A Reminder

A Brokhe

A Blessing

My new play.

And right now, the only place you can see it is this December 28th, 3:45 pm, at Yiddish New York. Well, you can't see the whole thing. But at least an excerpt. And me talking for an hour. So, register now.

Memory, Performance and Perets

If you were at Klezkanada this year, you were lucky. Among other highlights, we had a special focus on the 100th yortsayt of Y.L. Perets. If you weren't at Klezkanada, you can still spend some quality time with the Perets legacy. This Sunday at YIVO at 2 pm:

HOPE AND FEAR: Y. L. PERETZ AND THE FORGING OF MODERN JEWISH CULTURE
Y. L. Peretz (1852-1915) was the father of the Yiddish cultural revolution that transformed Jewish life in the early 20th century. The first to bring high literary talent to the workers’ movement, the first to use Jewish folklore for literary creation and the first Jewish cultural figure to enlist in electoral politics, Peretz championed a culture that embraced both tradition and modernist invention, and fought for its right to flourish in dangerous times.

If you've had enough of Perets at this point [WHAT????] there is a wonderful talk at the same time, a bit further downtown. Theater historian Alisa Solomon will be talking about her fantastic exploration of Fiddler on the Roof, Wonder of Wonders, at the Eldridge Street Synagogue. And if you thought you knew all there was to know about FotR, trust me, you don't know the half of it. Sunday, November 1 at 3 pm.

When it burst onto Broadway in 1964, Fiddler on the Roof was an instant sensation. But the show’s success went well beyond its nine Tony awards and record smashing ticket sales. Join Columbia University Professor Alisa Solomon, author of the acclaimed book Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof, for a fascinating talk about this remarkable musical. Sharing stories the New York Times called "as rich and dense as chocolate babka," Solomon gives us an inside look at the talented team who clashed, collaborated, and created this most celebrated of shows and explores how a musical about shtetl life became a cultural touchstone for audiences around the world.

Looking further ahead...

Coming up on Tuesday, November 10 is an event with a very personal connection for me. My friend Isabelle Rozenbaumas has spent the last few years researching the education of the girls of inter-war Telz, Lithuania. The education the girls received there was remarkably broad and demanding. I'm pretty sure I would have struggled to keep up with the Yavne curriculum.  I often think of the girls of Telz when working on my play. A Brokhe centers on the post-war lives of two young women who came of age in Eastern Europe but must now adjust to America and the American educational system. Isabelle's work is my link to the lived experience of ambitious Jewish girls of Eastern Europe.

THE GYMNASIUM YAVNE: LITHUANIAN JEWISH GIRLS’ EDUCATION IN TELZ  

This lecture will reflect on Rozenbaumas’s research process through archival documents, oral testimonies, photographs, eyewitness accounts, and yizkor-bikher (memorial books). Rozenbaumas will outline her efforts in teaching with these materials, as well as her work developing an open-space installation in the marketplace of Telsiai.

And last but not least. Just as Isabelle is doing multi-media memory work with her Telz research, for years Wolf Krakowski has been making music that integrates the soul of Polish Yiddish life with contemporary sounds. It's a lot more remarkable than that. His first album, Transmigrations, created a cult of fandom whose ranks seems to be still growing, some 20 years after its release.

A few days ago Wolf sent me this, his first video. And because it's Wolf, it's not just a performance of a new song, but a daring exploration of memory and how it lives on, and through, us. Enjoy!

YIDDISH NEW YORK REGISTRATION NOW OPEN

The bad news: After 30 consecutive years, Klezkamp is no more.

The good news: A group of artists has organized a New York City based event to carry on in the spirit of Klezkamp. The event is called Yiddish New York and will feature many of the same world class faculty, but with a New York City twist. The program will be non-residential, which lowers the cost of participation significantly. And, because it will be taking place in the East Village, the organizers will be able to take advantage of many fantastic New York venues and locales. And for everyone who has ever said to their friends and family: 'You'd understand if you had been there' (there being Klezkamp/Klezkanada etc), this may make it a little easier to bring your loved ones into the cult-- I mean, family.

Anyway, go here ASAP and register. The faculty list is lengthy and stellar. I'll even be there, presenting on my new play, the Yiddish-English gangster ghost romance, A Brokhe.

See you in December!

Leshono Toyve

Wishing All of You a Sweet New Year 5776
(See my previous post about how surprisingly influential this wonderful little record has been.  I HOPE HOPE HOPE it will be reissued on CD sometime soon b'himeyre v'yameynu omeyn)

LESHONO TOYVO
mir bagrisn hoykh un klor/leshono toyve a gut yor
mir bagrisn un mir vintshn/ale kinder hoykh un klor
leshono toyve tikaseyvu/ a gut yor a gut yor

tates mames dem gantsen dor/leshono toyve a gut yor
tates mames shvester brider/ kroyvim, fraynd, dem gantsn dor
leshono toyve kol yisroyel/ a gut yor

(my rough translation)
We wish you loud and clear/ a good year
leshono toyve tikaseyvu [may you be inscribed in the book of life]

fathers mothers the whole generation/ a good year
fathers mothers sisters brothers/ family, friends, the whole generation
a good year to all the people Israel

Memorial for the Night of the Murdered Poets -- August 11

From the Congress for Jewish Culture:

Please join us on Tuesday, August 11th at 6:30 PM for a special program honoring the Yiddish artists and writers murdered in the Soviet Union on August 12, 1952. The date has become known as the "Night of the Murdered Poets". Among others, David Bergelson, David Hofshteyn, Perets Markish, Itsik Fefer, Leyb Kvitko, and Benjamin Zuskin were executed on that date in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. 

This year we will feature Ala Zuskin Perelman - daughter of Benjamin Zuskin, principal actor in GOSET (the Moscow State Yiddish Theater) - who will share memories of her father and read from her recent biography of him, The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin.  Ms. Perelman will be available to sign copies of the book after the event.
Dr. Jonathan Brent of the YIVO will greet the audience. Professor Tom Bird of Queens College, CUNY, will deliver opening remarks. Shane Baker of the CJC will chair. In the musical program, Yelena Shmulenson, well-known Yiddish actress and singer. 

The Congress for Jewish Culture has organized the program together with the YIVO, the Jewish Labor Committee and the Workmen's Circle.

Tuesday, August 11th from 6:30 PM to 8 PM at the Center for Jewish History 15 West 16th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues) Admission freeReserve your seat here

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To give you a taste of the poets we will be honoring, please watch Shane Baker performing Peretz Markish's Brokhshtiker

Kockleffels and the Bridges to Memory

I've often said Yiddish Eastern Europe is the Jewish Atlantis. Somehow, back in the mists of time, it was the wellspring of a good portion of global Jewish culture. Today, its traces are everywhere: in language, in food, in custom. And yet, like Atlantis, Yiddish Eastern Europe was subsumed by disaster (man made in this case.) Swallowed up by the waves, Yiddishland is gone and, we tell ourselves, all that's left is a giant history shaped hole. How can one possibly know such a lack?

These latest examples appear in a personal essay recently published in The American Scholar. That many of these words are mistranslated, mistransliterated, Yinglish, German, and/or not even Yiddish words appears to be wholly besides the point.

We've conceded the unknowability, and inaccessibility of Yiddish Eastern Europe, thus leaving its interpretation wide open to charlatans and fraudsters. It's a sad fact that many of the people who pretend to speak authoritatively about Yiddish would be more at home in the pages of Fate magazine, holding forth on the latest 'scientific' proof of Atlantis.

Paradoxically, the field of academic Yiddish is flourishing and a new generation of farbrente Yiddishists is making long needed quantum leaps in advancing Yiddish pedagogy.

But there are few points of contact between Yiddishists and the majority of American Jews. While among Yiddishists the narrative about Yiddish may be growing and changing in exciting ways, for most American Jews, the narrative hasn't changed one bit in decades. The path to Yiddish is a rickety, slightly disreputable footbridge across the vast historical chasm between then and now. And the best we can expect from non-specialized, non-academic publications is yet another list of Yiddish words the author thinks s/he knows, strung along the familiar domestic recollections. These are the phrases that connect me to my past, these were the words of my mother, aren't they juicy, aren't they just so delightfully untranslatable? 

These latest examples appear in a personal essay recently published in The American Scholar. That many of these words are mistranslated, mistransliterated, Yinglish, German, and/or not even Yiddish words appears to be wholly besides the point.

schlemiel, schnook, schmo, schmegeggie, schlub, pischer, nebbish, putz, schnorrer, gonif,  fresser,  chazer, schtarker,  faygeleh...

And my favorite: kockleffel (קאקלעפל). A kokhleffel (קאכלעפל) is a cooking spoon. Colloquially it refers to a person who sticks their nose where it does not belong and takes pleasure in stirring things up. Kockleffel is not a Yiddish word, though if it were, it would mean shitspoon, which, I'll admit, would come in handy reading this kind of drek.

Phyllis Rose, the author of the piece, holds a doctorate from Harvard in English literature. She most certainly has the education and the resources to find out that nebbish is not a Yiddish word, but nebekh is.

I found this part especially interesting:

She [Rose's mother] had many expressions for sentimental trash, because that’s the kind of book she liked to read—before casting it aside as too sentimental, just a bubbe meise. I misheard that as “bubble meise,” and thinking that meise meant masterwork, I invented the definition “soap opera,” when the actual meaning was “old wives’ tale.”

Actually, "bubbe meise" has nothing to do with bubbe/bobe (grandmother). It comes to us all the way from the middle ages and refers to a Yiddish version of a chivalric romance, The Bovo Bukh. As Michael Wex writes in Born To Kvetch, a bobe mayse came to mean a cock and bull story, or an "unbelievable tale of knights and their deeds."

Further, the Yiddish connotation of bobe mayse actually has little in common with its common translation as 'old wives' tales.' An old wives' tale is saying that rubbing a frog on your finger will get rid of a wart or going out with a wet head will give you a cold. In fact, Rose's mother's derision of her sentimental novels as bobe mayses is the authentic Yiddish usage of the term, taking us all the way back to the literary origins of the phrase!

What is maddening is that an incredibly accomplished academic like Rose would not show the slightest interest in actually finding out what any of these terms mean. It's one thing to have a personal, sentimental dialect; it's another to turn that idiosyncratic language into fodder for a magazine with the word 'Scholar' in the title.

In the popular imagination, among ordinary civilians and even the most elite academics, Yiddish remains a rigid list of misheard, misapprehended words and expressions, with an emphasis on the vulgar and the 'colorful' (oh how I shudder to hear that word.)  As I said/ranted earlier today on Twitter:

If I had a friend who thought human circulation was the work of lymph gnomes, I wouldn't think it was cute, I would think it was sad. Ignorance about the deepest parts of oneself, one's history, family, language, migration, is a sad thing. American Jews, though, have no shame. It's as if they assume there is no possible way one could learn that it's lymph node, not lymph gnome. Or that bubbe meise doesn't mean old wives's tale.

But there is some hope. There are Jewish culture workers - talented, educated, generous- who have been working tirelessly for decades. They entertain and educate widely, not just to the circles of dedicated Yiddish lovers. One of those culture workers is Michael (Meyshke) Alpert. Today we learned that he had been named by the NEA as a National Heritage Fellow, an honor he well deserves. So, mazl tov, Meysh, and thank you.

From Wales to Anatevka and Back

Something to consider:  This week has seen an intense national discussion going on in Wales about improving and supporting Welsh language instruction at all levels. As part of Welsh language culture development, the government sponsors Eisteddfod, an all Welsh youth festival and competition. Today is the last day of the Eisteddfod competition.

Within that conversation about the value of Welsh and how best to support it, you can see this Eisteddfod entry: Fiddler on the Roof, sung by children, in Welsh. Not really a surprise, as people all over the world have found Fiddler's themes of tradition vs. modernity resonate within their own lives.

(I can't figure out how to embed the video here, but please click, you won't be disappointed.)

If you only listen to the beginning, keep an ear open for the Celtic reinterpretation of the fiddler's theme. Fantastic stuff.

And since we're talking about minority languages within English language hegemony... This is the first Yiddish language newscast I've ever seen. It's not really news so much as an in-depth look at the 2014 stabbing of a Chabad bokher in Crown Heights..

And just to tie everything together, please check out this wonderful project documenting the Jews of Wales, sponsored by the Reform community there.

וואס קומט פאר? ?What's Happening

Couple of cool things to put on your calendar, one this weekend and one coming in June:

Greek Jewish Festival

First, this weekend Kehila Kedosha Janina is holding its first ever Greek Jewish Festival. How cool is that? It's Sunday, noon to 6 pm, celebrating the culture of this historic Romaniote congregation.

From the website:

Join the Greek Jewish Festival as we celebrate the unique Romaniote and Sephardic heritage of Kehila Kedosha Janina. Experience authentic kosher Greek foods and homemade Greek pastries, traditional Greek dancing and live Greek and Sephardic music, an outdoor marketplace full of vendors, arts and educational activities for kids, and much more!

Bonus event: Thursday night (tomorrow) at the Center for Jewish History, Sephardic Journeys: an Evening of Exploration  (tickets $36)

From the website:

Rabbi Marc Angel and Rabbi Yamin Levy will discuss The David Berg Rare Books Room's latest exhibit, Sephardic Journeys, created by the Center for Jewish History with the American Sephardi Federation. The rare books and artifacts in this exhibit reflect a rich tradition of scholarship and culture shaped by migrations, and they invite, in turn, reflection upon the physical, emotional and spiritual journeys of Jewish history. The evening will also feature a performance by Itamar Borochov, a member of Yemen Blues and the New Jerusalem Orchestra, who recently played Dizzy's Club Coca Cola (Jazz at Lincoln Center).
Sephardi refreshments by Nahmias et Fils Distillery and desserts will be served. 

2015 Symposium on Yiddish Performing Arts, Media, Language and Literature, June 16-17

And coming June 16-17, some of my favorite people in the world, together at the most inconvenient museum in the world (haha, I kid, I kid), organized by the Folksbiene's Kulturfest. Yes, I know, such a long list of names, still missing the name of a certain acerbic voice of modern Yiddish culture criticism. גיי ווייס

The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene

and The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University

proudly present

2015 Symposium on Yiddish Performing Arts, Media, Language and Literature

June 16-17, 2015 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage 36 Battery Place in New York

Key Note Speech by Aaron Lansky, Executive Director of The Yiddish Book Center

Tuesday June 16, 2015 at 6:00 PM

Followed by a wine and cheese reception

The symposium is generously supported by a grant from the David Berg Foundation

Life Imitates TV Tropes

Do you guys know about TV Tropes? I love TV Tropes. I can't watch anything without having either IMDB or TV Tropes open on my computer, sometimes both. Despite its name, TV Tropes isn't just about TV, but includes music, film, animation, literature and basically any kind of popular entertainment. As TV Tropes says of itself "This wiki is a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction." And for anyone who has dared to dip her toe in fiction or playwriting (ahem...), it's an invaluable resource.

Anyhoo, whilst noodling through the back streets of TV Tropes I found a couple things which spoke to the non-TV Tropes side of my brain.

There's been some discussion lately about the erasure of non-Ashkenazi Jews: who is to blame, and how to frame the dynamic between different groups of Jews.  I come to the question from the point of view of a Yiddishist, as well as someone who cares deeply about Jewish history. Both positions put me at the margins of American Jewish life. The American Jewish narrative is not just deeply ahistorical, it is also founded on a great deal of internalized self-hatred and shame about Eastern European Jewish culture. Arguing for the importance of Yiddish is seen as not only foolish,  by many, but by those looking to bring Jews of color and non-European Jews to the forefront of the cultural conversation, such a position can seem downright retrograde.

How can I argue that 'Ashkenormativity Isn't a Thing' when TV Tropes, for fucks sake, has a whole page devoted to this very idea, All Jews Are Ashkenazi.

Which, ok, yeah, it's true. I get it. And here's the thing. We've been suffocated by an avalanche of Ashkenazi representations, 99% of which are about an inch deep. We're drowning in shallow waters here, people. Jews, when they show up as Jews and not Italian crypto-Jews (George Costanza, Everyone Loves Raymond) are written by people with very little relationship to Jewishness outside bagels, rabbis in beards and 'shiksappeal.'

And this is not a new phenomenon. In 1952 Henry Popkin wrote a wonderful polemic for Commentary magazine called 'The Vanishing Jew of Our Popular Culture: The Little Man Who Is No Longer There.' In short, we have almost a century long paradox of Jewish over-representation in culture making, accompanied by a complex process of Jewish erasure from said culture industry, both from Jews and non-Jews.

Which brings us back to TV Tropes. The contributors at TV Tropes have the perspicacity to identify and dissect the presumption of 'Ashkenaziness' but still come up with statements like this, on the page You Have to Have Jews:

Oh, TV Tropes. I guess this is just one of those things that everyone knows, because the American Jewish narrative is a story we tell ourselves about a tribe of upwardly mobile, middle class, white collar, cerebral, shrinking, manual labor averse Woodys and Brendas.

Of course, this narrative is utter bullshit. How and why we reify it is for another post/book... but anyway. It leads to the periodic surprise discovery of the actual Jews in the woodpile: brawny, criminal, sour, working class, radical and yeah, a little bit dangerous.

To my point, there is a wonderful new exhibit at YIVO about the world of Yiddish speaking wrestlers and boxers. Much of the press about the exhibit sags under the weight of the risible narrative I spoke of above. Isn't it kaaarayyyyzeeee? Jews were wrestlers? And boxers? WHOODA THUNK IT?

I dunno? Anyone who knew the first thing about American Jewish history? That wouldn't be so rare if we weren't so god damn invested in whitewashing ourselves and our past. But don't expect the Jewish press to do any of the real intellectual lifting for you. And, it may go without saying, don't get your Jewish history from TV Tropes.

And more importantly, we need to find a way to hold multiple frames of analysis simultaneously: yes, non-Ashkenazi Jews are under-represented and erased from popular culture. And yes, at the same time, Ashkenazi Jews have taken the means of culture reproduction and fucked themselves over, psychically speaking.

If it were possible to see how these things intersect, and how we can build an analysis to change both, then, and only then, we might find our starting point for some very necessary cultural work.

Felix and Meira

With its sly nods to Harold and Maude and The Graduate,  the new Canadian indie Felix and Meira beats, if weakly, with the heart of a black comedy. Like those two films, Felix and Meira tells the story of mismatched lovers, with a slightly absurd fairytale air. That one half of the couple is Hasidic turns out to be not terribly relevant to the story, even as Felix and Meira is being hailed in some corners as a great movie about the Hasidic experience.

Meira (Hadas Yaron) is a beautiful young wife and mother living within the Hasidic community of Montreal's Mile End. (If, like me, you have a soft spot for the slushy beauty of Montreal in winter, Felix and Meira is worth the price of admission just for that.) Meira's husband Shulem (Luzer Twersky) can't understand why she is so distant: locking herself in the bathroom, listening to forbidden records, falling into sudden dead faints. 

By chance, Meira meets Felix (Martin Dubreuil), a slightly older, slightly rakish Francophone hispter. If Meira is trapped by a lack of resources and opportunities, Felix struggles with too much. He must make peace with his dying father, and the wealth his father represents. What can Meira do with so little? Why has Felix done so little with so much?

We learn why Felix is the way he is, but no explanation is ever really given for Meira's unrest. Yes, Meira is an artist. We know because we see her sketching when she catches the eye of Felix. But the contemporary OTD (Off the Derekh, meaning those who leave the Hasidic/Haredi community) memoirs (like Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox and Shulem Deen’s All Who Go Do Not Return) hinge on the cracks that form between individual and community, whether listening to a forbidden radio, reading blogs or simply enduring an intolerable dynamic of communal abuse.  

On screen, however, Meira's angst is taken as self-evident. Her husband is confused, but loving. She has only one child, not five. What has brought Meira to such a desperate point where she is willing to jeopardize her entire life, perhaps even sacrifice her child? We never really discover what makes Meira tick, we never see her struggle against the totalizing worldview that comes with growing up in a fundamentalist community. 

And yet, I cried through much of Felix and Meira. Not because I was touched by Meira's characterization (thin as it was), but because having read about, met, and befriended a number of people who have left the Hasidic world, I could fill in the details myself. Seeing Meira and her sketchbook, I thought of Frieda Vizel, a dryly brilliant cartoonist who left Kiryas Joel, went to Sarah Lawrence and now runs tours of Hasidic Williamsburg. Seeing two young people trapped in a marriage not of their making, I thought of any number of people I know who found themselves married off at eighteen to total strangers. 

In that sense, Felix and Meira didn't have to do much to move me as an audience member. These are not stories lacking in drama.  For me, the humorless Yiddishist, all Felix and Meira had to do was get the Yiddish right. And that it did. With one jarring exception, the language and setting were beautifully rendered, a major achievement in itself, reflecting the input of ex-Hasid turned actor Twersky.

Yaron and Twersky give beautiful, understated performances, gracefully moving between Yiddish, French and English. It would have been easy to drift toward melodrama given the storyline, yet the writers stay away from big gestures or lurking trauma. Most importantly Twersky's Shulem, Meira's husband, with his soulful eyes, is no monster, but, like Meira, a young person coping the best he can with limited education in matters of the heart. I found Shulem so sympathetic that when he finally confronts Felix canoodling with Meira, I found myself wishing he had really clocked him, instead of taking Felix down in a comical hail of slaps. The dramatic tension simmers at low, even at the moments when most is at stake.

And that's the quirky, fairytale quality of Felix and Meira. In real life, brutal custody battles are the norm for those leaving the community. Wayward souls like Meira are rarely dealt with in such a gentle manner. Most of those who leave have paid dearly, some have paid the highest cost, either with their children, or their lives. There are few fairytale endings in the real world.

Like Harold and Maude and The Graduate, Felix and Meira relies heavily on a pop music soundtrack to amplify the story. I teared up as forlorn Meira peered through strange windows, watching a couple make love, all while Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat came on, handed me a tissue, and told me it was ok to let it all out. A good cry is one of the fundamental pleasures of cinema, isn't it? 

Unlike Harold and Maude and The Graduate, however, Felix and Meira lacks the nerve for black comedy. Some critics have dinged it for being excessively gloomy. A great black comedy embraces the gloom with glee, wringing comedy out of angst. When Felix dresses in full Hasidic garb in a desperate effort to see Meira, it just comes off as cringeworthy, a throwback to the silliness of a movie like The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, a French comedy in which a bigot is forced to hide out in Hasidic garb, passing as a ‘Rabbi’ with much hijinks ensuing. But Felix and Meira is too hesitant to really exploit the absurdity inherent in cross-cultural romance.

Indeed, Felix and Meira positions itself as a straight OTD narrative, but with little exploration of what it means to be a woman trapped in that community or what Meira really longs for, besides forbidden music. (How Meira would come to have a record player and rather esoteric taste in records is another matter.)

Had the filmmakers committed to either comedy or topical drama, Felix and Meira might have ended up a minor classic. For my money, the best portrayal of the OTD narrative is still the much less slick, but more psychologically insightful, Mendy: A Question of Faith. (2003). As it is, Felix and Meira is an entertaining but slight Yiddish flavored fairytale.

Commemoration of the 72nd Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Sunday, April 19th

Last minute reminder for those in the New York area: the annual commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising will take place this Sunday, featuring poetry, recitations and song, in Yiddish and English.

1946 poster from Poland commemorating the 1943 Uprising 

Where: Riverside Park, the memorial plaza

When: Noon

Co-sponsored by:  Workmens Circle, Congress for Jewish Culture, and Jewish Labor Committee

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.