Okay, well, my yiddish isn’t too good - my parents having spoken it as their first language, have politely never mentioned that I and my sister never learned to speak it, despite their having done their best to get us interested by speaking Yiddish when they didn’t want us to understand what they were saying about us or other family members.
Worse, it’s probably not even because of them that I understand what little Yiddish I do… as we all know, Yiddish has had far reaching effects on the American mamaloshn (can someone who actually speaks yiddish help me out here if I mangle anything?)
BBC radio of all places, has understood this and is doing a piece on the influence of Yiddish on American culture. Of course, Jewish culture in general has had wide effect, as we all know, from the cross-pollination of klezmer and jazz, the Ashkenazi comfort foods now offered in green by fast food restaurants on St. Patrick’s day, the wise-cracking, cynical and/or self-deprecating humor of Seinfeld, Stewart, Bruce and Mason -depending on your generation and tastes- to name the fewest of the few… but we all know when something’s not kosher, stay away - even if you’re the whitest WASP that ever was descended from a Plymouth rock.
You remember Reboot, right? They’re the five-year-old organization “committed to creating opportunities for our peers to gather, to engage, to question and to self-organize with their own networks, in their own way, in their own time.” While I will admit to being suspicious of their summits - as I am of most gatherings of Jews in fancy places to think about nothing in particular - I will equally admit to being enamored with their quarterly journal Guilt & Pleasure and especially with their record label, Reboot Stereophonics.
The label, devoted to reissuing obscure musical evidence of American Jews’ experimentation with the melting pot, launched with Irving Field’s not-at-kitchy-as-it-sounds Bagels and Bongos. At the time, I was working for my local Jewish newspaper and had the opportunity to interview both Fields and Stereophonics’ co-founder, Roger Bennett. I practically begged Bennett to give a second life to my favorite out-of-print album, The Barry Sisters Sing Fiddler on the Roof. (At some other point, I promise to wax rhapsodic about the album, especially its bongo-driven take on “Far From The Home I Love,” but I digress.)
So far, that release hasn’t happened, but today my inbox lit up with the news that the label has renamed itself, and the first release under the new name is the Sisters’ final effort, Our Way. I haven’t heard the entire album yet, but a couple of years ago a friend e-mailed me some MP3s of the duo’s Yiddish-language takes on such hits as “Cabaret” and “My Way,” and let me tell you, they are not to be missed. Now, will this fulfill Reboot’s hope that Jews of our generation will be spurred to explore and discuss the interaction of Judaism and American culture? Unclear. But whether you end up discussing the relationship between singing pop hits in Yiddish to singing tefillot to pop melodies or starting a dissertation on the epistemology of cover songs or simply humming along to some excellent performances of timeless songs, I don’t think that’s such a problem.
And what of the name change? According to the e-mail,
Our project is named in honor of Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, the godfather of Jewish musicology. Idelsohn devoted his life to studying, gathering, and classifying Jewish music in all of its forms in order to better understand the very nature of Jewishness itself, much in the same spirit as American folklorist Alan Lomax who used the collection of music as a means of understanding national culture and tradition. Idelsohn penned the ten volume Thesaurus of Hebrew and Oriental Melodies and is responsible for writing the lyrics to “Hava Nagila,” a Chassidic nigunim that he helped transform into the unofficial anthem of international Jewry.
It looks like they haven’t finalized the transformation yet, with the main Reboot website offering no sign of Idelsohn whatsoever, but there is a new wiki at www.idelsounds.com. The new site is a little bit more of a work-in-progress than I would like to see at a site’s launch, but shows promise if all those wonderful people out there in internetland do what the nice people want and fill in the blanks. (And I’ve got to admit, seeing all those incomplete entries nearly sent me into an orgy of picture and information gathering before I remembered I have a day job. And a second job, for that matter. But this may spur some of the conversations around the music that Bennett et al hope to foster.)
Post-Script #1 - Idelsohn Society mavens Bennett and Josh Kun are also releasing a book of Jewish History through LP Covers that looks promising: And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl.
Post-Script #2 - The Barry Sisters seem to be experiencing a mini-revival at the moment, with several of their other albums making their CD debuts courtesy of Collectors’ Choice Music. Alas, still no Fiddler.
A children’s program in Yiddish very nearly aired on Swedish TV. Why, you ask?
Since Jews are one of five “national minorities” in Sweden, Yiddish is one of five official “national minority” languages. This means the government “supports Yiddish with view to keeping it alive.” This is pretty cool, though slightly misguided. Plenty of older people spoke Yiddish when I was a kid. Sadly most have passed. Few, if any, Swedish Jews under the age of 70 speak Yiddish at home.
Apparently efforts to keep Yiddish alive in Sweden at one recent point in time included plans for a children’s show in Yiddish. The show was killed when a Jewish woman saw the script and pointed out that a show in Yiddish about children on a pig farm was a little culturally off.
How do I know this? Well, I am on vacation in my native Sweden. I switched on the TV and stumbled on a live Q. & A. in the Swedish parliament with representatives from these five national minorities. One of the Jewish representatives related the story.
Jewish Currents magazine*, the 62 year old, (formerly Communist), now secular, progressive magazine, has recently started putting its archives up on the web. You can check it out here and find out what Israel and the Black Panthers have to do with each other. It’s a fascinating, ‘more things change, more things stay the same’ look at progressive Jewish history. Enjoy!
*As many of you know, I’m now a paid employee of Jewish Currents. I’d still think this was cool, even if they weren’t paying me to say that!
Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Jewish poet, feminist, has written another book that should sit on all our bookshelves. For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book is Ostriker’s most recent book of essays addressing the and re-interpreting six of our richest biblical texts: Song of Songs, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Jonah and Job. Many of these are wells from which modern midrashists and feminists have drawn much water, but Ostriker is able to revisit many drawing new inspiration and showing how many of our traditional readings of these texts leave out a great deal that lies as subtext, and from which we can draw new strength and meaning.
Some of the readings address battles which have largely been fought, and which younger feminists, even younger Jewish feminists may feel are over. Yet, the truth is we keep revisiting them: in the secular world, when new movements form to try to make contraception illegal once again; in the Jewish world,women are still outnumbered as institutional leaders, presidents, and rabbis, in both worlds, getting paid less and receiving fewer benefits, being penalized for having children, and being constantly bombarded by bad science about how we ought to go back to the home. And of course, the battle is not won: not in Judaism, where there are still branches of Judaism in which women do not count, communities in which women have been so under pressure as those who lead men astray that against their rabbis’ wills, they have taken on wearing clothes that cover them more thoroughly than any Muslim full-body covering, some even covering their eyes and being led about inthe street by children.And of courswe, there is a world full of other traditions, religions and societies in which women remain bound, hand and foot by men to whom they did not wish to wed, where they live only to serve, to husbands (in the sense of that word: one who dominates or cultivates) to whom they remain property.
From her essay on Song of Songs:
“Open to me,” Says the lover, but women understandably hesitate to do so. “I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?” Better to stay safely in one’s place, not make waves. For what happens -according to respected Jewish tradition- to a woman who goes public with her spiritual need, whose yearning is larger than a kitchen, who does not hide behind a mehitza? What happens to the learned Beruria…Her devoted husband Rabbi Meir instigates one of his disciples to seduce her in order to prove that women are flighty. When the disciple finally overcomes her resistance, she kills herself for shame, but no one seems to think Rabbi Meir should be ashamed….What happens to women at the Wall? We are not speaking of allegory here, but real life. Women who dare to pray aloud with Torah in hand at the Kotel, the Western Wall in Jeruslem, have been spat on, cursed, called whore. They have had chairs thrown at them, they have been beaten up and hospitalize, and they - they, not their assailants- have been arrested. ….As it is uncannily written, “The Keepers of the walls took away my veil from me. More »
The New Yiddish Rep is bringing Yiddish theater back to the Lower East Side.
TONIGHT/äÖÇðè áà ðà ëè
Sunday Feb. 3rd at 7 PM Yosl Rakover Speaks to  G-d
The last testament of a chasid before his death fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Â The holocaust classic by Zvi Kolitz. Adapted for the stage and performed by David Mandelbaum, directed by Amy Coleman. In Yiddish with English super-titles.
New Yiddish Rep at The Community Synagogue
325 E. 6th Street  New York, NY 10003
917 670–1631    newyiddishrep.org
UpcomingÂ
Monday Feb. 4th  at 7 PM
The Essence, a dim sum of Yiddish Theater
An overview of Yiddish Theater from Abraham Goldfaden to the present day. Created by Allen Rickman, performed by Allen Rickman, Yelena Shmulenson, and Steve Sterner. Narration in English, songs and scenes in Yiddish with English super-titles.
Wednesday February 6
 Kol Nidre (Film) Made in Hollywood in 1939. 85 minute melodrama. English subtitles. Starts at 7 PM.
Return to the great Jewish themes of outsider-ness & redemption with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”— in Yiddish! Performed by Kugelplex with vocals by Jewlia Eisenberg.
Anyone else read that article in the Times recently by Natalie Angier? You know, the one where a neurophysicist teaches everyone at a symposium the steps to the Jewish hora and, OMG! Angier realizes how much fun it is to dance when, say… you know the steps. I know, I know, you don’t have to a brain surgeon (or neurophysicist) to know that participation in one’s own culture is actually enjoyable when you know the steps. Nonetheless, I’m applying for a grant to prove just that. But don’t hold your breath for my findings to be published in the Journal of Totally Fucking Obvious Things Jews Pretend Not To Know.
Anyway, that reminds me- there’s an amazing Yiddish dance party tonight, starting at 6:30, where, in conjunction with the big Yiddish dance symposium happening this afternoon, there will be something like 5 (million) Yiddish dance teachers leading and teaching Yiddish dances, along with a hot klezmer band.
It’s going to be held at the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant in the East Village 140 Second Ave. (between 8th and 9th Streets) Admission: $10.
(After the jump, find out why I’m changing my name to Old Dirty Jewess)Â
I’ve had Communists on the brain the last couple of weeks. On November 7, I gave my lecture, Mechanics of the Blacklist, 1946-1954, as part of the Jewish Currents Morris U. Schappes lecture series. Jewish Currents is the magazine for which I am a regular contributor. It started publishing in 1946 as Jewish Life. Back then, Jewish Life was published by the Morgn Freiheit, the Yiddish language Communist newspaper. Morris Schappes was the editor of Jewish Life and its second incarnation, Jewish Currents. Today, Jewish Currents is published by the Workmen’s Circle, an interesting development seeing as the politics of the two organizations have been at odds for a very long time. (Workmen’s Circle or Arbeter Ring has been passionately anti-Communist since they pushed the Communists out of the organization in the 1920s.)
Given that I’ve been writing for Currents for almost three years, I’ve become very interested in the trajectory of Yiddish Communists in this country. Two summers ago I gave a talk on the history of Currents in the context of other Jewish and radical magazines. I learned some pretty interesting things about Jewish radicals, and human nature. But that’s for another post. (Or you can hire me to give my talk about Jewish Currents.)
But I wasn’t interested in the topic of blacklisting until I saw The Front last year. As a movie it’s kind of a failure, but as a topic, it’s fascinating. Woody Allen plays a nebbishy bartender (I know, get out!) who gets drawn into a scheme to act as a ‘front’ for blacklisted writers in the 1959s. Back in those days of ‘McCarthyism’ and Communist persecution, a writer who had been identified as a Communist, or a sympathizer, or a dupe, or a fellow traveler, would find him or herself unemployable at all of the major networks and studios. In ‘The Front’, these blacklisted writers use Woody to sell their scripts and Woody, for putting his name on the work, gets a cut. Hijinks ensue.
The coolest part of the movie is that much of the talent involved with it (it was made in 1976) was in fact blacklisted during that time. Zero Mostel gives a particularly riveting performance as a comic who can’t get work, and in the end, is driven to desperate measures.
It was one of Zero’s scene which caught my attention. Desperate to work again, Hecky Green (Mostel) tries to defend himself against allegations that he is a Communist. He meets with an FBI agent and pleads for help. Pathetically, he explains, on his knees, that the only reason he went to that May Day parade (which is what got him on the blacklist) was his desire to nail one of the chicks who was marching.
Ultimately unable to clear his name, and unable to work, Hecky jumps out a window. His tragic death is based on the death of Philip Loeb, the real life actor (the Goldbergs) who was also persecuted for supposed Communism and, with nowhere to go, ended his life by jumping out a window.
I had heard about the blacklist before, but I never thought to wonder how exactly it was promulgated, or enforced. As portrayed in The Front, it appeared to be something nebulous, a government taking without opportunity for a hearing and without appeal. I started to wonder about the due process implications and the government’s ability to destroy lives based not on concrete charges but on rumor and whisper.
Our government has a long history of persecution of Communists, starting with the Palmer Raids of 1919. I mention these only because it was a large scale, systematic assault on Communists which ended up with thousands of arrests, and served as a proving ground for a young J. Edgar Hoover.
I coined the term Japtivism last year when I spent 20 minutes on the phone with a Victoria’s Secret (ugh, I know!) customer service representative last year convincing them that I DID NOT WANT any more catalogs. I did not want them once a month, I did not want them once a week. I did not want them in my house, I did not want them in the can, I did not want them Sam I am.  Hint to anyone else trying to convince Victoria’s Secret that no means no- have a catalog on hand to give them the sorting number from the mailing label.After my triumph over the Victorian Empire, I was emboldened to continue shopping/consuming smarter. I paid for a subscription to Green Dimes, a service that gets you off mailing lists and reduces waste. I even got them for family members’ birthdays. It’s been a good investment, as I’ve seen a tremendous drop in junk mail, more than just putting myself on the no junk mail list. And today, after some deliberation, I ordered something I’ve only dreamed of owning– my very own seltzer maker. The Penguin makes me seltzer whenever I want. Stores it in reusable glass containers. (No plastic to worry about leaching and other nonsense.) And it’s shabbes friendly. As a person who consumes seltzer almost every day, and throws away selzter bottles quite frequently, I only wonder why I waited so long. Some lingering Santa fantasy, probably. Oh well, he’s not coming. And I’m celebrating with egg creams as soon as my seltzer machine arrives. Huzzah!
If you look at the Forward’s recently published Forward 50, you’ll see April Rosenblum’s name listed right below grizzled Cold Warrior Norman Podhoretz, in the Ideas and Activism section. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Gey veys! (Go figure)
April is being recognized for her groundbreaking work, the recently published 32 page pamphlet The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere: Making Resistance to Anti-Semitism Part of All of Our Movements. If you’ve spent more than five minutes doing social justice work, you probably know that anti-Semitism is a real and pervasive problem. April’s pamphlet includes historical analysis, as well as thought provoking discussions about the nature of anti-Semitism today.
April was, as she describes it, ‘raised radical’ in Philadelphia, where she lives today. She is also an ardent Yiddishist and brings what I consider to be a Diaspora Nationalist perspective to her political analysis.
So, mazl tov April!! I look forward to seeing what else you have in store for us!
On Thursday October 18, 2007, NYU’s Bronfman Center hosted “Orthodox Paradox: A Debate on Jewish Values,†a panel presentation featuring Shmuley Boteach, Michael Steinhardt, and Noah Feldman, three controversial men with profoundly different conceptions of what Jewish values are and why they matter.
Before diving into the debate myself (don’t worry, you’re getting more than just a summary here), here’s some biographical information about each of the panelists:
Shmuley Boteach (the rebbe) is an Orthodox rabbi, educator, and author who considers himself “America’s Rabbi.†Host of the television show “Shalom in the Home,†on TLC Shmuley is the founder of the Jewish Values Network, a television network created to share Jewish values with the world.
Michael Steinhardt (the king, he has referred to himself jokingly as David HaMelech) is one of the most-well known Jewish philanthropists, having donated over $125 million to Jewish causes. Steinhardt was instrumental in creating Birthright Israel and the Jewish Campus Service Corps, as well as The Makor/Steinhardt 92nd Street Y. Steinhardt’s philanthropy is directed through The Jewish Life Network, his foundation, and focuses on “major projects that revitalize American Jewish life.â€
Noah Feldman (the scholar) is a Rhodes scholar, author and Professor of Law at Harvard University. He helped to draft the first Iraq constitution, and much of his work focuses on the intersection of religion and politics. In the summer of 2007, Feldman published a controversial article in the New York Times called “Orthodox Paradox†in which he provided a scathing critique of the Modern Orthodoxy community in Boston in claiming that he and his non-Jewish wife were intentionally removed from a photo of Maimonides alumni. More »
(I apologize for writing the same thing about Dan as I wrote in April, but the fact remains that you must check him out!)
Tonight at the Rose, in Brooklyn, a rare US appearance by soon to be superstar Dan Kahn and his band The Painted Bird. If you’re not familiar with the novel which inspired Kahn’s project, I’ll tell you it’s the only book my parents ever forbade me from reading. They didn’t keep me from reading Anne Frank’s diary in fourth grade, or even taking out the book about Mengele in 7th. But Kozinski was beyond the pale. Gey veys. Go figure.
ThePainted Bird (the novel) is an incredibly dark portrayal of life during World War II in Poland. It questions our very ability rise above our animal natures. It’s material is the grotesque and the grotesque as a reflection of life.
The Painted Bird, (the band), is an outgrowth of Dan Kahn’s travels as an American, and a Jew, in Central and Eastern Europe. (He’s been living in Berlin the last two years). It asks what it means to have an inheritance of victimhood but not be a victim oneself. And what does it mean to be the grandchild of perpetrators when one is not guilty of anything but being born into a troubled national legacy?
From his recent album Dostsebrokhene loshn (the broken tongue) Kahn’s song Son of Plenty takes up the question: Speak not of your righteousness/for though you might be true/ the tree of evil might just have its seed inside of you/ waiting for the proper time to bloom
We the chosen children of this martyrdom must learn/ that martyrs turn to murderers when tables have been turned/ and history repeats its bloody tune
This theme of the pathology of martyrdom and revenge shows up in a new song Kahn has been performing all over Europe and now here. It’s called Nakam and it’s about the aborted plan, devised by one of the leaders of the Vilna Partisans, Abba Kovner, to take revenge on the Germans, after the war, by poisoning the German water supply and extracting an equal number of German victims to match those who were sent to their death in the camps.
It’s a strange, uncomfortable and incredibly compelling story that challenges our ideas about healing, history and victimhood. As Dan told me, while his relatives here in the States have encouraged him not to perform it here, it’s his most popular song in Germany and Poland.
The music is part cabaret, part wine cellar, in yiddish, german and english, and leans heavily both on Tom Waits and Brecht. With the most important new Jewish clarinetist under 30, Michael Winograd, the band takes Jewish music to a whole new level. And while the subject matter is heavy, they’ve also got some of the funniest material I’ve heard in a long time, especially the new English verses for the classic Yiddish love song, Borscht, written by Dan and Moscow blues guitar legend Vanya Zhuk.
So don’t miss this rare show- Tonight, the Rose, at 8 pm.
I set out from my apartment off the main street in the Old Town of Vilnius for the Choral Synagogue. It is the one synagogue that survives and is still in use in a city that once supported over two hundred houses of prayer. During the war the Nazi’s used this synagogue as an ammunition storehouse. Today, it is a beautifully restored building in the ubiquitous Moorish style. It’s beige exterior glows at sunset. People wait for the bus on its corner. A man shlings some Brandy down his throat across the street. Passersby stare bamboozled at the small group of rugged men hobbling on canes towards the Synagogue’s rusted gates.
Inside, my friend Dovid is talking Yiddish to a very elderly man in the row across from me. Then Dovid gets up and says “Eli, would you mind accompanying this man home with me? He says his heart hurts.†Davening Mincha has not begun. I hop out of my seat and the old man wraps his left arm around mine. His other hand hold Dovid’s wrist. Dovid and I look at each other. Is this man going to die holding onto our arms? We will take him home, as he wishes.
We begin walking. He stops intermittently to rest. We ask him repeatedly in Yiddish if we should get him a doctor. We pass a cab. “Do you want a cab?†“Tonight is Shabbos!†he says, staring at Dovid. Then I remember my days learning in Jerusalem. “But sir, this is Pikuach Nefesh!,†I say. The Rabbis and the Rambam argued that it is permissible to break Shabbos if and when it becomes an obligation to save a life in jeopardy.
Then the old man leaned on Dovid and lifted his wrist, raised his thumb and said “Dos iz richtik!â€. This is correct! A smile bore a gleaming graveyard of four teeth. A Jewish concept in a formerly Jewish world! He talked to the cab driver watching three generations of Jews in front of a Vilna hotel. The driver explained he couldn’t take the man three blocks up the hill. He was waiting for a customer to leave the strip club across the street. The old man grit his teeth. Dovid and I were angry. The old man decides to go by foot.
So we walked up his hill. We learned on our frequent rest stops that he was nineteen years old in 1941. He was born in a shtetl two hundred kilometers from Vilna, close to what is today Belarus. He has the keys to the Vilna Gaon’s tomb in his apartment. He is the indigenous, Yiddish survivor who represents the world that much of world Jewry simply ignores. He stayed here. We arrive in a small building in a sprawling Soviet-era apartment block near the Vilnius train station. Blonde toddlers crawl in the dirt. He used to live with his son, but his son now works in Kaunas, formerly Kovno, over an hour away. He lives off a small pension and one check a month from a lady in America. A few people check up on him a couple times a week. He was born into the world of Lithuanian Jewry. In that world his heart, soul and feet have remained.
We ask him if we can get him some water, or if he needs help taking off his shoes. “What do you need?†He says “Tell that lady to write me a letter with her checks. A guten Shabbos. A Dank.†He shuts the door.
Dovid and I walk back to the Synagogue. We arrive. I’m sweating bullets. In a viscous Russian lilt, the minyan sings Lecha Dodi!
Over the last couple of summers at Klezkanada, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some of the young folks who are reinventing Jewish/Yiddish culture in the FSU, including the virtuosic Jewish/Gypsy folk explosion Dobranotch as well as the more rock and roll oriented Nayekhovichi, featuring Moscow based blues guitar legend, Vanya Zhuk. If you haven’t heard his new verses of Borscht (in yiddish, russian and english), then you’ve never tasted such a dish. Or heard such a song.
But besides the hot musicians and amazing new Yiddish song, there are other superstars of the Yiddish avant-garde of the FSU. Today I heard from Motl Gordon. In addition to studying mathematics, Motl teaches Yiddish sunday school at the JCC in St. Petersburg.
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This means he has little 7, 8 and 9 year olds performing (for example) Â yiddish purim shpiels that were collected in Ukraine by Moyshe Beregovski, some 90 years ago. A lot of the Beregovski material, some of the most important ethnographic work ever done on Yiddish, is still unavailable to us here in the US, especially if you don’t speak Russian. Point being, these little kidniks are doing stuff we can’t even dream about. The cuteness is almost too much to bear, even thousands of miles away.
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And it’s not just cute, though, Yiddish sunday school symbolizes a real, substantial, enviable commitment to the revitalization of Russian Jewish culture, a commitment that will have a profound impact on the future of spoken Yiddish in the FSU. Motl’s been doing this for three years and it’s been very successful, especially considering how Yiddish, and Jewish culture, barely survived the last sixty years or so. In fact, though the context is obviously wildly different, Yiddish faces similarly daunting challenges in the FSU as it does here in the US (discontinuity, lack of resources etc).
 Nonetheless, based on the success of the St. Petersburg sunday school, there will now be a similar school opening in Moscow, the nes (miracle) to which I refer in the title of this post. Here’s a brief word about it from Motl (in yiddish and english):
In september vet in Moskve onheybm tsu arbetn a naye zuntik-shul far yidishe mishpokhes “Di Yidishe shtikelekh”. Kinder un eltern veln zikh lernen yidishe shprakh, yidishe lider un traditsie mit profesionele lerers. S’iz di ershte azelkhe shul in Moskve un di tsveyte in Rusland (di ershte iz geven gegrindet in Peterburg dray yorn tsurik). Der program-direktor funem nayem zuntik-shul iz Motl Gordon, folklorist un lerer fun der yidisher shprakh.
“In September 2007, a new Yiddish Sunday school, Yiddishe Shtikelekh, will open in Moscow for Jewish families. Parents and children will learn Yiddish, Yiddish songs and traditions with professional teachers. This is the first school of its type in Moscow and the second in the FSU (the first was opened in St Petersburg three years ago). The program director of the new Sunday school is Motl Gordon, folklorist and teacher of Yiddish language. “
This will be first school in Moscow teaching Yiddish to Jewish children (and adults) in over 50 years. So mazel tov, Motl and I’m about to run home and make a l’khayim in your honor.
I thought cholent was just the Yiddish word for “leftovers.” I didn’t realize it was a religious fault line.
According to an article in JPost, the Shulchan Aruch instructs us to eat cholent on Shabbat lest we be taken for Karaites, who apparently spurn … cholent.
But my best takeaway was that Karaites reject the divinity of the oral law and, most interestingly, believe we should all read the Torah and decide for ourselves what it means. Karaites are apparently encouraged to “consult with as many people as possible where there is a question of uncertainty. One can take the advice of a hacham (an especially learned member of the community), but that advice is not binding and the hacham has to be able to prove his view from the Torah.”
Isn’t this what Jews mostly do anyway? When rabbis (to our stunned amazement) disagree on interpretation, don’t we just go with whom/whatever makes most sense to us?
The article quotes one learned Karaite as saying: “Rabbinic Judaism has taken the responsibility away from the individual and given it to the rabbis. But you can’t say on Judgment Day that the rabbi told me this or that - the responsibility is on the individual. Every person’s decisions are on his head and that’s why each person should read and try to understand the Torah.”
Isn’t this what all Jews are supposed to do? We all live, more than less, by the Karaite motto “search well in the scripture and do not rely on anyone else’s opinion.”
To me the Karaites are just another bunch of Jews proving Rabbi Friedheim’s adage, ‘There is only one kind of Judaism, Orthodox. There’s only one kind of Jew, Reform.”
I haven’t heard the entire album yet, but a couple of years ago a friend e-mailed me some MP3s of the duo’s Yiddish-language takes on such hits as “Cabaret” and “My Way,” and let me tell you, they are not to be missed. Now, will this fulfill Reboot’s hope that Jews of our generation will be spurred to explore and discuss the interaction of Judaism and American culture? Unclear. But whether you end up discussing the relationship between singing pop hits in Yiddish to singing tefillot to pop melodies or starting a dissertation on the epistemology of cover songs or simply humming along to some excellent performances of timeless songs, I don’t think that’s such a problem.
 
 
