A Night in the Old Marketplace Returns to New York City

Holy shit. This fall will mark my 20th anniversary living here in the Big Apple.

I think I'm gonna need some more time to digest that little milestone. And to accept the fact that I am officially no longer 'young.' I mean, I'm Yiddish young, but not young young. Alas.

In 2007 (that is, a decade ago, wow, time flies) I saw a staged performance of a new song cycle based on I. L. Peretz's epic play, Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace). The lyrics were by Glen Berger and music was by none other than the East Village's own one man klezmer revolution, Frank London. 

Peretz, revolutionary Yiddish theatre, a haunted Polish well and Frank London, you can imagine, I was excited to be there. But A Night in the Old Marketplace went much further back than 2007. This 'new' Bay nakht had been in the works for a decade, and, as it turned out, I had been there ten years prior, desperate to get in, when a very early version of the song cycle was performed downtown. But on that evening, in the fall of 1997, I was just another nobody, new to New York and despite my eagerness (or maybe because of it) I was cruelly denied. Happily, I not only got in to see the show in 2007, I got press comps this time. Getting older (or at least just surviving) has its perks.

Since then, A Night in the Old Marketplace has existed mostly as a fantastic cast album, but this year Frank has been taking the show on the road- Brazil, Denmark, Italy and Canada. And now, New York, on May 4 and 6th. (scroll to the very end of this for more info on tickets and a preview)

In honor of this new staging of A Night in the Old Marketplace I'm sharing what I wrote about it in 2007 for Jewish Currents. I think it goes without saying, read this, then get your tickets immediately.

DEMONS AND DARKNESS: INTERPRETING PERETZ AND MARGOLIN

(MAY-JUNE 2007)

I. L. Peretz worked on his epic play, Bay Nakht Afn Altn Mark (“Night in the Old Marketplace”) for almost ten years. It was first published in 1907, and revised multiple times until his death in 1916. The play barely has any dramatic arc, almost a hundred characters (many of whom have only one line), and framing devices within framing devices within framing devices. It’s a sprawling modernist collage that picked up all the big themes of Peretz’s work, with stage directions that require million-dollar budgets. It’s what I might colloquially refer to as an Attention Deficit Disorder mess.

Bay Nakht has only been produced five times, but it’s catnip to the most ambitious and avant-garde Jewish artists of each generation. It’s no surprise to find that Bay Nakht has a new life in the hands of three of the most interesting Jewish artists of our generation. Composer Frank London, writer Glen Berger and dramaturge Alexandra Aron have been working on their version for almost as long as Peretz revised the original. I remember when it first came around in the fall of 1997. I was new to New York and circled the listing in the paper.

If you’d ever been to Fez, you’ll recall its location on Great Jones Street, a coordinate that’s cute and charming when you’re strolling, but not so cute when you’re still new to the area and hoping to get into a show and it’s 7:55 and you realize you didn’t call to find out if there might be tickets left. I inched into the packed anteroom of Fez with about fifty other Jews. Shmushed against each other, we were pushed back against the wall as the artists swept past, down the hall and then downstairs to the club. I recognized Frank London (He’s famous, he’s in the Klezmatics!). Then he was gone, trumpet case slung over his shoulder. The bitchy lady at the entrance told us, without pity, that the show was sold out.

That was ten years ago. Just a few weeks ago, I made up for that night by attending the premiere performance for the new CD, A Night in the Old Marketplace, featuring words and music by Frank London and Glen Berger. I even got press tickets for me and my date. It took ten years, but at least I didn’t have to pay!

This new Night in the Old Marketplace exists for the time being only as a song cycle; it hasn’t been produced as a full stage production. What I saw a few weeks ago at the Barrow Street Theater was singers playing different roles, with Glen Berger as the Narrator. It was an incredible performance that featured not only London’s frequent collaborators (like Lorin Sklamberg of the Klezmatics) but also amazing Broadway talents like LaTonya Hall, who blew everyone away with her version of “Meet Me in the Old Market Place.” 

Over the course of ten years of work on this production, the concept of how it would be presented changed, too. (One version over the years compressed all hundred characters into one, with the badkhn taking center stage and singers as mere accompaniment.) The new produc- tion provides a more coherent narrative, while still focusing on the major themes of the text: the conflict between tradition and modernity, between faith and rationalism, and between free will and fatalism. Can human beings challenge the ineffable plan of God? Is true revolution, political, mystical or religious, ever a viable option? Those conflicts, in Peretz’s original text, are cloaked by the freewheeling “tragic carnivalspiel” (as Peretz termed it) created by the unstageable stage directions and the huge cast of characters, both living and dead, including talking buildings and a gargoyle.

According to Nahma Sandrow’s study, Wandering Stars, Peretz’s friends begged him to make the play “less a poem and more a play, with a tighter plot and more distinguishable characters. Peretz insisted that the truly Yiddish style, which would one day be acknowledged as such, was all in cryptic hints, and in interpretation of what is hidden.” While I sympathize with the stubbornness and avant-garde spirit of Peretz, the impressionist poetry of Bay Nakht meant that after devoting so much of his life to working and re-working the text, Peretz died without seeing it come to the stage.

One of its most famous productions was by the Moscow Yiddish Theater. According to Sandrow, it “recreated Bay Nakht in the image of the revolution, chopped out lines, characters, and added new ones.” In a way, the latest production has also been recreated in the image of its producers — not in the apocalyptic spirit of 1925, but in the pragmatic yet revolutionary image of the Jewish avant garde of 2007. Much of the first act has been eliminated, along with the many layers of framing devices. A love story, which appears as just one of many ripples of drama among the original swarm of characters, has been moved to the top of the narrative. Sheyndele and Nosn, the thwarted lovers, are reunited when Sheyndele is one of the many dead brought back to life by the mad badkhn. The dead klezmorim, called up from the otherworldly well in the center of the market (an image from Peretz’s childhood), play for Sheyndele and Nosn’s supernatural wedding. The badkhn hopes to frustrate God’s plan by taking the dead from their graves and, in a key mystical image of the new show, reassembling the shards of the glass broken at the wedding.

The familiar plot about thwarted lovers attempting to reunite comes to hold much of the tension and meaning originally created by the sprawl of eighty characters, each proclaiming his or her own conflict (the oppressed worker who died on the job, the poor Jew and the hussar who killed him, etc.). But in straightening out the narrative and performing it totally in English, the new production in some ways resembles the Moscow Yiddish Theater’s more than it fulfills Peretz’s dream of a cryptic Yiddish art. In fact, it was the creators’ intention to make a piece of Jewish art that was not about Jewishness. “The music is totally rooted in Jewish music,” Frank London told me. “The story is a totally Jewish story, the world it’s in is a totally Jewish world, the knowledge you have to have to understand it is a Jewish knowledge, the essential dialectic of the entire work is Jewish. Yet not for one second is what we’re doing about being Jewish. It just is.”

At the turn of the century, Warsaw was the international capital of Yiddish literature, and Peretz sat in the center, writing, teaching classes, encouraging young writers and generally creating a sense of possibility around the future of Yiddish art. Yet the world of Yiddish art was in flux. The failed revolution of 1905 threw many into doubt about what would become of any of the revolutionary movements, both political and artistic. For Peretz and the young artists he inspired, revolutionary art was not necessarily being matched by the creation of revolutionary audiences..."

***********************************************************************

OK: get your tickets here: www.bit.ly/MarketplaceFF20  and use code FF20 for 20% off

And check out this trailer for more spooky klezmer goodness:

https://www.facebook.com/folksbiene/videos/10154389420376332/








(as originally seen in Jewish Currents)

(originally appeared in the May-June 2007 issue of Jewish Currents)

Accounting for the Counters: Important New Scholarship on the State of Jewish Demography

I just saw an intriguing article in the Times of Israel, Numbers game: Do Jewish leaders manipulate existential fears with statistics? It's about a new collection of academic essays, a joint American-Israeli project, called Taking Stock: Cultures of Enumeration in Jewish Life. One of the co-editors is Deborah Dash-Moore, a giant of modern American Jewish history scholarship, so I was extra intrigued to read about this new volume. The topic is demography, a subject, you probably know, near and dear to my heart.

In their book, “Taking Stock: Cultures of Enumeration in Contemporary Jewish Life,” editors Michal Kravel-Tovi and Deborah Dash Moore examine what they call modern Jewry’s “profound cultural investment in quantified forms of knowledge and representation.” From Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, to Massachusetts’ tucked-away Yiddish Book Center, nine essayists pondered how Jews “take stock” of themselves and the world around them. The pieces are handily divided by the editors into sections for counting the dead, the living, and objects.

After a section focused on numbers in Holocaust commemoration and Israel’s memorial culture, the spotlight shifts to Jewish demography in the Jewish state and the United States, including — most provocatively — the manipulation of numbers by political and communal leaders.

Hmmm. "...the manipulation of numbers by political and communal leaders..." Sounds familiar. Now, where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, in my October op-ed for Haaretz, How the Jewish-American Elite Has Manufactured the Intermarriage 'Crisis'.  [full text yanked from behind the paywall here.]

I know, I know, I don't have a fancy degree, so if you didn't like what I had to say, maybe you'll enjoy it more coming from a bunch of (extremely smart) academic types. I'm most interested in reading my comrade-in-Yiddish Josh Friedman's essay:

For Kravel-Tovi, “Taking Stock’s” most eye-opening essay on American Jewry was Joshua B. Friedman’s, “Let’s Start with the Big Ones: Numbers, Thin Description, and the Magic of Yiddish at the Yiddish Book Center.” 

As the world’s first museum devoted to Yiddish, the Massachusetts-based center has “rescued” thousands of Yiddish books from attics and basements around the world since 1980. Although fewer than five percent of the collection is on display in the center’s shtetl-themed campus, the evocative installation demonstrates what Friedman and others call “the wetness of numbers,” or their ability to personalize what might appear as dry statistics.

I haven't even gotten Taking Stock yet but I'm already convinced it's the smartest thing that's been written about Jewish demography in the years since the publication of the massive Pew report in October 2013. More to come, no doubt, once I've actually read it...

Wishing You a Nonsense Free Springtime Festival - My Latest for Haaretz

Last week slimy Brexit cheerleader and nasty little UKIP troll Nigel Farage trolled us once again, this time claiming (incorrectly) that Cadbury had removed 'Easter' from its Egg Hunt promotion. If it wasn't bad enough stirring up outrage with his fabrications (remind you of someone?) Farage had to drag us into it, tweeting "...we must defend our Judeo-Christian culture and that means Easter."

What the fuck you mean by 'our' culture you racist little toad?

Ugh.

Turns out Farage has been selling this 'Judeo-Christian culture' bullshit for a while. In 2014, for example, he was on TV calling for 'extreme measures' to stop homegrown non-white terrorists. Makes you wonder what kind of 'extreme' solution Farage had for homegrown white terrorists like the killer of Jo Cox, Thomas Meir... Oh wait, he has none.

Anyway... plenty of Jews took umbrage at Farage's fantasy about Judeo-Christian culture, especially British culture. I mean, where does herding all your Jews into a tower and lighting it on fire fit into this picture?

Genug shoyn with this Judeo-Christian nonsense. My latest at Haaretz is about the uses and abuses of this imagined affinity between Jews and Christians. Did you know a pastor who 'laid hands' on the President will be hosting a Messianic seder? Did you know the President's pastor (prosperity preacher, Paula White) claims Passover as part of her "spiritual heritage"? These pastors lurve them some Passover, but why isn't the love returned by Jews?

For Jews in Eastern Europe, rather than being seen as a “supernatural, miraculous season” (as Paula White fondly describes the time of Passover) Easter was a time of dread. Violence against Jews often peaked around religious holidays. The infamous Kishinev pogrom of 1903 started on Easter Sunday amid ‘fake news’ of the day that two Christian children had been murdered to provide blood for Jewish matzah. In Yiddish, Pentecost, the seventh week after Easter, was known as ‘di grine khoge’, the (non-Jewish) holiday of terror.  

Pastor White can imagine herself into the Exodus narrative, celebrate as many seders as she wants, and for all I know, write new, pro-Trump (kholile) verses of Chad Gadya. She can do this because, not to put too fine a point on it, Passover has never been a symbol of mortal terror for her or her followers.

You can read more here:






(p.s. In these days of shrinking independent media many news sites, like Haaretz, put their content behind paywalls. I hope you'll think about supporting Haaretz so it can keep publishing terrific journalism and the occasional op-ed by yours truly)

Where Do Statistics Come From?

The 2013 study Pew survey of American Jews served up some sobering statistics, most notably, that the intermarriage rate for American Jews was now over 70%.

There were lots of other statistics contained therein, like that almost half of American Jews didn't even know alef-beys. For some reason, that statistic barely got any play. But the intermarriage number... hoo boy. 

Now, three years later there's lots of talk about the meaning of these numbers. Lots of 'three years later' blather, and now, I'm one of the blatherers! See, some things do change! 

Over at Haaretz I wrote about how the intermarriage 'crisis' is more of an opportunity for certain establishment types to make themselves seem important at a time of communal danger.  If you've been reading my blog, you won't be terribly surprised to see what I have to say on the subject. I want to understand why the intermarriage numbers are framed as a crisis above, and independent of, the dismal state of Jewish education and literacy in the U.S. Why is 'intermarriage' more crisis-worthy than the many other dismal dimensions of American Jewish life? 

I looked to the sociological theories of Rogers Brubaker for a clue. Brubaker studies ethnic conflict and the way that 'groups' are called into existence by what he calls 'ethnopolitical entrepreneurs.' What if the 'intermarriage crisis' frame is a kind of ethnic conflict used by those entrepreneurs to increase a feeling of 'groupness'? After all, nothing coheres a group more than heightening previously unseen boundaries (and fear of crossing them).

A few weeks after the Pew report hit in October 2013, many of us got an email from the Forward, subject line 'Does the American Jewish community have a future?'

Dear Friend, By now, you probably have heard the statistics: 32% of Jews under age 30 say they have no religion, and the majority of those without religion have Christmas trees. Fully two-thirds of the Jews with no religion are raising their children without any Jewish identity at all. As historian Jack Wertheimer told the Forward, “It’s the story of a community contracting.” If young Jews were choosing some kind of secular engagement over a religious one, Jewishness itself would not be at risk. But even ethnic and cultural identifiers are disappearing. America’s full acceptance of its Jewish citizens has led many more to leave their Jewish identity entirely behind.

"The statistics" mentioned in this email didn't just happen. They were called into being by the institution now using them for fundraising - Jane Eisner was the catalyst behind the Pew Foundation taking on the 2013 survey. In January of that year she wrote an editorial calling for a Jewish marriage agenda, saying that whether her kids (my generation) would marry, and if so, would they choose to marry Jews, was what kept her up at night.

Now, I don't know if Jane Eisner's kids will marry Jews, and I'm not that worried about it. But if you got that email, chances are you've at least given it some thought because those who shape the cultural conversation, Eisner and the Forward, and Jack Wertheimer, prominently (though not exclusively), missed no opportunity to hammer home the looming demographic dangers. (Dangers they themselves are involved in uncovering.) 

Luckily, Eisner and the Forward presented both problem and solution (signed by Forward publisher Sam Norich):

What is to be done? The Forward has been out front in raising that question and looking for answers. For us, it’s personal – we feel a direct responsibility to our community and its continued vitality. If you share that feeling, I hope you’ll join us in sustaining our ongoing discussion of the Jewish future. Stay informed. Participate in the debate. And take an active part in supporting the Forward’s continuing role by making a donation. Your membership contribution makes it possible for us to keep the spotlight on the defining issues of our community.

I think it can be true that Jane Eisner (and Sam Norich, and everyone at the Forward) cares deeply about the future of Jews while at the same, also true that they have interests that diverge dramatically from those of average Jews and that as ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, they have an investment in groupmaking that does little to nothing to solve the problems they claim to be tackling and a lot to do with making themselves, and their institutions, be seen as essential to American Jews.

We need information about the American Jewish community and the Pew study was a crucial (if deeply flawed) opportunity to take a snapshot of where we are. That's a good thing. But taking a minute to understand how statistics get made, and why, can also be a crucial part in planning for the future. And, as I point out in my Haaretz piece, it's the past that got us to the future, and it's too important to ignore in the present.

How Do You Say Email In Yiddish

How do you say 'email' in Yiddish ?

I'll admit, this New York Times piece about the new Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary isn't aimed at me. I'm probably one of a relatively small number of Times readers who already knows how to say email in Yidish. Or rather, one of a small number of readers who knows (and uses) the terms (blitspost or blitsbriv) suggested by the lexicographers behind the Dictionary, Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath and Dr. Paul Glasser. I'm also one of even fewer readers (I imagine) who bought the Comprehensive Dictionary soon after it came out and uses it in the ordinary course of business.


Please don't mistake that for a brag. If it were, it would surely be the lamest brag ever. But it's to make clear that I consume mainstream journalism about Yiddish with an entirely different set of expectations than the average reader. Now, according to some people, I expect way too much from journalists. According to some people, any publicity for Yiddish is good publicity. To both of those arguments I say HOGWASH. (Or else I would've given up these kinds of blog posts ages ago.)


As I've discussed elsewhere, the way we talk about Yiddish is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Joe Berger has been on the Yiddish beat for the New York Times for 30 years. Our mainstream (non-Yiddishist, non-specialist) discourse around Yiddish is exemplified and magnified in the Berger oeuvre. Yiddish is constantly represented as dying, inherently humorous, weak or any of the many icky tropes regularly invoked by journalists like him. The lachrymose vision of Yiddish culture flogged by Berger and his ilk translates to very real, negative consequences for Yiddish. Grants are turned down because Yiddish is obviously dying. Educational programs that treat Yiddish as a legitimate part of Jewish learning are scoffed at. Artists invited into Jewish schools and camps are explicitly told not to dare bring any Yiddish into the classroom.


So. Back to the Comprehensive Dictionary. It truly is a milestone in modern Yiddish scholarship. It's the product of decades of lexicographical collection (and some good old fashioned neologizing) and will be prized by Yiddish students and speakers for years to come. Here's what a good article about the Dictionary might look like. Larry Yudelson gives a beautiful background on the Schaechter family, on the project of modern Yiddish scholarship, and on the extraordinary talent and skills of the people who finally brought the project to fruition.


What does the paper of record have to say?

Those terms [email, transgender, bingewatch] came into popular usage long after the language’s heyday, when it was the lingua franca of the Jews of Eastern Europe and the garment workers of the Lower East Side and was the chosen literary tongue for writers like Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Though the Holocaust and assimilation have shrunk the ranks of Yiddish speakers — once put at over 11 million worldwide — to a relative handful, Yiddish still needs to keep itself fashionably up-to-date.

So two of its conservationists have produced the first full-fledged English-to-Yiddish dictionary in 50 years and it is designed to carry Yiddish into the 21st century and just maybe beyond. After all, Yiddish has always had a canny way of defying the pessimists.

"How Do You Say Email in Yiddish" opens with a number of familiar tropes about Yiddish, dearly beloved above all by Berger, such as:

• Yiddish as the province of a specialized, politicized sub-group of Lower East Side garment workers as opposed to millions of Eastern European immigrants who came to the US and maintained a Yiddish infrastructure far longer than comparable immigrant groups

• Characterizing Schaechter-Viswanath and Glasser as "conservationists" instead of linguists and scholars. The "conservation" trope precludes a discussion of Yiddish as productive and generative, even on a small scale. 

And then...

The 826-page Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary, with almost 50,000 entries and 33,000 subentries, is the work of Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, a Yiddish editor and poet, and Paul Glasser, a former dean at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the major repository of Yiddish language, literature and folklore.

• The characterization of YIVO as a "repository" rather than as a world class site of scholarly research. Notice how repository is passive whereas a center of research would be active. This trope functions to diminish activity related to Yiddish research.

So, the first problem is the layers and layers of asinine tropes. But what about the story itself. Why is this Dictionary important enough for NYT column inches? For one thing, as minority languages around the world disappear at a shocking rate, the question of language growth and maintenance is more and more urgent, and hardly exclusive to Yiddish. But this is what Berger sees.

Whether the new words, many of which were coined by the editors, will be widely embraced remains an open question.

Guess what? Berger never asks a non-Hasidic Yiddish speaker. I promise you, it's not like he doesn't have our phone numbers. Mant of my Yiddishist friends have spoken with him for background on stories. Even yours truly, on one memorable occasion.


Who does he ask?

“Any word that you’ve got to scratch your head to come up with they’ll use the English word,” said Yosef Rapaport, a Hasidic journalist and translator who is the media consultant for Agudath Israel of America, the umbrella group for ultra-Orthodox Jewish organizations.

Good lord. Where do I even begin? A journalist who does a story about Modern Yiddish research and then goes to the Agudah for comment strains credulity. The European, self-consciously modern project of Yiddish scholarship, of which Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter was a (figuratively) towering figure, is light years away from the American Yiddish used by haredi, Hasidic and other ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities today. Some of them may end up using this dictionary, but this project is not for them because, the sad irony is, there is very little demand for Yiddish scholarship within the communities that use Yiddish most widely today. But this is how Berger puts it:

Hasidim and other ultra-Orthodox Jews tend to absorb new English words just as they are for convenience’ sake without any guilt that they are bastardizing the purity of Yiddish. Email becomes email, though spelled in the Hebrew script that Yiddish adopted when it arose among Ashkenazic Jews in German-speaking lands during the 10th century. 

“For Hasidim, Yiddish is not about culture; it’s about using language in a utilitarian way,” Mr. Rapaport, the Hasidic translator said.

It's hard to believe that a writer who just published a book about Hasidim could write something so remarkably inapt and ahistorical. Though Hasidic communities may not have an investment in Yiddish as a high culture language, one of the main reasons they continue to use Yiddish is, while not on par with loshn-koydesh (biblical Hebrew and Aramaic), Yiddish is viewed as a language infused with Jewishness, and holiness. (Yiddish-only communities are also a form of social control, but that's another story.) When Berger credulously quotes Rapaport as saying it's not about 'culture' he betrays his ignorance of what 'culture' is and how Yiddish functions in the Hasidic world.

Furthermore, there were always (non-religious) Yiddish institutions in the United States which happily Americanized Yiddish as much as possible, the Forverts being the most famous example.

And this brings me to my main complaint. There is tremendous tension inherent in maintaining a minority language within a hegemonic monolingual environment. It's a valid question to ask who this dictionary is for. (Of course that would require to talk to people who DO care about the proper Yiddish word for computer or transgender.) It's also a difficult, contentious question of how to maintain and grow a language which has experienced radical, traumatic loss of speakers. Can neologisms like blitspost be imposed from 'above'? In the days of democratized media and education, is there an 'above' anymore? How have other minority language communities handled these questions? And for secular leaning Yiddish students and speakers, what is to be the relationship between them and the Hasidic/Haredi Yiddish world? What kind of linguistic interchange is possible?

I'm sure I've only scratched the surface of this topic, but that should suffice for now. It's possible that a few people will read this article and buy a copy of the dictionary for their favorite Yiddish curious friend. But at $60, it's unlikely to be a popular stocking stuffer this Khanike. Rather than another lament for the disappearance of Yiddish disguised as a light human interest story, Yiddish needs more journalism that takes it seriously. It needs journalism that educates general audience readers about the accomplishments of modern Yiddish scholarship, and most importantly, it needs people who can explain why Yiddish is not just an important world language, but a vital piece of the yerushe (birthright) of millions of Jews around the world. 

Fierce Guardians of Memory: Female Historians of the Holocaust

Hello friends. I just published what is probably to date the most personally meaningful piece I've written for Haaretz. It's about the intersection of gender and Holocaust historiography using the occasion of two films, DENIAL and WHO WILL WRITE OUR HISTORY and two historians, Deborah Lipstadt and Rokhl Oyerbakh.

[Rokhl] Oyerbakh and [Deborah] Lipstadt — one a writer and public intellectual of the inter-war, European mold; the other an American born and trained historian — both found themselves at historic turning points. By dint of circumstance, talent and personal force of will, both rose to the task as guardians of memory, speaking, each in her own way, for the murdered. 

The two historians also represent the two fronts of memory work left to postwar Jewry: one facing the outside world, refuting those who would deny the murder of European Jewry; the other facing inward, shaping how Jews would understand what had been destroyed, and how. 

For the Oyneg Shabes members, history was to be “an antidote to a memory of a catastrophe which, however well intentioned, would subsume what had been into what had been destroyed.

read more here

I do hope you'll read the piece. I know it's easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of information washing over us all, and even easier to feel 'Holocaust fatigue.' At the same time, there are still relatively unknown aspects to this history and important discoveries and insights being made all the time, especially by historians using a feminist lens to understand the wartime experience. And, unfortunately, holocaust denial is still with us, indeed, at the highest political levels. It is up to us to maintain vigilance on the historical record.

Now, to close on a happier note, some  exciting, historic news from Warsaw:

The Jewish Historical Institute said it will open an exhibition dedicated to the Ringelblum Archive, which chronicles the history of the Warsaw Ghetto.The entire archive also will be available for free on the internet, the Warsaw institute said Thursday at a news conference while presenting details of the project. Individual documents will be described not only in Polish but also in English, and some also in Hebrew.

(A note on paywalls and such: The future of journalism is uncertain to say the least. I'm proud to be contributing to Haaretz, one of the best internationally oriented papers out there. As I'm sure you've noticed, Haaretz keeps most of its content behind a paywall, because producing quality journalism is freaking expensive and only getting expensiver. You should get a subscription to Haaretz. Seriously. HOWEVER, if you cannot afford a subscription, and you want to read what I've written, go to a social media link to the article, through Twitter or Facebook, and click through there. That will take you to the full article. And if you enjoy what you read, please think about subscribing.)

Fyvush

2016 has been quite a year of loss. At times it feels like you've only just registered one when the next comes along. It's not a good feeling, especially coupled with the unpleasant chaos surrounding the US election. 

So, I want to take a few extra moments to talk about the loss of Fyvush Finkel, z''l. I wrote an appreciation of Fyvush for the newly revamped Digital Yiddish Theatre Project and I am delighted to share it with you.  As I wrote for DYTP "Yiddish theatre isn’t dead, but that doesn’t stop folks from publishing its obituary with alarming regularity."

In my DYTP piece I mention going to see Fyvush and Theo Bikel in a special, one night only performance of The Sunshine Boys in Yiddish. In 2007 I wrote about that performance (and much more) for Jewish Currents.

Fyvush and Rokhl backstage at Symphony Space, 2007

(From Jewish Currents)

(click here to read more)

Dress British, Think Yiddish (Theater)

Through the wonders of social media I recently made the acquaintance of playwright/journalist/historian/mid-western Jew of all trades, Max Sparber. Max has an extremely impressive list of produced plays and publications, so I was flattered when he asked if he could read my play, A Brokhe/A Blessing. We got to talking about the challenges of creating new works in Yiddish/English/Yinglish and one thing led to another and Max wrote a nice little piece about my play over at his blog Dress British Think Yiddish.

I particularly enjoyed this part, both as an artist, and as ME, an artist with a big, challenging play that I would REALLY like people to see one day before I'm too old to enjoy it:

I can already tell that there are some meddling dramaturgs out there who want to know 'why Yiddish?' And this is a play that offers a solid answer to the question: It is a play about a specific immigrant experience, and this was the language spoken by this group of immigrants, and they were in a neighborhood where the language still had everyday currency, where even American-born Jews could understand and respond, to some extent. It’s a play that Yiddish makes sense in, and wouldn’t make sense if absent.

But, as I said, I am not interested in why questions. You probably have noticed that I am interested in how questions. How do we make a play? How do we stage a scene? How do we communicate something unfamiliar to an audience? 

This play has a lot of fascinating hows in it. And the ones that interests me the most right now are the following: How is this play going to get a production? How is it going to have a life beyond that production, which is rare for new plays? And how am I going to get a chance to see it? [emphasis mine]

Anyway, go over to Dress British Think Yiddish and check it out, plus Max's adventures in learning Yiddish in Omaha (OMAHA!), some truly original cocktails and the odd ode to Cel-Rey.

Master of Ceremonies

Maybe you haven't heard? Joel Grey just published a memoir and it is fabulous. Being a Mickey Katz obsessive, I had a special incentive to read Master of Ceremonies. (Mickey Katz is Grey's father).

Which isn't to say that I wasn't curious about the glittering, decade spanning career of Mr. Grey himself, just the opposite. I adore Joel Grey and Master of Ceremonies doesn't disappoint as juicy showbiz memoir. I just published a short (too short) review over at the Jewish Book Council website. (I'm planning a longer think piece, too, about the second generation of Yiddish-American entertainers.)

As you would imagine, Master of Ceremonies devotes a considerable amount of time to Grey's participation in the creation of Cabaret. One of the incidents he talks about is how, during previews, there was a bit of controversy around the song If You Could See Her (The Gorilla Song). It's the MC's love song to a woman in a Gorilla suit- a thinly veiled commentary on racialized bigotry on the eve of the Nazi era. At the end of the song the MC delivers a rather manic punchline just to really hit the whole thing home: "If you could see her through my eyes/She wouldn't look Jewish at all." As Grey relates it, Jewish groups protested quite loudly, and quite stupidly (having missed the whole point of the song) and so the producers were forced to change the lyric. Obviously, the lyric got changed back for the movie and Grey's performance here is just. so. perfect. He is a national treasure and if you don't believe me, watch the video. And buy Master of Ceremonies!!!

The Spirit of Cable Street and the Dread of BREXIT

At this point you probably never want to hear the year's most awful portmanteau ever again: BREXIT. It's ugly, it smells like xenophobia, and the success of the campaign to leave the EU (endangering migrants and refugees in the process) can't help but give one a slight shudder as it pertains to the electoral chances of a certain orange demagogue.

BUT! Before you close the tab on BREXIT, please give a read to my latest op-ed at Haaretz,  'They Shall (Not) Pass': Brexit Vote Shows How Cracks in Anti-racist Coalitions Could Win Trump the White House

I look at the Battle of Cable Street (1936) and what it might have to say at this moment of isolationism and racial scapegoating. Art, history, solidarity: these are my comforts in unsettled times.  



(A note on paywalls and such: The future of journalism is uncertain to say the least. I'm proud to be contributing to Haaretz, one of the best internationally oriented papers out there. As I'm sure you've noticed, Haaretz keeps most of its content behind a paywall, because producing quality journalism is freaking expensive and only getting expensiver. You should get a subscription to Haaretz. Seriously. HOWEVER, if you cannot afford a subscription, and you want to read what I've written, go to a social media link to the article, through Twitter or Facebook, and click through there. That will take you to the full article. And if you enjoy what you read, please think about subscribing.)