A Brief History of the Evil Eye and Yiddish Anti-Demonic Technologies
Thursdays, June 11, 18 & 25 at 7pm EST (online)
Belief in the Evil Eye has been with us for 5000 years and is found all over the globe. Disease, sudden death, bad luck, sleeplessness, crop failure, and impotence have all been blamed on the power of a malevolent human gaze. Jewish belief in the Evil Eye (ayin-hore) appears in core rabbinic texts, as well as in Jewish folk cultures around the world.
If you’ve ever put a red ribbon around a crib, or uttered a kinehore (keyn ayin-hore, Yiddish for “no evil eye”), you have drawn on a rich tradition of apotropaic (anti-demonic) magic that goes back thousands of years.
But the history of the Evil Eye, and the Jewish defense
against it, goes far beyond red ribbons and kinehores. Indeed, in many
shtetls and towns, you could find Jewish men and women who specialized in
exorcising the Evil Eye. Where a specialist wasn’t available, ordinary mothers
and fathers often had their own techniques for lifting bewitchments.
If you think the danger of the Evil Eye is a thing of the past, you might want to reconsider. More than any other time in history, we are now vulnerable to an infinite number of eyes, seeing us from every angle. Technology has been a force multiplier for the malevolent human gaze. If you've ever posted your new car/vacation/graduation pics, you might want to learn more about the ancient dangers awaiting us online.
Join me this June for an entertaining and eye-opening exploration of the Jewish evil eye and its global context. All classes are recorded and available to watch afterwards.
Email with questions or to register ($100): cjcrokhl@gmail.com
This June I'm offering a new leyenkrayz: we will read six short stories from Found Treasures over six weeks. (Six consecutive Wednesdays starting June 10 at 7pm) This is really a hybrid-leyenkrayz. Each week we will read the story in English translation ahead of time. I send out the Yiddish text and in class, we read selections from the Yiddish out loud, along with a class discussion of the story in English.
This new leyenkrayz is coming after the success of my
first leyenkrayz over April-May. We read the wonderful new translation
of Rokhl Faygenberg's 1905 memoir, The Winding Road. Each week we read part of the Yiddish and for week 4, we had a visit from the translator, Tamara Helfer.
This hybrid format turned out to be perfect for Yiddish learners who aren't ready to read an entire Yiddish novel on their own. Reading the English ahead of the Yiddish aids comprehension tremendously. It also allows beginner and intermediate students the opportunity to think about translation in a more complex way, as reading aloud in class naturally leads to discussion of the many layers of translation choices.
The Found Treasuresleyenkrayz begins Wednesday, June 10 at 7pm (EST). Roughly half of each class session is for reading the Yiddish text out loud, then we discuss the story. In addition, where appropriate, I give short talks about various elements of the story and context. We might even have supplemental readings that illuminate the main text. In The Winding Road, Rokhl Faygenberg describes how important "shund" novels were for her as a teenager, especially those of Shomer and Yankev Dinezon. In fact, her first literary creation was fanfic based on the characters in Dinezon's Young Dark Man. We when we got to that section of the book, I sent around a sample chapter of Young Dark Man so we could get a sense of what Faygenberg was actually reading.
If you're interested in joining the upcoming leyenkrayz ($200 for six sessions) drop me an email and you'll get payment and registration info. I'd love to see you there!
Questions or to sign up and pay, email: cjcrokhl@ gmail dot com
At the end of last year's class, participants said they wanted more class time! So, this year, we will have six sessions in which to learn together, in preparation for the new year and High Holiday season. Classes start on September 9 and will meet twice a week for three weeks, 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm ET.
Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, Poland
Full description:
Just as Judaism is a religion of sacred time, liminal times and spaces play a powerful role in traditional Yiddish folk belief. The month of Elul, the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, are set aside for special prayers, visiting the graves of ancestors, and preparing to be written into the Book of Life for the new year. It is during Elul that we find the unique Eastern European women's folk magic ritual known as feldmestn: measuring the cemetery (and its graves) to make special holiday candles.
Feldmestn brings together three of the most important symbols of Ashkenazi women's folk magic and ritual: cemetery, candles, and personal, vernacular prayer (tkhines). But the cemetery was a key locale for much more than measuring candles. It was also the site of the plague wedding (mageyfe khasene), a place to gather curative and healing materials, and an essential site for ongoing communication with the dead (kayver-oves).
These customs can be uncovered through a variety of Yiddish texts (in translation) including ethnographic accounts, memoirs, newspapers, songs, and Yiddish tkhines.The course will also place a special emphasis on learning about these customs through short stories, particularly the work of Sarah Hamer Jacklyn.
Join journalist and scholar Rokhl Kafrissen to learn aboutfeldmestnandkayver-oves, as well as other beliefs and customs related torosh khoydesh(the new Hebrew month) and the Yamim Noraim(Days of Awe). What did these customs and practices look like? How have they been adapted and reinvented for our modern life? How can Yiddish folklore and folk magic speak to the modern world?
All sessions are held live via Zoom. Recordings will be available to all registrants.
It's khanike/xanike/hanukah/chanuka and we all need a little more light (and a little more joy.)
I've put together some very last minute Klez-Yiddish listings for the next few days, mostly in NYC and environs, but a few beyond, too. Also, make sure to check out the awesome new video from the ever-brilliant Frank London. (Make sure to read to the end...)
Saturday December 9
3-8 pm, L’chaim to Light: A Hanukkah Celebration. Wine tastings, food, music. Sideways Bar Ellenville (Hudson valley)
7:30 pm Michael Winograd & the Honorable Mentshn, with special guest Sasha Lurje at Flatbush Jewish Center, Brooklyn.
Tuesday December 12
9:00 pm Branches of Light: The Sway Machinery's Holiday Ball (Jeremiah Lockwood), with Kohenet Shamira and Eleonore Weill. At NuBlu, tickets here
BONUS Sunday December 17
1:00 pm We Are Here: A Yiddish Meet and Greet, with performers Miryem-Khaye Seigel and Zisl Slepovitch. At the Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center, 3301 Bainbridge Avenue, Bronx. More details here.
8:00 pm Isle of Klezbos release party for "Yiddish Silver Screen," at Joe's Pub. More details here.
ON TOUR: Throughout the 8 days of khanike, Michael Winograd & the Honorable Mentshn will be on tour in cities up and down the East Coast including New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Check for more details on his website ...
I'm very excited to share the first video from Frank London's new Klezmer Brass All Stars album, a new khanike banger: GREEKZ (Yevonim)
Between Heaven and Earth: Yiddish Women's Folklore, Rituals, & Magic
I'm so happy to share that this fall I'll be teaching my first class for the Yiddish Book Center. I've created a brand new course on the Ashkenazi folk magic and ritual of women++. (While the folk magic and ritual domain was one where women played significant leadership roles, it did not exclude men.) We'll be covering plague weddings, feldmestn (grave and cemetery measuring), candle magic, the indispensable art of evil eye removal, protections for pregnancy and childbirth, Ashkenazi herbalism, divination, and more.
We'll talk about why some magical practices have persisted for hundreds of years, despite the disapproval of the rabbis, while others have almost completely disappeared. And we'll explore the role (or lack thereof) of folk magic and folk religion in American Judaism.
July 21 is the eighth yortsayt of Theodore Bikel, at least according to the western calendar. He passed in 2015, at the age of 91. Bikel led the kind of outsized life which is almost impossible to sum up. His Wikipedia page lists his many careers as “actor, folk singer, musician, composer, unionist, and political activist.” But those many careers overlapped and reinforced each other, with the sum of the parts adding up to a whole which was extraordinary.
He acted on Broadway, in the movies, and on television. He fought on behalf of American civil rights and for Soviet Jews. He created the role of Captain von Trapp in “The Sound of Music” on Broadway, was the president of the Actor’s Equity union, and appeared as Worf’s adoptive Jewish father on "Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Theo Bikel was a giant, not just on the stage, but on the world stage.
In remembering Bikel today, I want to focus on just one slice of his astoundingly diverse body of work: his career as a folk musician.
Even his folk music oeuvre is too great to summarize here. He started recording “folk music” albums in 1955, putting out 18 albums for the Elektra label alone. Jewish material was just one part of his global repertoire.
In 1958 he recorded “Theodore Bikel sings Jewish Folks Songs”
In 1965, he recorded “Theodore Bikel Sings Yiddish Theater and Folk Songs” for Elektra
In 1959, he was one of the co-founders of the Newport Folk Festival, along with Pete Seeger. Seeger was another long lived, American cultural giant, as a musician, activist and co-founder of the folk revival magazine, Sing Out! in 1950.
I recently spent some time wandering through the pages of Sing Out’s early issues, now available digitally on archive.org. You can read my latest GOLDEN CITY column about it, here.
Of course, Theo Bikel was a frequent presence in the pages of Sing Out! in those years. In April 1960, he was on Broadway in “The Sound of Music” when he appeared on the cover of the magazine.
A note on the inside cover describes Bikel as having “achieved an enviable reputation and popularity.” At that time, Bikel was as close as the magazine would come to huge mainstream crossover potential (and advertiser appeal, too.)
Inside the magazine you find “A Backstage Chat” with Bikel, as well as reprints of songs from his repertoire.
In the Summer 1961 issue, to take another example, you could find his name in an “industry roundup” column, noting that he had just signed on with talent impresario Sol Hurok
You’d also see him name checked in one of the many Yiddish folk songs the magazine published, here, Di mezinke oysgegebn. The editors note that a recording of the song can be found on Bikel’s album, “Jewish Folk Songs.”
And finally, he is at the center of this two-page advertising spread:
One page is selling the Goya model guitar. Facing that is the upcoming Grossinger’s First Annual Folk Music and Guitar Festival, September 1961. Bikel meant big business for Sing Out!
Yet, the magazine didn’t pull punches where there was criticism to be made. In the April-May issue of 1961, Ruth Rubin, the groundbreaking folklorist and regular contributor to Sing Out!, published a long and rather devastating review of Bikel’s new song collection, “Folksongs and Footnotes” (the same book advertised as a premium giveaway with the Goya sponsored Grossinger Folk Fest.)
First off, she says, many of these cannot even be considered folksongs, but for Bikel's choice to falsify their authorship.
From Rubin's review of Bikel's collection, "Folksongs and Footnotes."
Bikel, she says, has rushed in "where angels fear to tread..."
Nor can he spot, she says, the difference between an earnest folk song and obvious satire
Ouch
It’s pretty clear that a negative review in Sing Out! had approximately zero effect on Bikel’s career. The magazine needed a popular draw like Bikel far more than he needed them, that’s for sure.
And at a time when many assimilating Jews were embarrassed of Yiddish, or thought it too provincial, Bikel’s mix-and-match strategy of combining songs from many traditions, while not appealing to folklore purists, placed Yiddish on equal footing with other global cultures.
In June 1960, Bikel released “From Bondage to Freedom: Songs of Many Lands, of Tyrants and Slaves, of Free Men and Liberty,” for Elektra records. Yiddish songs like “Di shvue” (the Bundist anthem) “Un du akerst” (so you plow) appear alongside “Les guitares de l’exil” and “Scots Wha Hae.”
In her April-May 1961 review of Bikel’s songbook, Bikel’s version of “Un du akerst” is another target for Rubin’s ire. She dings him for his “limited knowledge” of even the “basic facts” about the song.
What basic facts are those? It was Rubin who tracked down the history of the text, back to an 1864 German song later adapted into Yiddish by Chaim Zhitlowsky. Rubin published her findings in her own songbook, “A Treasury of Jewish Folksong” (1950).
I can imagine Rubin’s irritation that, firstly, Bikel’s book, with a no doubt quite significant mass commercial audience, would introduce factual errors about the song. Secondly, it demonstrated that Bikel was unfamiliar with the important folkloristic work she had already published ten years previously.
For Rubin, this isn't just sloppiness, it's "chutspe."
OOF
If you’re my age (or older), you probably grew up with at least a few of Bikel’s records in your house, maybe you even had some of the Yiddish ones. In addition to his many brilliant contributions to American (and world) culture, Bikel's records were a crucial vehicle for bringing global folksong into American homes. Even today, his version of “Un du akerst” feels fresh and stirring (if not a bit overly macho.)
Ruth Rubin’s criticisms remind me of arguments which persist today in the Yiddish world. Is it better to maintain the Yiddishist’s focus on accuracy and purist respect for the totality of Yiddish culture? Or should we be open to more popular/populist interest in Yiddish, even if it means accepting a certain amount of errors, misapprehensions and, at times, insulting Yinglish misconceptions about the language and culture?
Though I tend to fall on the side of the humorless Yiddishist, when it comes to the life’s work left by Theo Bikel, I must disagree with the most esteemed Ruth Rubin. I am grateful to Bikel, his work, and his lifelong commitment to Yiddish culture. Even the mistakes. All of us would be incalculably poorer without it. Koved zayn ondenk.
I'm very happy to announce that I'll be in conversation with Montreal's Black Ox Orkestar on Thursday, April 20. Last year, the band returned to the (virtual) recording studio and concert stage, after a 15 year hiatus. Their new album, "Everything Returns," is gorgeous and moody, with a sound wrapped in Leonard Cohen-esque colors. In an age of disappointing reboots, "Everything Returns" is exactly the album fans were waiting for.
There’s still a few days left to put the spook in Spooktober. My latest Golden City column is up now and in this one, I look at just a few of the many incarnations of the dybbuk.
Of course, there’s the 1938 Polish produced, Yiddish-language film adaptation of Sh. Ansky's play, der dybbuk. But there’s also a 1960 made for TV, English-language adaptation directed by Sidney Lumet! I had a vague understanding that Lumet came from a Yiddish theater background, but it’s much juicier than that. Sidney was a child actor in the Yiddish theater in New York. He got his start there thanks to his dad, one-time Vilne Troupe member and then New York Yiddish actor, Baruch Lumet. You can read all about that over at the Digital Yiddish Theater Project.
There have been many, many productions and adaptations of Ansky’s dybbuk play, the two I just mentioned are the tip of the dybbuk iceberg. Traditional dybbuk lore has also done its own share of “inspiring” stories. I don’t know how I missed Psi Factor when it was airing in the late 90s, but this bit of forgotten Dan Ackroyd paranormal silliness will appeal to anyone who loves spotting Toronto locations. And in the first season of the show, the Psi Factor cops took on a dybbuk.
Dybbuks aren't just for grown ups! On this episode of Rugrats, the Yiddish-accented grandfather tells a scary story about a dybbuk, which he says is a kind of monster.
Thank God I wasn’t born a dybbuk
One of my absolute favorite YouTubers is Justin Sledge, the man behind the Esoterica channel. Sledge is an academic specializing in Western Occultism and Esotericism. It's really fascinating material presented in a down to earth, accessible format. This week he focused on, what else? the origin of the dybbuk in Jewish philosophy.
As Sledge explains, the concept of a dybbuk, a dead human spirit possessing the body of a living person, only came about relatively late, within 16thcentury Spanish kabbalah. It took a number of philosophical developments to finally get there.
Before that, Judaism, Islam and Christianity had beliefs around possession by malevolent spirits, though not the spirits of formerly living people. Jews in the ancient world were well known for their association with spirit exorcisms. Many of the miracles of Jesus, as Sledge reminds us, were exorcisms! However, after the rise of Christianity and its “embrace” of possession and exorcism, the rabbis lost interest in possession and exorcism. It would take a thousand years, and the rise of kabbalah, for spirit possession to come back to an influential place in Jewish philosophy and theology.
Finally, as I discussed in my column, there has been a bit of a dybbuk renaissance in cinema in the last ten years or so. Unfortunately, the catalyst for most of that “dybbuk revival” is down to what I would call an urban legend, the dybbuk box. (I go a bit more in depth on this “haunted wine box” in the column.) The important thing here is that the dybbuk box urban legend is not a Jewish story, but another take on the modern craze for haunted objects, wherein "Jewish culture" (or an approximation of such) lends a slightly different form to the elements of the genre. But the story is not actually Jewish.
In addition to the movies I covered in the column, the “dybbuk box” pops up elsewhere, as in this 2019 short film, about two couples camping in the desert. One of them accidentally open a “dybbuk box,” unleashing a murderous spirit. If you thought violent possession couldn’t be dull, you haven’t been looking in the right places.
It irritates me when artists (loosely defined) extract Jewish culture and distort it for their own uses. I’m tempted to say that those people are getting dybbuks “wrong.” But if you’re a modern, scientifically minded person who doesn’t believe in a literal reality of spirit possession - and I am - it seems sort of… silly to say that they’re getting the facts about a ghost story wrong.
To go back to Justin Sledge, we can see that the concept of the dybbuk is in fact a historical, contingent phenomenon. If the Jewish world can go from being full of spirit possession experts to a thousand years of No Possession, Please and then on to a kabalistic explosion of possession and dybukim, we understand better that these kinds of supernatural stories change with the times, reflecting the concerns and conditions of the people who tell them. Who am I to say that modern “dybbuk boxes” are stupid, offensive and just plain wrong?
So I won’t say that. But I will say that the “dybbuk box” conceit is one that allows anyone to profit off a fresh angle on a supernatural story (something rare in Hollywood) while marginalizing the Jews who would have otherwise been central to such a story. And at the risk of opening a box full of angry dybbuks, I will indeed call bullshit on any story which exorcises the Jews out of their own myths.
The Algemeyne Entsiklopedye(General Encyclopedia) was a 16-volume set published between 1930 and 1966, with Yiddish and English volumes, some on Jewish topics and others for general knowledge. But that dry description really can't capture the many twists and turns the project took over three decades.
I had a fantastic time chatting with Barry for a book talk sponsored by the Congress for Jewish Culture. I hope you'll give it a watch. He is a wonderful historian and a really engaging speaker.
(And while you're watching the video, make sure you subscribe to the Congress for Jewish Culture YouTube page.)
The men who launched the Algemeyne project hoped:
"...to add a sophisticated Yiddish language encyclopedia to the already blossoming global genre of Jewish encyclopedias in world languages. The Entsiklopedye’s central tension lay between those who felt the goal should be to offer world knowledge for Yiddish readers, and those who urged the Entsiklopedye to educate Jews about their own history. It was a tension that would linger across the Entsiklopedye’s many twists and turns.
For more on the wild history of Yiddish reference books, see my May column, Encyclopedic Knowledge.
Cantors, khazones, and nigunim were central to the work of the Ansky expedition, carried out in the heart of Hasidic Ashkenaz. In contrast with the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, who found the redemption of Jewishness in books and other texts, the Ansky expedition privileged the sensory and sensual, ephemeral and ghostly traces of what they perceived to be a disappearing, pre-modern existence.
And how do you capture a Yiddish ghost? Not with a proton pack, khas v'sholem, but with an Edison wax cylinder phonograph. The expedition made 500 such recordings (in addition to collecting 1,000 melodies and 1500 folk songs.) AvromRekhtman's memoir of the expedition notes many funny and fascinating (and at times, disturbing) encounters between the expedition team and shtetl residents, mediated by this spooky new piece of technology.
A hundred years later, Jewish modernity is still being shaped in the encounter between Jewish researchers and their Hasidic neighbors. I recently caught up with Jeremiah Lockwood to learn more about his research in modern khazones. As we talked, bright lines of connection emerged between the work of the Ansky expedition team and Jeremiah's own work recording the rebel cantors of contemporary Hasidic Williamsburg.
That new record is called "Golden Ages: Brooklyn Chassidic Cantorial Revival Today." But "Hidden Melodies Reveled" - the name of his upcoming Rosh Hashanah concert event with Because Jewish - resonates just as much with the work he's been doing with these Hasidic cantors.
What I discovered in our conversation is that in 2022, Hasidic Williamsburg is not some romantic source of "authentic" Yiddishkayt to be "collected" by objective scientists. Rather, it is a community that, in some surprising ways, is just as alienated from its own past as a child of 1980s Jewish American suburbia, such as myself.
The "hidden melodies" in this case are the recordings of Golden Age khazones, made a hundred years ago by men who prized improvisation and artistry. In order to access this tradition, the Hasidic artists whom Jeremiah recorded had to do their own kind of salvage ethnography. Indeed, one of the cantors got into this repertoire after finding a cassette tape of Golden Age khazones underneath a washing machine! ...
...many cantors took new names when they performed for non-Jewish audiences, at the opera, for example, or even in vaudeville. “Name changes,” he said, “reflect the polyglossia of modern Jewish life. Jews weren’t satisfied with just code switching, they had to change the very substance of their beings. They’re like Jacob wrestling the angel and receiving a new name. It’s the angel of history now, instead of the angel of the Lord.” Lockwood pointed me to the cantor Pierre Pinchik as a particularly vivid example.
Pinchik was born Pinchas Segal somewhere around 1900 in Russia. He went from the Hasidic yeshiva world to the Kyiv conservatory....
...after he had immigrated to the United States, he released an album called Two Sides of Pinchik (1962). The cover features two pictures of him, one, in his cantorial garb, the other, in his incarnation as a suave artist of the world. This duality is also reflected in his song choices. One side of the album is liturgical and the other is traditional Yiddish songs.
There’s something intriguing in theTwo Sidesconcept. Though he has changed his name to the continental-sounding “Pierre,” Pinchik is not hiding anything, but rather, he’s putting his various selves into conversation, perhaps even inviting us to imaginemany sides to Pierre Pinchik. ...
I'll conclude by going to back to Shneur Zalman: "the language of melody is concise."
I recently had a friendly argument with Jeremiah about whether you needed to understand the words of a song to enjoy it. He came down pretty firmly on the "don't need the words" side, a take which, I'll admit, scandalized me, as a writer of words. But it also reminded me that in approaching khazones, it's ok to not worry about the meaning so much and to simply let yourself listen once in a while.
