Isabelle Adjani or Nastassja Kinski

Isabelle Adjani and Nastassja Kinski are NOT the same people. But you can understand how I got them mixed up, right?

Memes of the Yiddish Atlantis

Yiddish: A Dying Language.

Kinda says it all...

Yiddish lives in the pages of Contact!

Khevre:

Peep this- an article I wrote about Yiddish appears in the latest issue of Contact, a magazine of the Steinhardt Jewish Life Network. You have to open the pdf for the Spring 2008 issue and go to page 12.

You think Steinhardt would ever pour some of his billions into supporting Yiddish? A nekhtikn tog. But you should write a letter to the magazine anyway and tell him how much you enjoyed my perspective!

Vu bistu geveyzn

Khevre:

I've been out of the blogging game for the last two weeks while I attended the YIVO Summer Program refresher course. It was fantastic, thanks for asking. Though I still can't properly inflect in the accusative. But it ain't no thang. I'll be off to Vilne in a few weeks where my inflection will get a lot more reflection. As such.

That's all. Maybe I'll have more to say on the fact that Barney Greengrass The Sturgeon King was founded in the same year as the Czernowitz Language Conference. You'll just have to wait and see, eh?

Kids, this is what the 80s were like...

I was just sitting here, doing a little free-associating googling, when I decided to look into Laura Brannigan. Did you know that she was a Long Island girl? Or that her video for 'Self-Control' was directed by William Friedkin (director of The Exorcist)??? Even weirder, I learned that MTV originally banned the video for being too sexay. You can guess where I went next:



I guess the dude stroking the cello is a little obscene. What do you think?

Eggcreams and Eggrolls

Wow, I'm off to the Workmen's Circle NEB convention in a few minutes, but there's a bunch of great stuff happening this weekend.

Sunday afternoon head down to Eldridge Street for the annual Eggcreams and Eggrolls festival:
"Klezmer music, Chinese opera and acrobatics, language lessons, scribal art, folk art demos, crafts, tours and, of course, kosher egg rolls and egg creams! Experience a unique slice of Lower Manhattan, where Chinatown meets the old Jewish Lower East Side at our annual festival, voted the best annual block party by the Village Voice."

We all know how important the eggcream (neither egg nor cream) is to the heritage of Jewish New Yorkers. So don't miss it!

Events at the New Yiddish Rep

Two events coming up at the New Yiddish Rep downtown.

First Joel Shatzky, a longtime member of the Jewish Currents community (both as a writer and reader) will have his play, Nazi (in English) performed as a staged reading. That's Sunday.

Then on Monday, through the generosity of Benjamin and Frances Feldman, New Yiddish Rep will offer a rare screening of "Jewish Luck", a Soviet made silent based on Sholom Aleichem stories. Live piano accompaniment composed and played by Steve Sterner.

Both shows start at 7 PM, at The Community Synagogue, 325 E. 6th Street, between 1st and 2nd. For more details go here.

Check it out!

Wednesday, June 11- Shoot the Strudel to me, Yudel

One of the cool things about working for a magazine like Jewish Currents is that for the editors and readers of Currents, radical Jewish history isn't just history, it's a part of their lives. The editorial board of Currents is still run as a collective (of which I'm now a member), and the magazine has always been a vehicle for the voices of its readers, rather than a platform for the editorial board. If we covered labor and union issues, it was because a great part of our readership were union members- teachers, civil servants, wall paper hangers as well as union organizers and labor agitators.

Henry Foner fits into many of those aforementioned categories. He's been a high school teacher, union organizer (Joint Board, Fur, Leather and Machine Workers Union), Jewish Currents editorial board member and writer, as well as a victim of the New York State communist purges of the early 1940s.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 11, at 6 pm, Henry Foner will be honored for his decades of service, as well as his achievements as a songwriter and bard of the organized labor world. Taking place at the Workmen's Circle (45 East 33rd St) we will also be celebrating a new exhibit on the Labor Arts website called "Play it Again, Sam": The Lost Chords of the Labor and Progressive Movements.

Henry Foner and his colleagues young and old will be performing songs like "Shoot the Strudel to me Yudel", "Capitalist Boss" and "Song of the Pennies and Selling Union."

Wanna see Henry himself singing "Shoot the Strudel to me, Yudel"? Check it out!


Here's a wonderful bio of Henry from Tamiment Library:

Henry J. Foner (1919- ), longtime activist leader of the Joint Board, Fur, Leather and Machine Workers Union (FLM), grew up in New York, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. His father had a seltzer delivery route, and later owned a garage. In high school, Foner started playing saxophone with a band at hotels in the Catskills. He also started composing comic verses, played to the tunes of popular songs. By the late 1930s, Foner had acquired an interest in history and politics from his older brothers, Moe, Philip and Jack, and began developing the commitment to progressive activism that would shape his life. After graduating from City College with a degree in Business Administration in 1939, Foner organized "Student Caravans for America," which sent groups around the country to perform puppet shows promoting an anti-war message. The puppets were made by Pete Seeger. Foner's own group had their puppets and stage destroyed by a group of vandals in Bristol, VT and had to be rescued by the local sheriff.

In 1940, Foner's three brothers were all working at City College when the Rapp-Coudert Legislative Committee-investigating Communism in New York public schools and colleges, and employing tactics that later became a template for the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations-suspended them, along with fifty other employees of New York City colleges.

At the time, Henry, who had received his substitute-teaching license in stenography and typewriting, was teaching at Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn. He had already passed all parts of the regular examination, but he was not granted that license because of an "insufficiently meritorious record" after he, too, had been questioned by the committee, and he initiated an appeal from that decision to the New York State Commissioner of Education. Meanwhile, together with two of his brothers, he helped form "The Foner Orchestra and their Suspended Swing" in mock homage to their experience, and during the summer of 1941, they played at Arrowhead Lodge in Ellenville, New York, where the post of staff comic was filled by Sam Levenson, a friend of the family who, at that time, was teaching with Henry at Tilden High School.

In the summer of 1942, Foner was drafted into the Army and assigned to the 88th Infantry Division in Camp Gruber, Oklahoma, where he rose to the rank of warrant officer. After his division entered combat in Italy, he was awarded the Legion of Merit, the Italian Military Valor Cross, "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services." Upon returning from service in 1946, he resumed teaching, this time at Prospect Heights High School in Brooklyn, while awaiting the outcome of his appeal to the State Commissioner. During the summers of 1946, 1947, and 1948, he and his brother Jack were part of the orchestra at Arrowhead Lodge, which became the official resort of the Jefferson School of Social Science, whose faculty was made up largely of victims of the Rapp-Coudert Committee, joined by other scholars. During the summer of 1947, he met his wife; Lorraine Lieberman and they were married in March 1948.

In 1947, together with Norman Franklin, Foner co-authored a musical, "Thursdays Till Nine" that was sponsored by the Department Store Employees Union and performed by its members -- the first labor musical since "Pins and Needles," written a decade earlier for the International Ladies' Garment Worker's Union by Harold Rome. Immediately after returning from his summer employment at Arrowhead Lodge in 1948, Foner was informed that his appeal to the State Commissioner had been denied and his substitute license was withdrawn. At the time, his brother, Philip, had been writing what was to become the history of the fur and leather workers' union, and he introduced Henry to the leaders of the union, as a result of which he was hired as Educational and Welfare Director of the Joint Board Fur Dressers' and Dryers' Unions. In 1961, after the death of Joint Board President Sam Burt, Foner was elected president of the union and served in that capacity until his retirement in 1988. During his 27 years in the leadership of the Joint Board, he not only represented the union's members in contract negotiations in a union that covered workers in the fur, leather, and machine industries in the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and West Virginia, but he helped involve that union in a wide range of social issues, including the struggle for civil rights, helping to mobilize other unions in opposition to the war in Vietnam and joining in the early efforts to achieve universal healthcare coverage. He also established and edited the union's newspaper, FLM Joint Board TEMPO, which, for ten successive years, won the first prize for "general excellence" in the competitions sponsored by the International Labor Press Association. In addition to his union work, Foner also served as a vice-chairman of the New York State Liberal Party, as chair of the party's Labor Committee, as a member of governor Mario Cuomo's Committee on labor practices and as a member of New York City Mayor John Lindsay's Committee of the Judiciary. After the fur industry was attacked by animal rights activists, Foner served on the board of Wildlife Legislative Fund of America and authored a weekly column, "Conservation, Legislation and You" for the trade newspaper, Fur Age Weekly.

After retiring from the union in 1988, Foner helped create the Fur Design Department at the fashion Institute of technology (FIT) and served for two years as its chair. He also taught classes in labor history at the Harry Van Arsdale School for Labor Studies, the City College Center for Worker Education and the Brooklyn College Institute for Retirees in Pursuit of Education (IRPE). He also joined the Editorial Board of Jewish Currents magazine and for three years wrote its column, "It Happened in Israel." He was vice-president of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra; treasurer (and later president) of the Paul Robeson Foundation; and a member of the Executive Committee of the New York Labor History Association, whose newsletter, Work History News, he continues to edit. In 2000, he privately published a booklet of his poems and songs, For Better or Verse. The same year, together with labor historian Rachel Bernstein and later joined by Evelyn Jones Rich, he helped found the website Labor Arts (www.laborarts.org) sponsored by the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, NYU, and 1199/SEIU's Bread and Roses cultural program.

Foner and his three brothers were all involved in issues involving labor and radical history. The twins, Philip and Jack, had distinguished careers as historians after their exit from City College in 1940-Philip at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Jack at Colby College in Maine. Moe was executive secretary of Local 1199 during its dramatic organizational campaigns in the hospitals of New York City and beyond and later went on to found the Bread and Roses cultural program. In the next generation, Jack's son, Eric, has distinguished himself, as a professor of history at Columbia University and Moe's daughter, Nancy, is currently a professor of sociology at Hunter College. In 1985, the four brothers received the Tom Paine award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee for their actions in defense of civil right and civil liberties. Fourteen years late- in 1999- they received the Distinguished Labor Communicators' Award from the Metro Labor Press Association. In 2003, Foner received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Jews for Radical and Economic Justice (JFREJ). His wife of 54 years, Lorraine Lieberman Foner, who had received a Special Baccalaureate Degree from Brooklyn College, worked as a social worker at Brookdale hospital in Brooklyn until her retirement in 1988, died of complications of a brain tumor.

The evening will be co-sponsored by Jewish Currents, the Workmen's Circle, Labor Arts, and the Bread and Roses Cultural Program of 1199/SEIU. Entrance is free, but we're asking attendees to contribute to Labor Arts.

If my wife calls, tell her I'm blogging down the street...

Khevre:

Just a reminder that I'm exerting most of my bloggergy (that's blogging energy) over at the Rokhl blog, the officially Rootless blog of Jewish Currents.

That's all. Just reminding, informing, nagging etc.

Mazl tov Menachem Yankl

My friend, svive comrade, and leader of Yugntrug (Youth for Yiddish) was named one of the Jewish Week's lamedvovniks- 36 under 36 young Jews to watch out for. So watch out, cuz Menachem Yankl is coming for your kids and he's teaching them Yiddish!!!

L'ag Boymer

I'm lazy, so check out my l'ag boymer post from last year. No one ever answered the extra credit questions, so, hey, if you answer them you may* get a special prize.










*or may not

New Israeli Yiddish Orthography?

Khevre:

I need your help, especially you cunning linguists out there.

I was just loading a Moyshe Oysher CD onto my computer and noticed the spelling of his name. Ot a ponim, there are as many variations on his name in hebrew letters as in English. (And I say hebrew letters/oysyes, because I hesitate to call the following either Yiddish or Hebrew. It's some no Moyshe's land in-between...)

So, the CD says

מוישה אוישר
יידישע גולדענע לידער

Obekeybe....

In Hebrew letters, Moyshe/Moshe is spelled משה. I would try to put myself in the shoes of the Israeli package designer responsible for this CD... but it hurts my head. He or she starts out by spelling the first syllable phonetically by Yiddish orthography... except no one (well, I've never seen it) spells out the "oy". You see mem shin heh and pronounce 'Moyshe'. You're Yiddish, you know how Moyshe is pronounced.

But then the designer takes an abrupt turn away from the slippery slope of phonetic Hebrew spelling. Eeeeek. (imagine hard braking noises.) Instead of doing the at least consistent thing of ending the word with an ayin to represent the 'eh' sound (as expected with Yiddish), the guy/designer/typographer said to himself, 'eh' I'll throw in a 'heh' just to fuck with their heads. The ה swerves us right back into Hebrew, narrowly escaping the terror of orthographic consistency.

And don't think it gets any better with the second word. We start out ok, again with the 'oy' according to Yiddish phonetic rules. But again, just to fuck with us, that 'ayin' just disappears into the memory hole, with the reysh rushing up to meet that 'shin' like everything's cool here. Extra vowels? Who needs 'em????? They're for weak golus jews and literalist pussies.

And don't get me started on gooldene. Eurgh. At least that can be imagined to be some sort of misapprehension reified by lack of a dictionary. In which case, I pray this fellow gets one, and stat...

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this is totally legit? I'd be happy to know, one way or the other. Thank you!!

R.O.K.H.L

Get Your Cyborg Name

Who, me?

If a picture tells a thousand words then I'm screwed

Check out Eli Valley's new comic on Jewcy. Mazl tov, Eli, on pre-empting my entire research project on Diaspora-State of Israel relations. I hope you're happy!

I made it onto a syllabus!

This is the syllabus for Ethnomusicology 98TB: Beyond Klezmer: Music of the Radical Jewish Culture Movement. It's taught by my friend Jeff in LA. I've chatted with Jeff a number of times when he's been in NYC to do research for this thesis. Pretty sweet gig he's got, don't ya think??

He's using my Jewish Cultural Manifesto as one of the class readings. It's kinda cool, but also verrry humbling to be on the same reading list as real heroes of this field.


I'm not worthy

From Rootless Labs: Now Even Easier to Read My Rants!

The Story of Yiddish- A Totally Unnecessary New Book by Neal Karlen

A review copy of Neal (Shanda*) Karlen's new book about Yiddish came to the Jewish Currents office. I was momentarily bummed it went to another writer, but I am thinking now that it was better... maybe even added years to my life.


Here are some excerpts from Norm Goldman's review of The Story of Yiddish:

"In writing this book, Karlen has sidestepped academic gobbledygook, and as we can appreciate, The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews is a labor of love as well as reflective scholarship evidencing a great deal of exhaustive research which at the same time is not exhausting for the reader...

As the book mentions, Yiddish was conceived as slang meant for illiterate Jewish peasants, women, children, and intellectual nincompoops...

The beauty of these chapters is that they don´t have to be read in sequence and can easily be read out of order, by pages, paragraphs, or sentences." [emphasis mine]

So, hey read it. See if I care. I'm not saying you shouldn't read it. I'm not saying your eyeballs will bleed and your heart will seize up while reading about a language conceived as slang for nincompoops. I'm also not saying I will give a fuck if your brain liquifies and runs out your ear and down your collar because nincompoops like Neal Karlen get book contracts. JUST DON'T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU!!!!!! And have a blessed day.


*Hey, I'm not calling him a shanda, just quoting him on himself!!! Which makes me think I should post my unpublished review of Shanda. Maybe if I had published it this abortion of a book might not have been published...

My part in the upkeep and maintenance of the Zionist Hegemony

So, I can't really hide from this.

What do you think? Do I sound like a grouchy nut? Or an every day rootless cosmopolitan?

More on the Salute To Israel Day Parade- The Last Taboo?

So, we just celebrated Israel Independence Day/Yom Ha'Atzmaut. There's been a lot of ambivalent and conflicted discussions about how to observe it here in golus. Over on Jewschool, one of the writers, Chillul Who?, identifies three schools of thought about Y'HA: take the day to acknowledge the nakba (Palestinian exodus), take the same day to go all rah-rah, break out the blue t-shirts and unashamed nationalism, or, take that time to "waffle and prevaricate" (as Chillul Who? writes) between the first two options.

I'll tell you, I understand all three options and even how they can exist in the same person.

But I wonder if there's a fourth position, too? What if I choose not to observe an Israeli holiday? Not because I object to the existence of the State of Israel (khas v'sholem!!!) but because I reject the Zionist hegemony which insists on my golus existence as mere preface to aliyah.

Lots and lots of Jews love Israel and take this time to celebrate it, as with the Salute To Israel parade. Lots of Jews criticize Israel (and they have their own institutions and framework.)



But what about those of us for whom the State of Israel is just another node in world Jewry? Is this the last taboo, to say that Israel is perhaps not so relevant to the life of a golus yid?

For a more poetic look at this issue, take a gander here at a piece I wrote after visiting the sidelines of the Salute To Israel parade of two years ago. It's mostly about the sublime music of Jewlia Eisenberg, but moreover, it's about what we lose when Jews surrender to modern nationalism.

And here's some more photos I snapped that day. Sidelines of sidelines, if you will.

Happy Birthday, Frank!

So, it was quite a night. First stop was our regular svive meeting. A group of about 10 of us meet once or twice a month to speak Yiddish, eat Triscuits and sing silly songs. Last night we met in Menachem Yankl's apartment and who showed up but a BBC radio crew!

It was pretty hilarious. The BBC dude is making a documentary about Yiddish. So, he wants to come to a svive where us yung 'uns are speaking Yiddish. Well, I don't think Denis actually counted on us, you know, speaking Yiddish. We chatted for a few minutes אויף ײַדיש after which he realized that what he really wanted was English about Yiddish.

Thus ensued a pretty amusing hour or so of his asking us leading questions about Yiddish and Israel and why we're so angry. (Well, half of us are angry, half of us are pretty chill, according to the amount of cultural transmission that happened in our homes.) For once forethought and planning were on my side. As the crew packed up to leave I had issues of Jewish Currents at the ready for their further "research."

Anyway, after all that talk about why we chose to speak a useless, non-functioning, dead language, Kh-R and I headed over to the birthday party of the year at Drom. Frank London pretty much is the klezmer industrial complex in New York City. If it's Jewish and Music and crazy good, well, Frank is probably involved in some way. I don't know how he does so much (clones perhaps?) but he's an inspiration. And his band is fun to ogle. Sorry!!

Here's his brass band performing last night. Yum.

I tried to get the dancers in the foreground, but it was pretty dark. But they're there.

(Cross posted to Rootless Cosmpolitan)

Observational Roundup

A couple of things I learned recently:

*Turkey bacon is not bacon. It has no ba and it has even less con. Ersatz has a bad name for a reason. Respect.

*A surprising number of women over 30 have blankies. Go fig.

*Jews will show up early to an event, sit in the first row, and promptly fall asleep, preferably falling into the lap of the stranger next to them. They do this at all events, not just Yiddish events. I found this strangely comforting.

Ling Ling O"H

When I was working at my corporate job, one of the most important parts of our little cubicle world was Panda News. Anything about pandas was a code red priority, even panda hoaxes, like the guy who painted his puppies to look like panda cubs.

Anyway, I'm not in a cubicle at the moment, but I do still have to pay tribute to the passing of Ling Ling, a giant panda who lived at a zoo in Japan.



As one commenter on TMZ put it, at 70 in panda years, Ling Ling was still younger than John McCain. ZING!!!

Memes of the Yiddish Atlantis part 7

"When was secular Jewish culture born in the United States? The short answer: later than most people think. While the seeds of secular Jewish culture were sown on the Lower East Side of New York at the turn of the 20th century, Yiddish culture, in addition to being sealed off from the rest of American society, was essentially backward-looking. Built on nostalgia for the Old Country and its ways, it never freed itself from its European past."

So opens Ted Merwin's piece on Jbooks called 'Jewish, Secular and Popular' In just one paragraph we see a nice illustration of a couple of my most popular memes related to Yiddish and Yiddish culture:

*Yiddish is and was monolithic. It was all the same and we don't have to bother learning about it in order to judge it.

*Yiddish in America was never more than a nostalgiac remnant of life in the 'Old Country.

*Yiddish culture in America never engaged with American life or the larger Jewish American experience.

*Yiddish culture was created, and consumed, solely on the 'Lower East Side'. It was born there and it died there.

For Ted Merwin's edification, I'd like to recommend a wonderful new book called Recovering Yiddishland: Threshold Moments in American Literature. I really feel like if you're going to make sweeping statements about an entire culture and time period, you should go on a little more than a gut feeling. Although somehow, when writing about Yiddish, gut feelings and conjecture seem to be totally legitimate, and even rewarded. I'm still trying to work that one out.

Anyway, Merwin should pick up a copy of Recovering Yiddishland, by Merle Bachman. The book is an exploration of American Yiddish literature between 1880 and 1930. Bachman devotes a whole chapter, for example, to Yiddish poems dealing with the African American experience, especially lynchings. Since the majority of these lynchings took place in the South (and many were personally reported on by Yiddish writers on the scene) I don't really see how one could, in good conscience, make the claim that Yiddish writers were "sealed off from the rest of American society." For example.

Another chapter is devoted to Mikhl Likht and the Inzikhistn poets and their confrontation with modernist poetry, such as that of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. Unless Eliot and Pound were actually from Poland, I'm not sure it would be accurate to say that American Yiddish culture was "Built on nostalgia for the Old Country and its ways..."

I know, I know, this is merely a 50 year period encompassing thousands of Yiddish poems (many of which are still untranslated.) This hardly disproves such thoughtful and nuanced thinking that we see in Merwin's piece. Or does it??????

I'd go on to critique the rest of the piece, about the development of Jewish secular culture, except, to be honest, the author has already lost his credibility with me. Sorry Ted, I haven't got time for the pain.

Fuzzy!!!

You must watch these teeeeny lion cubs. Or maybe not, if you're terrified by leetle fuzzy lions who can't even eat meat yet and make little squeeky noises.



They're furr-ocious

אן אמתער ײדישער העלד איז אוועק אין דער א''ביקייט

Abe Osheroff passed away a few days ago. I didn't even know until today. I was khol hamoyd lunching with my favorite uptown family today and the discussion turned to my current research obsession- images of Jewish toughness and Jewish manhood. I was lamenting the endless reproduction of the meme of passive Jewish men. The father of the family, who grew up in Boro Park in the '50s, mentioned that his father had been a carpenter. His friends had also been tough Jewish men, men who worked with their hands, but who were still really 'Jewish'. Toughness and Jewishness were never incompatible, though today we insist that they were, and are.

My friend asked me if I had heard that Abe Osheroff, a friend of his family, had passed away. I hadn't.

According to the Times obit, Osheroff was a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, had returned home from Spain and been active in the Communist Party:
After the war, he moved frequently, to avoid federal investigators hunting Communists. He worked on a dude ranch and for a company that wrote term papers for college students, among many other jobs.



It was during that time that Osheroff, a friend of my friend's father, stayed with their family. My friend's father got Osheroff work as a carpenter. He was known as "Dave" then, and it wasn't until much later that my friend realized that Dave had been an assumed name.

We still have a lot to learn from men like Osheroff, and Moe Fishman (another ALB vet who passed away this winter.) Not just about toughness, and courage, but about Jewishness and modernity.

UPDATE:
I've been working with the Jewish Currents archive and I found an interesting review of a film Abe Osheroff made about his life in 1974. You can see the review by Morris Schappes here, at the new Jewish Currents archive site. I'd love to see this movie, called Dreams and Nightmares. Anyone have any ideas where it might be found? Tamiment maybe?

New Blog, Slightly Different Name

Hey folks. As you may know by now, I've recently become an employee of Jewish Currents. Part of my job is blogging for them. To that end, please click over to the Rokhl blog, where I'll be talking about movies, Jewish life, and my quest to get Bigfoot to renew his subscription to Jewish Currents.

Memes of the Yiddish Atlantis part 6

(huge hat tip to Jordan)

This article from the Miami Herald is just too funny. Not funny ha ha, but funny stab stab.

Anyway, it hits many of the major MotYA:

*Writer writes about Yiddish and throws in ridiculous, inappropriate Yiddish words to prove that s/he knows Yiddish and inadvertantly reinforces his/her ignorance
Al Lipton is so meshuga about Yiddish that, eight years ago, he started a speaking group at Temple Sinai in Northeast Miami-Dade...Lipton, who is no shmendrik, saw the potential for more.

*Only cute old people speak Yiddish cuz their brains are so addled that we can't expect any better

*Yiddish is only important so one can tell boring, nostalgiac stories about one's old neighborhood, dead friends, or similarly boring old people topics

And finally, most importantly, each instance of spoken Yiddish is an anomaly, newsworthy and utterly unconnected to what happened before it

*Al Lipton, the leader of the Yiddish group in the newspaper, has been leading Yiddish groups all over Dade County for EIGHT YEARS. But it's still MESHUGGE that this SHMENDRIK is doing this REALLY WACKY thing. And it's still abut nostalgia, still about loss, and, oh yes, still solely for old folks. The idea of continuity, of one of the attendees bringing a grandchild to such an event, is beyond the pale.

Gevald.

Memes of the Yiddish Atlantis part 5

This is a little off topic, but somewhat pertinent, I think. I just got a press release about an art opening for an Israeli artist. (I'm keeping it vague because this is not her fault but that of her somewhat ridiculous representation.)

The PR was for an opening to be held at a gallery here in NYC and, according to the text, co-sponsored by the Jewish Consulate.

Where might that be? Is it anywhere near the Israeli Consulate? One wonders.

You rarely see such obvious examples of the popular conflation of "Israeli" and "Jewish". I almost feel lucky- like getting a really clear Bigfoot footprint, or even better, a sample of his hair. A hank of Bigfoot hair would really tell us a lot about who BF is, ya know? Just like some random PR flack's innocent slip into the rhetoric of Zionist hegemony tells us how deeply the Israel=All Jews meme has penetrated the conventional wisdom.

Bigfoot insists that he is not elusive on account of avoiding his compulsory Israeli military service. Pure coincidence. Really.

Stand Down from Turquoise Alert

I repeat, stand down from Turquoise Alert.

My favorite new Alexander McQueen skull scarf was found safe and healthy (without visible rips or tears) in a rest stop bathroom on the New Jersey Turnpike. He was happy to be returned home where he will continue to be paired with contrasting colors.

Thank you for your concern.

Turquoise Alert

I recently discovered that my favorite new scarf is missing. I thought I packed it in my bag for Toronto, but I can't find it.

Here's what the scarf looks like in its native habitat


For some reason, the scarf has acquired many enemies. Suspects at this time have said things about the scarf such as "Burn it" and "Ew".

Here's a close up


Don't be a hater. Anonymous tips as to the scarf's whereabouts will be greatly appreciated.

muchos cabezas.

Next on Our Pogrom...

Over at the Jewish Currents editor's blog, Larry Bush reminds me that the anniversary of the horrific Kishinev pogrom of 1903 is coming up in a few days. (Larry's piece also reminds us that while we may be the victims of violence, we are also its beneficiaries.)

You may recall the Kishinev pogrom from such epic poems as Bialik's City of Slaughter.

Did you know that Bialik's condemnation of Jewish passivity in City of Slaughter inspired the founders of the Jewish defense group that became the Haganah?

Over at Search for Emes, City of Slaughter sparks a discussion about the (perceived) perils and problems of the 'Golus mentality'.

I find Bialik's poem troubling, at the minimum. I refuse to blame Jews for the evils perpetrated on them by their enemies.

What do you think?

Not gnomes, but almost as good

Khag Purim sameakh. I'm still sick and not going to hear the megille reading tonight. I wonder if you can zay mekayem the mitzve of hearing the megille if you listen on-line, or to an mp3?

Anyway, I got some very nice non-gnome stuff from friends, including Purim music and a bag full of healthy groceries from my kale. Thoughtful wife that she is brought me New Skver OJ.



I've got DVDs of my new favorite 'wood- Torchwood. And the new issue of Mysteries. I'm set for now. Except for owing 1000 wds to a certain publication, tomorrow. Maybe a gnome will come by with a first draft...

Sick again. Send gnomes.

And tissues.

And soup.

And pity.

Oh yeah, and hob nobs.

Gnomes Are The Best Medicine

As some of you know, I've spent the last few days celebrating my new life by lying in bed miserably, in pain, coughing up a lung. Yay, bacteria!!

I had an arsenal of ineffective medicines (hot water with lemon, H2o2 gargle, salt rinse, burning pictures of exes etc) at my disposal. But if you had asked me what is the one thing in the world that would have truly made me feel better, you know what I would have said?

Camera phone video of a gnome in Argentina.


(Did you think I was going to say ibuprofen? You're lame.)

Peep this and tell me you don't feel better.



Let me say it again. Camera phone video of a pointy hatted gnome SIDE STEPPING through the grass of a city in Argentina while a bunch of kids shoot the shit about their fishing trip.

And not a moment too soon.

Coming up at the New Yiddish Rep

Moshe Yassur: A Retrospective
MARCH 8th at 8:30 PM The Kreutzer Sonata
MARCH 9th at 3 PM The Book of Ruth
MARCH 9th 7 PM An Evening with Moshe Yassur
Following the screening on March 9th there will be a meet and greet with Mr. Yassur, and at 7 PM he will be joined by Nahma Sandrow for a discussion of his work in the Yiddish Theater, its past, present, and future.


Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d
Sunday March 16th
7 PM
by Zvi Kolitz
Adapted for the stage and performed by David Mandelbaum

The first-ever one-man drama in Yiddish (there is supertitle translation), an Orthodox resistance fighter in the Warsaw ghetto confronts G-d about abandoning His people.


The Essence
Monday March 17th
7 PM
a Yiddish Theater dim sum
by Allen Lewis Rickman
Performed by
Steve Sterner, Yelena Shmulenson, and Allen Lewis Rickman

Yiddish Vaudeville: The Remix

On Saturday the 22nd at 8:30pm the company celebrates the Purim holiday by presenting actor/scholar/magician/literatnik and raconteur Shane Baker in an evening entitled "Yiddish Vaudeville: The Remix". The presentation, which will be in English and Yiddish with supertitles, will feature prestidigitation, music, material from the Yiddish vaudeville canon, and an unpleasant story about Sophie Tucker. "It will actually be a few days too late to celebrate Purim (which falls on the 20th), but what do I care? I'm not even Jewish", said Mr. Baker, who is widely recognized as a Gentile.

Memes of the Yiddish Atlantis part 4

OK, this is especially annoying. The Forward should know better.

Yiddish Sound Effects

...the Shmooze is always struck when Yiddish words come up in unlikely places, but we were particularly surprised by this latest discovery: the word “hazarai” attached to a new sound-effects box that has become a top-seller in the world of rock music...Yiddish scholars define “hazarai” as “junk food,” but the colloquial meaning has shifted throughout the years to include “junk” more broadly, and many people today use the word when referring to “stuff” or “a little of this, a little of that.”

"Yiddish scholars define 'hazarai' as 'junk food'..." You don't have to be a Yiddish scholar to own a dictionary. Yes, Yiddish has a dictionary. Many, in fact. I'm bugged by the implication that the simplest matter of definitions of words is relegated to the expertise of 'scholars'. Guys, you're the Forward. Buy a Weinreich. (Preferably by clicking on my Amazon link.) PLEASE!

Memes of the Yiddish Atlantis part 3

from the Cleveland Jewish News

Mamaloshen warms hearts of Wiggins Yiddish speakers
Like Yiddish itself, her [Ethel Katz's] father’s family disappeared in the Holocaust. “Those villages were all wiped out,” she says, sadly...

Yiddish did not disappear in the Holocaust.

Talking About My Generation

The New Generation Gap- What Synagogue Jews Can Really Learn from Secular Jews

by Rokhl Kafrissen

In "The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Secular Judaism", Professor Jonathan Sarna attempts to find a continuity of Jewish American secularism. This continuity includes the Revolutionary War era Free Thinkers, Louis Brandeis and, most importantly, the political Yiddishist movement of the 20th century. But there is no real connection between them, at least not in the way Professor Sarna proposes. In fact, Sarna misrepresents who the political Yiddishists were by associating that deeply Jewish, and successful, movement with individuals like philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the occasional Jewish Free Thinkers.

The political Yiddishists get a double insult from Sarna, because he also misunderstands the complex reasons (both in