's arrogance and vanity, some of the very qualities that would, we know now, end his career in total ignominy.
Anyway, Hora Staccato is a great tune. And I'm glad I can give props to the real composer, the great Grigoraș Dinicu.
Happy almost goyish New Year! (Jump to the bottom for a couple juicy Yiddish events) Despite having a disgusting cold, I just spent a magical almost-week at Yiddish New York. One of my personal highlights was having the honor of presenting my work to friends and colleagues. First, I gave an updated and expanded version of a lecture debuted last year called 'The Deathless Klezmer Revival.' In order to understand better what's been going on in the past oh, 46 years of the 'Klezmer Revival', I dove into some comparative revival history. Did you know about the ragtime revival of the '70s? I didn't before I wrote this lecture, but boy, do I now. In addition to doing comparative history, we talked about the elements of a revival, how they apply to the work being done on klezmer, and why the word 'revival' just won't go away. It was really, really fun. My second lecture was completely new. 'The Most Unusual Jew I Know' was written in honor of my friend Shane Baker's yoyvl, his fiftieth birthday. I opened with a brief overview of Shane's multi-varied body of work, from literary translator to teacher to performer. But what I really focused on were Shane's influences: from the downtown camp extravaganzas of Charles Ludlam to the fabulous women of the Yiddish stage. All of those influences can be seen in his newest, and in my opinion, most significant, new work, a drag character called Mitzi Manna. It's in the persona of Mitzi that all these influences speak- across artistic milieux, across time, and across continents. Throw in a dollop of Judith Butler (no, but seriously) and you've got an extremely entertaining, and, if I do say so myself, provocative afternoon.
Shane as Mitzi Manna as the non-binary Jew
Both lectures are available for your Hadassah meeting, university Yiddish club or Hillel. I can even bring Shane, too, if you have the budget. If you missed Shane's triumphant performance as Mitzi during Yiddish New York, you can still catch his brilliant new interpretation of MONISH, the classic Peretz prose poem about Yiddish romance. I thought I had heard everything there was to hear about Monish. Until I saw this production. I'm serious. You need to see this. The show will be preceded by a concert by visiting pianist David Serebryanik, including Three Piano Pieces by Georg Kreisler; Gershwin's Preludes; excerpts from Viktor Ullmann's The Lay of Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke; as well as original preludes of David's own. Details: MONISH AND OTHER WORKS Wednesday, January 2nd 7:30 PM Scorca Hall at Opera America 330 Seventh Avenue, 7th Floor Admission $25 Get your tickets here ....Coming up later this week at the Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center in the Bronx, Sunday, January 6th at 1:30. Rukhl Schaechter, Editor of the Forverts will be speaking (in Yiddish) on possibly the most divisive topic in Jewish history, gefilte fish. Lecture followed by (if a devastating sweet vs. pepper brawl hasn't broken out) a performance by the fabulous Sasha Lurje
My latest for Hey Alma, Yiddish Porn is Officially a Thing, is up now. My editor made me take out the best pun, though. Annie Sprinkle has started a new chapter in her life as a fierce protector of water and educator on all things therein, leading to her being the sexiest example of kishmoy ken huever. OK, I got it out of my system. Please click over and give it a (furtive) read!
It's the end of the year and I'm shaking things up a little. I've posted two long read essays over at Medium. One is called My Great-Grandfather Wasn't a Bundist and the other is called Beyond Demographic Panics and Contraceptive Virtuosos: Building a New Jewish Agenda for 2019. Both are kinda self-explanatory, both contain many of the key themes of this year in the Jewish thought-o-sphere, as well as some thoughts about the future. How's that for an exciting inducement to read?
From Beyond Demographic Panics
They're both pretty good, if I do say so myself, so please, click on over and take a read.
