Broadway Danny Gumby and the Yiddish Side of Eddie Murphy

I was at brunch today with my friend Ari and he mentioned an old Saturday Night Live sketch I had never seen. It's a What If scenario: what if a Jewish family like the Franks had been hidden in an attic in Amsterdam, but the people hiding them had never remembered to let them out. My jaw dropped as Ari described the premise, that the family was so annoying it wasn't worth it to the Dutch family living downstairs to free them. Yikes.

I was also intrigued when he mentioned that Eddie Murphy played one of the members of the Jewish family. I assumed he did it in white face makeup, similar to what he used for Coming to America, but no, it's just him, doing his thick as shmalts 'Yiddish' accent with a black satin yarmulke perched on his giant wig.  

When I went to find the clip on YouTube, though, I stumbled on something else. It's Eddie Murphy returning to Saturday Night Live in 1982, to promote his new movie, 48 Hours.

In the opening monologue, he tells the story of buying a house on Long Island. It's haunted by the ghost of the Jewish man who died there. The ghost turns out to have a special enmity for Eddie, and uses a Yiddish word to insult him which I won't spell out here.

Like a lot of words from that era, this particular word is now unacceptable, but back then, its use was utterly unremarkable. In my experience, the adults who used it did so, to be totally honest, in the same way they used the Yiddish words for 'gentile.'  Not so much as a pejorative, but to underline our own separateness from everyone else. Which is not to claim it wasn't used in a more overtly racist way, but only that that wasn't my experience.

I grew up on Long Island, and, to understand Long Island, you have to understand that it's one of the most segregated places in the country. Eddie Murphy grew up partly in Roosevelt, one of the few heavily African-American towns on Long Island. It wasn't always that way, of course. In the 1950s, rather than allow African-Americans into the neighborhood, almost all of the white residents sold their houses and took off, aka 'white flight.'

If you're a real Long Islander, you know that, aside from Eddie Murphy, the most notable product of Roosevelt* is Howard Stern. Stern claims his white, liberal, Jewish parents refused to leave the neighborhood out of a sense of principle. 

In this light, you can read Murphy's joke about the ghost of the Jewish man in his new house as a comment about the despicable history of racial restrictions and housing covenants, legal devices meant to enforce segregation in housing. Eddie Murphy may have become a millionaire who could afford to buy a house in the fanciest, whitest part of Long Island, but you better believe that there will always be someone to remind him that as an African American man, he doesn't belong there. The ghosts of Jim Crow are always there, even in supposedly enlightened New York. It's also a reminder to white, American Jews that, very often, they were more than innocent bystanders in the story of American segregation.




Two years later, Eddie Murphy returned to Saturday Night Live and performed in 'The Family in the Attic.' The problem with 'The Family in the Attic' is that it's not just offensive, it's unfunny, which frankly, is even more unforgivable. It's also weird to think that this aired only four years after the death of Otto Frank.




The one intriguing aspect of the skit is that Mary Gross plays what one supposes is the 'Anne Frank' character, now a grown up woman, and sex crazed from being hidden in the attic for decades. 

It's well known today that the standard edition of Anne's diary was censored and that all her references to sex and her own sexuality were removed by her father, Otto. Did they have an awareness of what had been removed from the diary when the sketch was written in 1984? Or was it just kind of obvious that someone cooped up in isolation for decades, whether man or woman, would be pretty desperate?

And then we come to Broadway Gumby Rose, SNL's takeoff on the then new Woody Allen movie, Broadway Danny Rose. I believe this is from the same night as 'The Family in the Attic.' A bunch of old 'Yiddish' showbiz types are bullshitting at a deli when in comes Broadway Gumby Rose. Eddie Murphy does his angry Gumby shtik, but with a Yiddish flavor.




It's mildly funny, I guess?

Eddie Murphy brought out his old Jewish guy shtik again in 1988, for Coming to America, this time with astonishingly realistic makeup by SFX king, Rick Baker.

According to this video, Baker based the makeup on his father in law, Nestor, who is not Jewish. You can even spot him in the background of a couple of shots.



There's really no earthly reason 'Saul' needs to be in Coming to America except to show off Eddie Murphy's virtuosity as a mimic. Inadvertently, 'Saul' foreshadow Murphy's later box office success in such vehicles as his Nutty Professor remake, where he disappeared into elaborate makeup once again.

Also, I'm sorry, yes, this joke may be a thousand years old, but it's still funny:


Anyway, I'm curious what you, dear readers, think about Eddie Murphy and Jewface. Is there anything more to it than a comic falling back on instantly recognizable, and tested, 'funny' voice?



*Bad on me for slighting Chuck D. and Flavor Flav of Public Enemy. Apologies.

Like Ashes and Yortsayt Candles...

Like many American Jews, I don’t know much about my family history before their arrival in the United States. For one thing, I’m a third generation American. My grandparents were born here, and even if they had lived to transmit our family history to me, they themselves had no first hand knowledge of our lives before. 

American Jews breathe forgetting like oxygen and history cannot compete. 

Nostalgia tastes good, like a pastrami sandwich on fresh rye bread. History tastes of guilt, like ashes and yortsayt candles. It makes demands upon the individual, it takes work. Nostalgia is a false friend, one which soothes guilt, but whose fruit is self-deception.

A perfectly apposite moment comes in Red Shirley, the late  Lou Reed’s 2011 documentary about his elderly cousin, garment worker and labor activist Shirley Novick. Novick is describing how she bought a mandolin upon arriving in Canada from Poland in 1929. Reed’s only response is “Oh come on.” 

Presented with this unexpected point of contact between the 99 year old former garment worker and himself, Reed can form no response other than incurious disbelief. Had Reed paused a moment to ask why she bought it, he might have discovered that it was not chance or whimsy that brought Shirley to buy that mandolin, but, something akin to the same forces that drove Reed himself to pick up the guitar in the early 1960s. 

Shirley was a young woman at a time when mandolin orchestras were the rage for young working class lefties, especially in the garment industry. Dozens of mandolin orchestras thrived in New York and other centers of Jewish labor activism. Picking up the mandolin was an obvious way for a young greener to make friends in a new country. Not that Lou, or the audience, ever get the chance to make the connection.

At the time Red Shirley was making its way around film festivals, Reed told the press:  "I realized if I didn't do this, a connection to a lot of things would be lost forever. So there was great impetus to do this.” 

But Reed’s explanation for making the movie rings hollow. What he ended up doing was indeed the opposite of capturing some kind of fragile historical truth. He didn’t just miss every opportunity to learn more about Shirley, he, for reasons that may now be impossible to uncover, actively chose to distort key aspects of his cousin’s life. 

The woman who was known for decades as Shirley Novick is presented in the film as Shulamit Rabinowitz. Shulamit (or, as she would have been known in Yiddish, Shulamis) Rabinowitz was born in Poland, but came to New York as a young woman where she became an outspoken organizer in the garment industry and a high profile member of Yiddish Communist circles.

How is it possible that in the (albeit brief) 27 minutes of Red Shirley the word ‘Communist’ is not even uttered once? It could be that Lou’s family didn’t approve of Shirley’s marriage to a high profile Communist like Paul Novick. It’s hard to say. 

Memory is a muscle and American Jews have allowed theirs to waste away. Indeed, that wasting effect is cumulative. What is allowed to wither in one generation will have small chance at being reclaimed by the next.

Lou Reed went in search of the radical Jewish past. Led by nostalgia, he ended up rewriting history. 

By a quirk of fate, I was at Shirley Novick’s funeral not long after Red Shirley premiered at the New York Jewish Film Festival. I even sat a few seats away from her very surly cousin, Lou. I’m one of the very, very few who saw the movie and knew enough to be alarmed by its distortions, knew the people whose lives were being erased.

The Talmud tells us that while they are gestating in the womb, Jewish babies possess knowledge of the entire Torah. Right before they are born, an angel's touch removes that knowledge, making the subsequent acquisition of Torah a process of remembering.

I became a born again Yiddishist in college. My adult life has been spent in this kind of remembering, a re-acquisition of memories, a scrabbling at dreams in languages always at the far end of my tongue. 

That work of remembering is exhausting. Simply learning Yiddish at the end of the 20th century - the language of millions of American Jews and tens of thousands of volumes of literature - was a labor of extraordinary difficulty. 

Anyone who studies Yiddish today, even at this moment of so-called revival, knows that it is a source of social friction. Because we all know Yiddish is a dead language; we all know Yiddish had to die for Hebrew to live. It is the logic of internalized brutality, where losers may be pitied, may even be mourned, but they must, at all costs, remain buried.

I have seen how easily the story of history’s ‘losers' can be casually (or maliciously) overwritten. Who will remember Shirley Novick as she was? Who will be able to correct the historical record? Decades from now, who will look back and want to claim Shirley as their own?

Doikayt and Decolonization

I closed out 2019 by fulfilling a longtime ambition: attending the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) conference as an invited member of a conference panel. 

Alllll the excited emojis.

I was the sole journalist in an otherwise all-star lineup of young academics. We came together to talk about the modern meaning(s) of the Bund. I joined David Slucki (Monash), Josh Meyers (Harvard), Jacob Labendz (Youngstown State), Caroline Luce (UCLA), and Mindl Cohen (Yiddish Book Center) for what turned out to be a truly fascinating and productive conversation. It was a pleasure to meet so many great folks whom I had previously only known virtually. 

I read Mindl's doctoral thesis on doikayt in preparation for our discussion and I highly recommend it if you want to go deeper into the pre-war Bundist zeitgeist. Of course I've read David Slucki's The International Labor Bund After 1945: Toward a Global History. And both Josh and Caroline have books coming out soon about very different moments in Bund history. I have a feeling they will be 'must reads' on the subject and I'm eagerly awaiting both of them. 

As I said during our panel, I was there as a humble polemicist among serious scholars. My paper, on doikayt (hereness) and decolonization, was expanded and translated into Hebrew for the latest issue of Haaretz's Judaism supplement magazine. It was then published in English as 'Why Modern Anti-Zionists Love the Bund.' If my goal were to piss off every possible corner of the Jewish Left I'd be making solid progress on that one. I guess you have to take your wins where you find them.



As a bonus to those of you who read to the bottom, here's the video from Itzik Gottesman's recent YIVO talk about Yiddish Christmas. Enjoy!

Tevye the Icon

Yiddish Fiddler (aka Yiddler) was the unexpected off-Broadway hit of 2019. What else could I do but honor it's January 5th closing with a grumpy op-ed about linguistic oppression for JTA. Audiences may love Tevye, but they're a lot more mixed on the language he speaks.

I'd been wondering why Yiddish is always tagged as 'guttural' and after seeing myself described with that word in a newspaper article, it occurred to me that:

If one had to locate Yiddish within the popular imagination, it would be found in the primeval Jewish throat.

The success of Yiddish “Fiddler” shows that Yiddish, from afar, can attain a certain symbolic stature in the public eye of the theatre class. But the intimate experience of Yiddish, up close and personal, still speaks to nothing so much as lingering discomfort, and an estrangement between observer and object. 

Yiddish is often characterized by its guttural “ch’s.” But Hebrew, with just as many guttural sounds, rarely seems to get tagged as such. As late as 1930, Zev Jabotinsky was arguing that the ideal Hebrew pronunciation would “First of all … have to avoid the Yiddish ch, which is like the hoarse cough of someone with a throat disease.” Ouch.

Read more at JTA ...

The Yiddish Decade

It's almost the end of the 2010s, in case you hadn't heard. Jewish Week is running a decade's end wrap up series and they were kind enough to commission something from me. My contribution is a reflection on The Yiddish Decade. It should more properly be called the Yiddishist Decade, but that's really for the quibblers among you.

It won't surprise you that my major theme is the insanity of New York real estate. Biology may have been destiny once upon a time, but around these parts, it's location, location, location.

And as it pertains to Yiddish, I’m now old enough to have had my hopes raised, and utterly dashed, more than once by tantalizing plans and promises for a new, centrally located, brick-and-mortar social space for New York’s thriving Yiddishist community. Not only did we NOT get that dedicated space, our existing spaces kept slipping away:

The loss of CYCO’s prime location was reported as the “nail in the coffin of Yiddish.” But since I moved here over 20 years ago, the churn of unchecked development has increased every year, pushing everyone but the wealthiest residents to the edges of the city. Yiddish is no more a victim than the countless other linguistic, cultural and artistic communities lacking millionaire benefactors.

That reference to "millionaire benefactors" was not accidental. I didn't have room to get into it for the JW piece, but the longer I reflected, the more pissed off I became, and I kept coming back around to the saga of Makor.

In 2001, mega-donor Michael Steinhardt made a historic donation to the 92nd Street Y. He gave the Y a Central Park West brownstone whose purpose was to serve as a clubhouse for young, well to do Jewish singles. As the New York Times reported at the time: 

The five-story, 22,000-foot brownstone will become the eighth center in the Y's chain of cultural institutions. It is valued at $16 million and has a cafe, a 72-seat screening room and an art gallery. ... 

''I am convinced,'' Mr. Steinhardt said, ''that the 92nd Street Y can give Makor programs and synergy and marketing muscle that will take it to the next level of visibility and impact.'' Later, he said he was ''thrilled to have made this shiddach,'' using the Yiddish word for an arranged marriage.

Unlike the Y, Makor has a specific mission: to attract people in their 20's and 30's to events that will teach them about Jewish culture. The center will be renamed the 92nd Street Y Makor/Steinhardt Center and will retain its current focus. Its annual budget and programming will be managed by a committee of board members from the Y and Makor.

In 2006, the 92nd Street Y was looking for funds for renovation of its original Upper East Side location. The leadership of the 92nd Street Y decided to sell the CPW Makor brownstone, now valued at $25 million and use the profit to fund the renovation.

Makor was relocated to a Tribeca location, where it remained between 2008 and 2013. 

I was a fairly frequent visitor to the CPW Makor townhouse, but I think I visited its Tribeca location maybe once or twice in five years. As I recall, to get there you needed to cross a pedestrian bridge, pray, and be prepared to never see your loved ones again, because it was in such a god forsaken spot.

In 2013, the 92nd Street Y executive director released a letter explaining their decision to close the Tribeca location and say goodbye to Makor forever:

"We believe 92Y can best serve the community now and in the future by investing our resources into our flagship location uptown on Lexington Avenue...” 

But the organization would continue “to invest in strategic partnerships and technologies that allow us to offer our programs and create communities far beyond the walls of any building — livecasts, online classes, partnerships ..."

So, to summarize. At the turn of this century, mega-donor Steinhardt buys a $16 million townhouse to serve as a social club for the coveted young, single Jewish demographic. Like with Birthright, a big part of the agenda was getting these unicorns into physical proximity (and serving them in the swanky style to which they were presumably accustomed.) 

Pretty quickly, Steinhardt donates the new social center to the 92nd Street Y to be run and programmed by them. In less than a decade, the 92nd Street Y decides to use Makor (now valued at $25 million) as a piggybank for their own needs and by 2013, Makor was no more. All those magical NYC singles were expected to find their needs met on the Upper East Side, or be on their own.

So, that was a $16 million investment down the toilet in a matter of less than 15 years. Of course, $16 million is pocket change for Steinhardt, whose fortune is estimated at $1 billion. And it's not like the choices of the 92nd Street Y are going to redound to the Jewish singles whose interests were supposedly being served. No one is going to throw up their hands and say it's just pointless to try to reach them or that this was the nail in the coffin of Jewish singles. It would be laughable.

Of course, during those same years,Yiddishists watched many offices/spaces of legacy Yiddish organizations either shrink radically, or disappear altogether, for want of far, far smaller cash infusions. 

And indeed, the brutalities of the real estate market were inevitably interpreted as the death of Yiddish and lost offices were the nail in its coffin. 

In my opinion, the only Yiddish organization that came out ahead at the end of the decade is YIVO, with a state of the art, centrally located space and (relatively) bright financial future. And YIVO is terrific and hosts many wonderful, irreplaceable classes, events and meetings. But (for various reasons) it can never take the place of a social center run for the benefit of artists and activists.

Just imagine if some donor (mega- or not) had seen fit to donate just a fraction of that Makor money to Yiddishists and other Ashkenazic culture workers. Ours is a demographic which, if anyone actually bothered to ask, skews quite young. And our achievements, mostly on the wispiest of budgets, are quite impressive. 

But maybe don't imagine what might have been, because the reality is just too damn infuriating.

Catching Up

In case you don't follow me on social media, I thought I'd give you an update on what I've been doing.

*For the holiday of Sukes/Sukkot, I wrote about the magic of the pitom in Yiddish literature

*The Jewish Chronicle published a truly nonsensical attack on Yiddler and the Yiddish language. I wrote a response for Haaretz. 

*I scratched just the very top layer of the topic of non-Jews in Yiddish

*We dove into post-Revolution Russia and the pogroms that changed Jewish history forever and set the stage for the Holocaust

*Do you hate October and pink themed merchandise as much as I do? Then read this op-ed I wrote for JTA

and finally... 

*I reviewed French journalist Piotr Smolar's new memoir about three generations of his family, <<MAUVAIS JUIF>>. I was most interested in his grandfather, Hersh Smolar, known to Yiddishists as the long time editor of the Warsaw Folks-shtime and the man who 'broke' the story of Kruschev's secret speech and the decimation of Yiddish culture in the Stalinist era. Hersh's biography is still waiting to be written.

Coming on November 4: Rokhl Oyerbakh, The Bridge Between Wartime and Postwar Testimony

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.

All events free and open to the public.

Paul Robeson

(Go and read my new column on Paul Robeson and Yiddish and then come back and read the rest)

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.” 

from We Are Long Overdue for a Paul Robeson Revival by Peter Dreier

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.

The Future of the Past of Yiddish Cinema

My latest Golden City is up and in honor of this summer's Film Forum retrospective **, it's all about Yiddish Cinema.

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 Present in 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 

Archival Treasures

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...