For some of us, Yiddish is the language of loss. For others, it’s the language of punch lines, a comic, even raunchy, bit of business. But most of us, I suspect, are inclined to see Yiddish as a language of fragments, of bits and pieces left over from a now-vanished world.
Zalmen Mlotek/Source: official site If you’re able to make it to the DC-JCC on Tuesday evening, March 5th, at 7 p.m., when Zalmen Mlotek and his special guest, Cantor Arianne Brown, will be performing, you’ll encounter a Yiddish that is full-bodied, robust and, preeminently, a language of song.
Thanks to the artistry and dedication of Mr. Mlotek, a celebrated composer, music director and consultant as well as the Artistic Director of the National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene, America’s oldest and only continuously running Yiddish theater troupe, a new generation of American Jews now has the opportunity to familiarize itself with the sounds -- and sensibility -- of what had once been the lingua franca of Ashkenazic Jewry.
Mr. Mlotek’s forthcoming concert, “One Hundred Years of Yiddish Theater Music,” which has been made possible by the DC-JCC and the generous support of the David D. and Betty Cooper Wallerstein Fund for Judaic Studies at GW, will range widely over, and expose us to, the varied musical genres that the Yiddish theater world made its own.
Moving from the patter of Gilbert & Sullivan to the jazzy inflections of George Gershwin, “One Hundred Years of Yiddish Theater Music” will not only leave us hungry for more. It will also free us of many of our preconceptions.
Like people, museums come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some, like the Nut Museum in Connecticut, are small and quirky; others, like New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, are mighty and marvelous.
Louvre, Paris/Flickr Whatever their ambitions or contents, museums loom large these days, beckoning us with all manner of innovative, interactive exhibitions, imaginative public programming, seductive gift shops and enticing restaurants.
At a time when many of us are more apt to keep company with our digital appurtenances than with one another, the contemporary museum is the latter-day equivalent of the public square or commons. It brings us together -- and out of the house.
Enlarging our vision of the world, museums have also increasingly become the site of communal affirmation, a place where we seek out our identity. No longer just a treat for the eyes, this premier cultural institution, a child of the Enlightenment, is now called on to nourish and sustain our souls.
Behind this recent development lies a great big yarn, one that encompasses politics and money, religion and ethnicity, postmodernism and the digital age.
It’s a story that calls out for a master storyteller -- someone on the order of Edward Rothstein, the critic-at-large of The New York Times. His weekly column on the latest exhibition -- from Prohibition to spiders and from Holocaust museums in Israel to the dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History -- are marvels of economy, insight and wit.
But don’t take my word for it. Mr. Rothstein will be speaking at GW next Tuesday, November 13th, at 7 p.m., in the Jack Morton Auditorium. His lecture is free and open to the public. Come hear for yourselves as he weighs in on “Identity Museums and Their Discontents." A stimulating, thought-provoking evening awaits.
These days, when digital devices rule the roost, it’s often hard to make the case for the old-fashioned rituals of social interaction.
What seems to be going the way of the dinosaur is the kind of camaraderie and good fellowship that can only take place face-to-face, within the context of the public square and its institutions such as theatres and museums, where conversations are born of serendipity.
Flickr/Saskatchewan Jazz Festival
Yes, I know that texting is a marvelous way to keep in touch, but there’s something about watching a performance or looking at objects within the company of others that does a better job of bringing us together.
Last night’s performance of The Merchant of Venice at GW’s Bett’s Auditorium was a case in point. Though much to my dismay, several students seated right in front of me spent much of the show texting away, most of the audience – especially those who stayed for the post-performance talk-back – forged a relationship with the play and its actors that was alive, rather than mediated. For several hours on a Saturday night in November, a disparate group of people found common cause in a 400 year old play.
Much the same can be said of visiting a museum and of looking at the real thing rather than at simulacra or avatars. There’s an immediacy to the experience, a sense of belonging to something larger than one’s self, that is well worth celebrating, much less preserving.
But don’t take my word for it. This Tuesday evening, November 8th, at 7 p.m., at GW’s Jack Morton Auditorium (School of Media & Public Affairs), NYU University Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will be speaking on “The Elusive Object: The Meaning of Things in a Digital Age.” Be there.
Multiple ties bind this blog and the university that hosts it to George Washington. We proudly take our name and many of our cues from him.
George Washington, Public Garden, Boston, Mass. Flickr/Eric Hatch Under the circumstances, then, fans of the first president of the United States would do well to consult the June 24 issue of The Forward, which features both an editorial and a front-page article about the fate of the famous 1790 letter assuring the Jews of Newport of religious liberty.
As it turns out, this foundational document, a staple of American Jewry’s political and civic identity, currently reposes in a Maryland storage facility, where it’s kept under wraps. “What a loss!” The Forward declares, coming down hard in favor of publicly displaying the text.
At a time when simulacra have taken the place of the real thing, and historical literacy is increasingly an artifact of the past, taking the measure of an 18th century text with our own eyes is an experience to be cherished.
Now that grades have been submitted, the seniors have graduated and cap and gown have been returned to the back of the closet, it’s time to take stock of what the Program in Judaic Studies has accomplished over the course of the past academic year.
Whether exploring the millennial history of Jerusalem, taking the measure of Israeli culture, learning about the making of Jewish books, reckoning with the American Jewish experience and the challenges of memory or meeting weekly with contemporary Jewish writers, our classes have deepened our students’ critical encounter with the richness and complexity of Jewish arts and letters, geopolitics and philosophy.
Flickr/AJ Cann The faculty, too, has been energized by a wide array of informal, work-in-process presentations given each month by its colleagues on topics that encompassed art, politics and the self, the ancient Near East, medieval England, late 19th century Germany and contemporary Latin America.
Public programs, meanwhile, have enlarged our audience as well as our opportunities for partnerships with neighboring institutions. From the Cedar Film Retrospective, which was held on campus as well as at the D.C.-JCC, to “Tough Guys,” a cooperative venture with American University and the Foundation for Jewish Culture; from the annual Fleischman Lecture at The Phillips Collection to a behind-the-scenes tour of the new National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, the Program in Judaic Studies has made a point of extending its reach into the community at large.
We spend a lot of time thinking up ways to engage our students: tinkering with the text of our remarks, searching for le mot juste, much less the perfect illustration, devising imaginative exercises. The better the prep, we tell ourselves, the better the class.
Credit: James F. Clay/Flickr But now and then, something happens in the classroom -- something entirely unanticipated -- and we're off and running. The most magical moments in the classroom, it turns out, are spontaneous rather than planned.
This week, the subject of my "Jewish Lives" class was Mary Antin and her 1912 autobiography, The Promised Land, a celebration-cum-manifesto of the processes by which immigrants became Americans. We discussed why the book was so widely reviewed and saluted in the years prior to World War I, why it has remained in print for nearly 100 years and what it might possibly offer those of us who've come of age in the 21st century.
Our exchanges, though lively, were couched largely in intellectual terms. The students tended to view the challenges that Antin faced through the prism of history, distantly. Finding one's voice and footing; figuring out which rituals and traditions to retain and which to jettison; how best, as Antin put it, "to take possession of America" -- all this seemed, well, academic.
And then, up in the front of the room, a first-year student who is usually quiet and contained began to speak in an accented English and with mounting excitement about the copy of The Promised Land which she had obtained via interlibrary loan: a first edition. More tellingly still, she told us how its tattered condition as well as its long, long list of stamped due dates bore witness to the book having been read and re-read -- and now, read again.
All of a sudden, it dawned on everyone in the room that Mary Antin’s words were not just glimpses into a world gone by or, for that matter, pretty turns of phrase. In one powerful moment, we came to understand that for some of us at GW in 2011, Mary Antin's words were as evergreen and fresh and vital as they had been way back when in 1912.
For their final assignment, the students in my "Jewish Geography" class were asked to come up with a guidebook to some of the historic places they had explored over the course of the semester. Almost to a person, they made sure to include the Jewish farming communities of Woodbine, N.J., and Petaluma, Calif., on their itineraries.
Radishes. Creative commons Flickr image by Tamara Dunn
No matter how their guidebooks were cast -- places to avoid; places to seek out; places that spoke of possibility; places that spoke of loss -- Woodbine and Petaluma were on virtually everyone's list.
The runaway popularity of these two farming colonies among GW undergrads might have to do, in part, with the way the particulars of their history run counter to standard notions of the modern Jewish experience. Doctors, lawyers, accountants and professors are a familiar bit of business. But farmers in the family? What a novelty!
The students' affinity for Woodbine and Petaluma might also have to do, I suspect, with the growing appeal of farming, which over the past few years has gone from being an artifact of America's past into a beacon of its future. On college campuses across the country, farming is now chic.
Whatever its rationale, heightened interest in the history of American Jewish farmers is welcome news. In that connection, those who'd like to learn more, or who have farming stories to share, should be in touch with Scott Hertzberg, himself a vegetable farmer from Prince George's County, Md., who is currently assembling a website on Jewish farming in America.
As Malka Heifetz Tussman, one of my favorite poets, would have it, drawing freely on metaphors of the soil in her poem, "Cellars and Attics":
…Children should know where
They come from.
'Yes,' I say.
Children are not radishes.
Children have deep roots.
This article, which first appeared in the Forward's blog The Arty Semite, is part of a cross-posting partnership with the Forward.
By Menachem Wecker
"Black woods howl in the stove/Our dog turned into a lion/but today the grownups are/Frowning like a mean witch." So go the lyrics to Karel Berman's song "Children at Play" from his 1944 work "Poupata" (Buds), sung by Canadian bass Robert Pomakov.
Walter Braunfels
Berman's lyrics convey a naïve perspective but were composed for a bass on purpose, according to James Loeffler, research director of Pro Musica Hebraica, an organization that revives neglected Jewish music.
"If the cantor is the sound of a grown man crying, this is the sound of a grown man being reduced to a child," said Loeffler in a November 18 lecture, "What Is Jewish Classical Music and Why Does It Matter?" at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
The talk preceded the 90-minute performance "War and Exile: The Music of Berman, Braunfels, and Ben-Haim," featuring the works of Jewish composers Karel Berman, Paul Ben-Haim, and Walter Braunfels. Pianist Dianne Werner accompanied Pomakov, while the Ben-Haim and Braunfels pieces featured violins (Benjamin Bowman and Marie Bérard), viola (Steven Dann), cellos (Bryan Epperson and David Hetherington) and clarinet (Joaquin Valdepeñas).
According to Loeffler, the Holocaust was a "backdrop" to the lives of the three composers, "but they are also three different key figures in a kind of mid-century moment of reconfiguring and rethinking what it means to talk about Jewish classical music."
Pomakov, who is not Jewish and does not speak Hebrew, said prior to singing the Berman music he had never sung Hebrew opera. The new experience opened his mind as a musician, he said. "You can get very stuck doing Beethoven and Brahms and all the usual stuff."
The performance also drew on his childhood. "I'm Catholic, and half of our Bible is the Torah," he said. "I grew up singing religious texts my whole life. It's something I can look to my past for."
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Charles Krauthammer, chairman of the board of Pro Musica Hebraica, introduced the performance.
"We started from the premise that this is a very neglected area of Jewish culture, and a neglected area of classical music," Krauthammer said of the organization he co-founded with his wife Robyn four years ago. "This is a small room in the mansion of Jewish culture, and an equally small room in the mansion of Western classical music."
According to Krauthammer, people tend to identify "Jewish music" with klezmer, songs like Hava Nagilah, or liturgical music sung in the synagogue. "This whole world of Jewish classical music, which is so rich and moving, has been neglected,”"he said.
Asked if he thought Pro Musica Hebraica's audience was mostly classical music nuts wanting to learn more about Jewish culture, or Jewish music aficionados looking to expose themselves to more classical music, Krauthammer said, "I'd like to do an exit poll." He estimated that two-thirds of the audience fits the latter category, and one-third was the former group.
However exposed to Jewish classical music the audience was, it was treated not only to something other than the usual stuff, as Pomakov explained, and not only to Jewish works on par with secular classical music, as Krauthammer suggested, but also to a program that was defined as much by its sounds as by its effect on the musicians.
Berman had Pomakov grinning at the humor of the childish lyrics, and Ben-Haim's and Braunfels's compositions moved the musicians into a symphonic game of Twister, where they were swaying in their chairs and coaxing palpable emotion out of the music.
James Loeffler will be coming to GW on March 8th to deliver the annual Fleischman Lecture in Judaic Studies. His theme: the storied relationship between the Jews and the violin. Stay tuned for details.
Midterms are upon us and with them, a barrage of dates, facts, lab reports and other exercises that place a premium on processing information.
I thought I'd buck that trend by having the students in my Jewish Geography course, which explores the relationship of the modern Jewish experience to the American landscape, do something a tad more creative: to imagine themselves as newcomers, as immigrants, to the New World and to do so through a venue of their own choosing – or devising.
Drawing on the kit and caboodle of ideas, sounds, impressions (and misimpressions) that constitute their cultural baggage – on family stories passed down from generation to generation as well as on old, sepia-toned photographs - the students were encouraged to think – really think – about what immigration, transplantation and dislocation actually entailed.
I'm delighted to report that they acquitted themselves admirably. Some took to paper, others to song and still others to YouTube, giving voice to diary entries, reminiscences, short stories, recipes and mini-documentaries. A couple of students even created a performance piece.
Several women imagined themselves as men, while a handful of men imagined themselves as women. Some inhabited a world of their own making, creating fictional characters. Others built on the foundational stories of their ancestors. And still others found a congenial, real life historical personality and imagined what it must have been like to have been him or her.
A whole lot of conjuring going on…
One can only wonder what the man in Luis Sanguino's "The Immigrants" is wondering. Creative commons Flickr content by Wally Gobetz.
I thought I'd buck that trend by having the students in my 