The Ultimate Yiddish Meme

An attentive reader tells me this image was created to publicize the summer Yiddish course in Tel Aviv. I highly recommend you check out their page

Why 'Ashkenormativity' Isn't a Thing

(cross-posted at Jewschool)

Maybe you’ve seen it by now, first in New Voices and then in the Forward. Thanks to author Jonathan Katz, the conflation of 'Ashkenazi' with 'Jewish' is no longer the problem with no name. Now it’s the problem with the really, really awkward name: Ashkenormativity. In ‘Learning to Undo Ashkenormativity,’  Katz urges us to uncouple Jewish from Ashkenazi. Further, Sephardic culture, he writes, is suppressed by Ashkenazi hegemony and Ashkenazim justify this suppression by claiming their culture to be more progressive and more egalitarian than the presumably retrograde Sephardim. Now, these are some pretty big claims. But Katz's thesis seems to have resonated with enough people to make it worth a closer look.

Katz’s analysis draws on the ubiquitous language of critical theory. For example, I assume the newly coined Ashkenormativity is a nod to ‘heteronormativity’, a term coming out of early 1990s Queer Theory. Heteronormativity is a discourse which enforces the naturalness of heterosexual male-female pairings and excludes the possibility of that which is non-heterosexual. Presumably, it follows that Ashkenormativity is a Jewish discourse in which Ashkenazi is the default, one enforced by media, education and other communal institutions.

If majority white, European Jewish institutions have done a piss poor job of recognizing that not all Jews are white or European (a gross understatement), at the same time, non-European, non-white Jews have developed vibrant, independent networks of their own. I’m thinking of the Syrian community of Brooklyn and Deal, NJ and the Persian community of Great Neck and Los Angeles, just to start. Heteronormativity is a discourse with state power behind it, one which resists non-heterosexual agency, often violently. The Jewish American scene today is so much more complicated and diffuse than such an analogy would permit.

Katz could have just as easily framed his argument around the even more topical ‘check your [   ] privilege.’ The new vocabulary of power and ‘privilege’ has been incredibly successful at creating dialogue around some of the thorniest questions facing us today. Are there structural advantages and disadvantages accruing to different races, classes, and genders? How does history inflect the individual experience in the world? How can an individual with more privilege use that privilege to be an ally to those with less? The answers to many of these questions require sensitivity to history and awareness that events of even hundreds of years ago continue to shape our present reality.

Katz exhorts his fellow Ashkenazim to learn about Sephardi and Mizrahi history “and ... not in the ‘heroic Ashkenazi savior’ mode.” I’ve never heard anyone refer to ‘heroic Ashkenazi savior mode’ but I’m quite familiar with the problematic figure of the ‘white savior’ discovering the Other; think of Bono in Africa. The White Savior discovers people and cultures which have existed for centuries. He presumes to speak on their behalf, often imposing culturally inappropriate solutions rather than listening to those he claims to help. 

Rather than critically interrogate, Katz reifies socio-racial binaries like Ashkenazi-Sephardi. But if we're dismantling cultural hegemony, mustn't we also be building a discourse with room for the global multiplicity of Jewishness? Nowhere does Katz propose an alternative framework that would make visible traditionally marginalized communities, communities swallowed up in monolithic concepts like Sepharad. 

I don’t doubt his good intentions, but Katz is too eager to critique without first defining terms. By doing so, he comes perilously close to becoming what he warns against. Indeed, Katz critiques the supposed erasure of one culture by another with an argument itself predicated on erasing cultural differences and ignoring the way one group historically used the other to construct its own Whiteness.

In order to understand that, however, we have to unpack a couple things, starting with Ashkenaz. The word Ashkenaz is found in the Tanakh and eventually came to be applied to the medieval Jewish settlement in the Rhineland area. As the Jews moved east, they took Ashkenaz with them. And though Ashkenaz came to refer to an enormous area, from the Rhineland to Russia, there was always a tremendous cultural diversity within its boundaries, the most important boundary being between the Jews of Eastern Europe and German language identified Central European Jews. Beginning in the early 19th century, with the advent of the Jewish Enlightenment, the relationship between German Jews and their Eastern co-religionists has been one in which German Jews constructed an identity explicitly predicated on the Otherness of Eastern Jews, an identity which elevated German Jews in contrast to the primitive Ostjudn.

If German Jews were to distinguish themselves from those other inhabitants of Ashkenaz, they needed to look outside for a new cultural model. And where they looked was (a highly idealized version of)  medieval Spain. The great historian Ismar Schorsch describes this historical phenomenon in his classic essay, The Myth of Sephardic Superiority. It’s no surprise that a giant picture of Maimonides appears at the top of Katz’s article in The Forward. The figure of Maimonides was, and apparently still is, among the most evocative in this turn toward Sepharad. One example from Schorsch’s The Myth of Sephardic Superiority should suffice:

Between 1794 and 1795, a German maskil named Aaron Wolfsohn published a Hebrew language satire called Siha be-Eretz ha-Hayim (A Conversation in Paradise.) In it, the founder of the Haskalah, Moses Mendelssohn, arrives in paradise. There he is welcomed by another Moses, the medieval Sephardic philosopher, Moses ben Maimon-- Maimonides. Maimonides is relieved at Mendelssohn’s arrival, saving him, as it happens,  from the uncouth badgering of a Polish talmudic scholar who is demanding that Maimonides test his learning. The Polish scholar cares nothing for philosophy; he’s only concerned with “matters of import-- the laws governing sacrifices, family purity, and financial affairs.” As for theology “he firmly believed that lightning was created to punish the wicked and personally warded off its destructive force by placing salt on the four corners of his table and opening the book of Genesis.”

Maimonides asks Mendelssohn to explain what has brought Ashkenazi Jews to such a vulgar state. In this way Wolfsohn, the author of the satire, is able to place a typical maskilic critique of Eastern European Jews into the mouth of the great emancipator himself. 

At the close of the story, Moses (no last name needed) appears to welcome Mendelssohn to Paradise. It’s a powerful, if crude, encapsulation of a new cultural dynamic ushered in by the Haskalah. As Schorsch writes: “Collapsing the Moses of Egypt and the Moses of Dessau into the Moses of Cordoba rendered the philosophic strain of Spanish Judaism both pristine and normative.”

The imagined Sephardic tradition was so appealing to German Jews because of its ultimate connection to Greek learning and its “implicit univeralism”- one perfectly suited to the new goals of integration and assimilation. The imagined Sephardic tradition was everything the little Polish Jew of Wolfsohn’s story could never be. As Schorsch demonstrates, the self-conscious emulation of an imagined Sephardic Golden Age found expression in, among other things, architecture, literature, and normative Hebrew pronunciation.

If you think the 19th century obsession with an imaginary Sephardic ideal has no political or cultural implications today, try speaking Ashkenazi Hebrew in the 90% of the Jewish world where the havara sefardit is normative. I’m always amazed at the strong emotions – anger, disgust, pity—aroused by the mere sound of a final sof. Forget about arguing for the inherent value of Yiddish. Disgust at the mere sound of Ashkenaz is itself bound up with the history of Zionism, also a product, in large part, of an ideological repudiation of Eastern Europe. 

So, if history is more complex than an Ashkenaz-Sepharad binary, and the cultural dynamic is, among other things, a product of hundreds of years of rhetorical negation of one group to the benefit of another, why does this idea of Ashkenormativity have so much traction? What’s it really getting at?

When I probe people about what they think Ashkenormativity is, and why it’s problematic, what comes up is the presumption of Jewish whiteness.  (For the sake of argument, I’m going to ignore the reality of Jews who are both non-white and Ashkenazi.) American Jews are largely of  European descent. (Though one of the tragic failures of the latest Pew survey was a total lack of inquiry into the linguistic and cultural affiliations of American Jews and thus we're lacking in hard numbers as to how many American Jews identify as Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Sephardi, etc.)

In any case, white, European Jews still make up the majority of the American Jewish demographic. And the flip side of cultural and racial homogeneity is the uncomfortable possibility that encounters between white (largely European) Jews and Jews of color will be defined by a kind of self-absorption that plays out as dismissive, exclusionary or condescending. 

The exclusion of Jews of color from American Jewish discourse is a problem and we (desperately) need to define and talk about. But we already have a word for it: Racism. With a big dollop of ignorance. I’m all in favor of building a Jewish community which is less racist. Halevai! But does that racism really spring from something unique to ‘Ashkenazi’ culture? Indeed, what unites Jews everywhere is the smug certainty that real Jews look like (and pray like and eat like and vote like) they do. I have Syrian friends whose families would rather die than allow them to marry one of us (Yiddishy Yids). And when white elites in Israel use state power to create permanent underclasses of North African, Arab and Ethiopian Jews, yup, that’s racist. (Really fucking racist.) But to imagine that somehow Yiddish, that reviled, shat upon yerushe of millions of Israeli and American Jews, bears responsibility as cultural oppressor, it really beggars belief. 

The problem isn’t too much cultural specificity on the part of one group, it’s not enough for everyone. A few jokey words of Yiddish sprinkled through American Jewish culture does not a hegemony make. Though I often complain about the marginalization of Yiddish, at the same time I emphasize that I am a linguistic maximalist. The health of global Jewry depends on access to the multiplicity of Jews and Jewishness. The future of Jews everywhere depends on inculcating an understanding of one's history and culture, and that can only come through a respect for cultural specificities.

Katz complains that Ashkenazi and Sephardi institutions exist separately. But it is making room for those cultural differences, and honoring their boundaries, which is what we really need to be fighting for.

BREAKING: Global Coalition of Jewish Leaders Set to Unveil Revolutionary Continuity Program

BREAKING: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is now meeting with top American philanthropists and community leaders ahead of the announcement of new continuity program dubbed 'The First Mitzvah.' Details are still under wraps until official launch on Wednesday night, but insiders say 'The First Mitzvah' will be the first outreach program dedicated to increasing sexual engagement among unmarried Jews, across gender/sex/nusach. No combination is off the table, per the findings of a ground breaking strategic plan, the product of a five year study by Steven J. Cohen and Steven J. Boym. According to a Steven: "What we found is that sexual intercourse produces feel good hormones like oxytocin. Young people like sex. Like, really, really like it. Also, did you read that How to Train your Husband article in the Times? It's like that. If we can get young Jews to identify the sensation of orgasm with being near another Jew, our projections show that in-married Jewish couples may increase by as much as 18%."

What's so revolutionary about 'The First Mitzvah' is its cross denominational participation. Reached for comment at 770, Yehuda Krinsky of the worldwide Chabad moment said "Moshiach is coming and we are providing the towel. Borekh hashem" 

Funding of 'The First Mitzvah' is said to be at a mere $500 million for the first three years, until studies can be done to show whether giving young Jews lots of money to fuck can really work. An anonymous source at UJA-Federation was hopeful, though, 'No one thought thousands of Jewish teenagers would take an all expense paid vacation to Israel. Now, if we can make boning as accessible, and as lucrative, we believe we can reverse some of the most worrying trends of the last thirty years. And let's face it, after this, we're all out of ideas."

Can I Pass Along a Jewish Identity to My Children?

The Forward has a new column on inter-faith relationships called 'Seesaw.' I find it interesting, especially because the questions asked reflect concerns held by far more than just those in inter-faith relationships. Like, this week, someone engaged to a non-Jewish man wrote in to ask how she could transmit secular Judaism to her children:

I’m a woman engaged to be married to a wonderful man. He’s a non-theistic, pagan-interested Unitarian Universalist, and I’m a non-theistic Jew. Lately, I’ve been preoccupied with the question of how to raise our future children with a Jewish identity. I’m not interested in raising them in the Jewish faith (or any faith, for that matter), but I really want them to connect with the cultural aspect and hold onto that identity, just as I have. So, how does a secular Jew pass along secular Judaism to her children 

Lately, I’ve been preoccupied with the question of how to raise our future children with a Jewish identity.

I've written before about the work that the 'identity' concept has been doing for American Jews. Rather than articulating which aspects of Jewish life are important to them (prayer, history, texts, languages, history, folkways, music, cuisine etc) and then figuring out how to transmit whatever it is that is most vital to their Jewishness, generations of American Jews have been able to wave away the problem of specificity with a single magic word. Identity.

We came to believe, with perfect faith, that there was a thing called identity, a Jewish continuity with a somewhat mysterious Jewish content. Jewish feeling without Jewish doing. And, failing to teach our kids alef-beys, failing to instill a sense of connection to Israel, failing to give them even a rudimentary idea of Jewish history, American Jewish parents could tell themselves at least their kids had an identity. Maybe that identity was ultimately a shared hatred of Hebrew school and ambivalence around Christmas, but at least it was something. Right?

Belief in Identity as a real, transmissible thing allowed us to avoid the hard choices faced by American Jews when being American and being Jewish are so fundamentally at odds.
As I wrote last year, identity has served as a kind of ideology:

The integration of American Jews, especially Eastern European Jews, was the great project of the Jewish elite of the first half of the century. That integration came with many seemingly irresolvable contradictions and tensions. For example, the terms of integration of Eastern European Jews were set, in part, by the German Jewish elite, a group traditionally less than enamored of Eastern European Jews.   

But the most fundamental of these tensions was a reimagining of the Jewish way of life as an American style religion. Turning Jewishness into the Jewish religion was like stuffing 10 pounds of kishke into a five pound casing. It was lumpy as hell, but it worked, sort of. 

As it happened, the vast majority of American Jews didn’t want religion or religious commitments. No matter. Identity as ideology could reframe the multitude of contradictions now at the heart of American Jewish life, including the rejection of religion by American Jews. Identity made it possible for sociologist Herbert Gans to make an observation which, 50 years earlier, would have seemed downright bizarre. In a 1951 ethnographic study he wrote: “In Park Forest... adult Jews quite consciously rejected any involvement in the religious and cultural aspects of the Jewish community, while trying to teach the children to be Jews.”

If the letter writer had come to me with this question, I would have asked her what specifically being Jewish means to her and then tried to help her figure out how to share that with her kids. Actually, I'd like to sit down with the greater Jewish institutional world, the ones always casting about for ways to 'meaningfully' 'engage' and 'revitalize', and ask them: what matters to you? What's the Jewish thing most important to you that you couldn't be Jewish without? All the foundations in the world can't fix the problem that so many leaders, and so many parents, have no meaningful connection to Jewish life and no sense of what they urgently need to pass on to the next generation of Jews.

More on Intermarriage (Part 1.5)

What's been missing from the thousands (millions?) of words written about the Pew survey is any kind of serious critique of that institutional apparatus which surveys, comments on, and claims to lead the group we call American Jews. Why do these so-called leaders keep writing surveys that do little to measure the Jewish lives of actual Jewish Americans? And what is really at stake in the so-called intermarriage crisis? I might even add, whose crisis is it? I categorically reject it as my own, so I'll get that out of the way now. 

Am I committed to marrying a Jewish man? Yes. Am I in my late 30s and still single? Yes. Do I sometimes suspect that valuing New York City and its unique Jewish community AND trying to find a Jewish partner in the most screwed up dating pool in the country renders my own particular hopes moot? Obviously.

And while I couldn't imagine not having a Jewish partner, I understand, intellectually, that the decision to marry belongs to each individual and is hers alone to make. Emotionally, yeah, I get a little sad seeing my Jewish friends choose non-Jewish partners. Not because I worry about the looming demographic crisis, but because I want my friends to have the same kind of deep connection to Jewishness that has shaped my entire adult life and given purpose to everything I do. In my more judgmental moments, I wonder what choice they would make if they had a more positive, more intellectually rewarding, more joyful connection to Jewish life. And then I step back and ask, who the fuck am I to judge them?

I know plenty of committed Jews who would make the exact same judgment about me, a bacon eating, non-shabes keeping, non-procreating single Jewess. I'm sure they wish that I could experience the kind of rich Jewish life that they do, with the warmth of holiday and shabes meals, nakhes from kids, the security of a community and faith. 

Could I start keeping kosher at any moment? I sure could. And my friend who marries a non-Jewish spouse, could that person convert? I've seen it happen. Could the non-Jewish spouse commit to raising Jewish kids without converting? Absolutely. Could two apathetic Jews marry each other and raise children with zero affirmative connection to Jewish life? Do I even need to answer that?

The best, and most dangerous and scariest thing about Jewish life in America today is its dynamic quality. I call this potential Dynamic Yiddishkayt, and it privileges process over result, journey over destination. Dynamic Yiddishkayt recognizes that Jewish lives aren't flat, ahistorical objects of study, but ever changing potentialities.

On an individual level, almost anything is possible in American Jewish life and in any permutation you can think of. But on a macro level, the lives of American Jews, intermarried or not, will reflect the depth, or lack, of connection to Jewish history, culture and life. 

And, if you ask me, that's where our greatest problem lies. You can't look at intermarriage statistics without looking at every other marker of Jewish life. Jewish literacy is shockingly low. Forget about knowing any Hebrew or Yiddish (or Ladino or any other historical Jewish language), half of American Jews don't even know the alef-beys. A third (and realistically, probably more) identify as Jews of no religion. 

As I've been laying out in previous blog posts, the downward trend as regards pretty much every substantive aspect of Jewish life in America has been noted and studied for decades.  What's scandalous to me is not that so many American Jews don't care about religion (per the Pew study), but that a member of our media elite could express surprise about it, as Jane Eisner did in the New York Times in 2013. 

The demographic trends we see today were set in motion decades ago and anyone familiar with Jewish American history before 1990 would know that.  I'm less concerned about the choices of average American Jews today than I am with the narrative told and re-told by those with those with the  power, leaders like Jane Eisner. And for the power elite, intermarriage (and its less inflammatory cousin 'continuity'), not literacy, has been privileged as the key to a Jewish future. Why?

That's where British sociologist Rogers Brubaker comes in. Brubaker's understanding of ethnic groups (and ethnic conflict) can provide a different perspective onto the puzzling relationship between American Jews and their putative leaders. Perhaps it's not an accident that those leaders are so out of touch with the average American Jew, but rather a function of the leader-group dynamic.

Brubaker has written extensively about nationalism and ethnic conflict, especially in Eastern Europe. "Ethnicity Without Groups" addresses what he sees as the problem of groups and 'groupism' in the study of ethnicity, race and nationhood.  Groupism means "...  the tendency to treat ethnic groups, nations and races as substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed."  

The very act of surveying American Jews (as with the Pew study), whether on intermarriage or anything else, is a kind of group making project that serves the interests of the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs as much, if not more, than the members of American Jewry. 

(To be continued...)

The Intermarriage Crisis is a Scam

Another day, another skirmish in the Jewish continuity wars, this time with a partisan slant.

So, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz made some remarks a few weeks ago at a Jewish event within her district. Conservative media pounced on her speech, particularly comments in which she called intermarriage and assimilation 'problems.' Looking at the coverage of her comments, it's pretty clear that the whole thing is mostly a light breeze blown into a tornado within the right wing echo chamber. I don't think most of those covering it really care about the issue one way or another, they're just looking to score points against the woman right below Nancy Pelosi on the Republican Most Frothed Over list.

DWS's comments also got some traction within the Jewish media, as there's little better click bait than intermarriage. Intermarriage: Good or Bad for the Jews? is a perennial headline. On one side: the vast majority of American Jews who either marry non-Jews or have close family members who are intermarried. On the other side: A handful of Jewish communal elites who have chosen to isolate intermarriage as a 'danger' to the health of American Judaism and who frame it as a phenomenon which can be stopped or slowed in isolation. The 'on the one hand' 'on the other' presentation gives the appearance of balance, when in fact,  the astronomical rates of intermarriage demonstrate that intermarriage is THE reality of American Jewish life and is a product of patterns of Jewish American life going back decades.

The soi-disant 'serious' Jewish conservative media has taken the DWS kerfuffle as an opportunity to flog two dead horses - so called liberal weakness and the danger of intermarriage, wrapped up in the eminently hateable Chair from south Florida. After her remarks came to light, DWS had to walk back her condemnation of intermarriage. That just made them angrier. And gave them another chance to advance their master narrative: Liberals are hampered by their fear of giving offense. They are unable to protect the Jewish community because of their adoption of the values of multiculturalism and pluralism. Liberals refuse to call out the dangers of intermarriage. Ergo: Liberals are destroying the Jewish future.

L'moshl, writing in Commentary, Jonathan Tobin says:

Intermarriage is so prevalent that the intermarried and their loved ones are now so ubiquitous throughout Jewish life that they form a powerful interest group. Since many if not most of them have now come to regard advocacy of endogamy as an insult, it has become next to impossible for communal organizations, especially those umbrella groups like federations that revolve around fundraising, to broach the issue. Instead, they prefer to speak of it as an opportunity rather than a dilemma, a foolish position that ignores the stark statistical evidence provided by Pew that shows the children of intermarriage are far less likely to get a Jewish education or raise a Jewish family than those who marry other Jews. The result of this silence is that the issues discussed by Pew are not being addressed in a way that gives the community any chance to even slow, let alone reverse, the demographic trends.

Intermarriage is so prevalent that the intermarried and their loved ones are now so ubiquitous throughout Jewish life that they form a powerful interest group. This is the way they talk about you. This is the kind of rhetoric used to talk about the majority of American Jews. You are not fellow Jews, you're a sinister 'special interest group.'

But the majority of American Jews aren't a cancer on Judaism or a feared Fifth Column in our midst. They are our loved ones, friends, family, and they are making the choices that are to be expected from a Jewish community which has so thoroughly adopted the American values of individualism, egalitarianism, monolingualism and consumerism. As I've said this many times before, the Americanization of American Jews was pretty much fait accompli by mid-century. It is the reason that, in addition to intermarrying, American Jews have shockingly low Jewish literacy rates. 48% of Pew respondents did not even know the alef-beys. Why is no one up in arms about that? Why was the reaction to the 1991 NJPS (the one where the rates of intermarriage finally came into the spotlight) to give all American teens an identity making vacation, instead of subsidizing comprehensive Jewish education?

I don't know. I'm not a billionaire. Personally, I think isolating one symptom of Americanization, and framing it as the most urgent problem of our time, is the height of irresponsibility on the part of our leaders. 

Jonathan Tobin, and many, many like him, think that at this late date, all you need to do is hector American Jews into marrying each other and the 'intermarriage crisis' can be overcome. Like, no one thought to hand out the pamphlet on making Jewish babies and now Liberals, with their PC nonsense, are too pussy to do it. This is the intermarriage 'crisis' narrative at its most politicized, and most useless.

Indeed, why this focus on intermarriage at all? In her recent book Jewish on Their Own Terms: How Intermarried Couples Are Changing American Judaism , Dr. Jennifer Thompson* argues that leaders focus on intermarriage because doing so creates a false sense of insider-outsider discourse. We can clearly see by the actions of intermarried Jews that they are on the outside of the normative Jewish community. But, she argues, what makes an intermarried Jew so different from (or worse than) the average in-married Jew who has no Hebrew literacy, does not keep kosher or shabes, and has little connection to the Jewish institutional world? Thompson's fresh, outsider perspective forces us to ask some tough questions about targeting intermarried Jews and the way we use them, and the intermarriage 'crisis' to construct ourselves as 'good' (or better) Jews.


The obsession with intermarriage strikes me as bizarre. Not just bizarre, but sadly ahistorical. American Jews are American and must be reckoned with as Americans with American values, intermarried or not. To do otherwise is to make a lot of self-important noise, but accomplish nothing.


*Full disclosure, Dr. Thompson is an old friend of mine whose work I respect very much.

The Rest is Comments...

Now go study...


In case you haven't heard, Tablet Magazine has launched an offense against the world of online trollery. Tablet will now require readers to pay for the privilege of commenting. The fee is modest, $2 gets you all the comments you want for a day. The idea is to put a speed bump, not a wall, in the way of overexcited commenters.

For the record, I think it's a great idea. We'll see how it shapes the comments on a high traffic site like Tablet. I think it will be for the better. But...

Small time outfits like this blog have a very different problem. No comments! No one's paying me to blog. Indeed, I put an enormous amount of effort into what I write (which is why my output tends to be infrequent) with little to no reward, other than the satisfaction of the writing itself. Which is nice, but it would be a lot nicer if there was more feedback from my readers.

So, I'm thinking of starting a new commenting policy of my own. From now on, you will have to pay if you read something you like and don't leave a comment. I'm using a super secret technology that may or may not have come from a scavenged UFO at Roswell. Like velcro and night vision goggles, but bloggy.

What do you think?

Yiddish Revival in a Bus Station? Oy Gevalt!

Oy Gevalt is right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toyznt Tamen A New Yiddish Song Event January 28th

I am excited to let everyone know that my dear friend, Miryem-Khaye Seigel, will be celebrating the release of her first CD, Toyznt Tamen. Miriam-Khaye is a brilliant interpreter of Yiddish song, acclaimed gamine of the Yiddish stage, Jewish librarian par excellence and now, composer of new Yiddish song. Guys, this lady is the real deal. I hope I'll see you on January 28th at the Museum at Eldridge Street. And if not then, please pick up her CD online. 

Here's a taste of the new album, an original song about the wonder and excitement of life in the Groyser Epl:

Reaching Out to the Future From the Past

As it's the new year, I'm taking the opportunity to redo, reorganize and, where necessary, reacquaint myself with my library. I pulled down this slim volume of Morris Rosenfeld's poetry and prose for reshelving. I couldn't help but spend some time reading the intro material and flipping through the wonderful translations therein.

 (Here's Morris Rosenfeld)

It's always Movember in Yiddishland

This quote from Itche Goldberg spoke to me:

Jewish creativity in English, or in any other language, in order to achieve its maximum color and richness, needs to extend and integrate this heritage. Yiddish literature is not limited to a given number of Yiddish-speaking generations, nor is it on the verge of extinction with their passing. Yiddish creativity is an integral part of the cultural pattern of our people's continuity. It transcends generations and reaches out into the future.

-From the Introduction to Morris Rosenfeld: Selections From His Poetry and Prose YKUF (1964)

The volume also features many wonderful illustrations, like this one, by E.M. Lilien, which appears with the short story 'Haman's Warning, A Purim Fantasy.'

I gravitated toward this particular volume because a few weeks ago I finished rereading the wonderful All of a Kind Family series (reissued by the also wonderful Lizzie Skurnick Books imprint.) In All of a Kind Family Uptown, we see Ella singing Morris Rosenfeld's O ir kleyne likhtelekh (in English translation, alas.) 

O ir kleyne likhtelekh 

Ir dertselt geshikhtelekh 

Mayselekh on tzol 

Ir dertseylt fun blutikeyt 

Beryeshaft un mutikeyt 

Vunder fun amol.

What's interesting is that the story is set in 1917. Rosenfeld died in 1924. Which means that for the girls of AoaKF, Rosenfeld wasn't some long ago bard of a disappeared world, he was a guy who published poems and songs in the Yiddish papers and those poems and songs were being learned and transmitted in real time.  Hard to imagine, almost a hundred years later. As an adult who cares about these things, I wish that Sydney Taylor had at least included his name or some yiddish so young readers would have a clue what Ella was singing.

Morris Rosenfeld: Selections From His Poetry and Prose includes a short story called Hanukah; Jewish Self-Defense. The story is introduced with the first verse of O ir kleyne likhtelekh (in English) but is quite different from the mythic tone of the song. Rather, the story positions, quite explicitly, the "[M]odern Jewish Heroes in Russia" as the heirs to the Maccabee tradition. Don't forget, this volume was brought out in the 1960s by YKUF, the Communist associated Yiddisher Kultur Farband.

"For thousands of years Jews waited for miracles and mocked the spirit of the Maccabees. For generations they exchanged the sword for groveling 'shtadlones' (intercession with the authorities.) They celebrated the 'Miracle of Hanukah' and continuously kept in mind the fact that 'all the holidays will be abolished, except Purim.' The miracle will never disappear.... Not the Torah will save the fist, but the fist will save the Torah. The sword and not the yarmulke will protect the Jew in the bloody lands of his enemies."

I wonder what Mama and Papa of All of a Kind Family would make of that?

Anyway... Did you use this holiday to do any book related organization?