The radicals have ruined Yiddish New York
Opinion

The radicals have ruined Yiddish New York

I love Yiddish. The language is my emotional home, a profound reminder of my bubbie and zayde, who raised me with all the love and nurturing I needed to sustain me through life’s tests and trials. In recent years, it has given me a new life’s mission: To chronicle the truth of what happened to so many members of my family who were slaughtered by the Nazis.

Which made what I experienced in December — as for the first time I attended Yiddish New York, an annual gathering for those, like me, who deeply cherish this part of our Jewish heritage — intensely jarring and painful.

The program, which took place primarily at Hebrew Union College’s Greenwich Village campus, includes films, concerts, lectures, and music and dance workshops. For weeks, I had been looking forward to attending.

But the conference, which says its goal is “to share in art, creativity and learning of all sorts to sustain, nurture, and celebrate Yiddish culture,” was transformed into a hotbed of anti-Israel sentiment.

To be sure, the majority of the participants upheld the organizers’ official request to ensure that “a love for Yiddish and our community be at the center of our time together.” But the loud presence of vocal Israel-haters was enough to ruin the experience for me.

People wearing kaffiyehs dotted the crowd. Out of curiosity, I talked to one of them, a man in his 20s. Why the kaffiyeh, I asked? “To identify with the victims of Israeli genocide.” Why are you at this conference? “To identify with my Jewish ancestors.” He said that his entire family, in his grandparents’ generation, was murdered in the Kovno Ghetto (the same ghetto from which my mother and grandparents escaped).

It meant something to me to find common ground with him: Zionist or anti-Zionist, it’s a relief to see Jews embracing their Jewish heritage. But I wonder what the ancestors he mentioned might have thought about his choice to don a garment — at an event dedicated to celebrating Jewish culture — that in many Jewish circles is associated with terrorists who murder innocent Jews.

At one program on the history of the Jewish Labour Bund, a member of the audience piped up in the middle of a documentary that in passing mentioned the slaughter of Jews by Arabs in the period before Israel was founded in 1948.

He sneered, to no one in particular, “I wonder why!” — as if refugees escaping persecution, as so many Jews in pre-statehood Israel were, deserve whatever harsh treatment they may get.

Somehow I suspect he would not have the same callous view of North African immigrants facing hostile communities in Europe, or Latinos encountering chill political winds in the United States.

When the documentary later examined, in explicit detail, the annihilation of Jews in the Shoah, I turned to him to ask: “Do you wonder about that also?” To which he responded: “Save your crocodile tears for the real victims of genocide in Gaza.”

At another program, a presenter repeatedly referred to refugees escaping pogroms in turn-of-the-century Russia, on their way to what was then mandatory Palestine, as “Jewish colonists.” Speakers, of course, are entitled to their own choice of vocabulary, and their own opinions. But to call Jewish refugees from Russia “colonists” — meaning emigrants who settle in a distant territory but remain subject to the authority of the parent country — is just incorrect. Jews escaping persecution in Russia were not, by any conceivable reading of history, subject to Russian authority after arriving in what is now Israel; they were not even viewed as Russians while living in Russia. Nor was there any Jewish “parent country” from which they were emigrating.

It is hard to escape the inference that the reason for referring to the Jews leaving Eastern Europe for the Middle East as “colonists” rather than “immigrants” or “refugees” is to arouse hatred against the Jews who today live in Israel, and to delegitimize the country.

In the “Safe Dialogue” policy posted on Yiddish New York’s website, the organizers urged participants to center their love for Yiddish — an implicit plea not to let contemporary international politics overtake the purpose of the gathering. But at least some of those in charge of the conference themselves seemed to put their thumb on the scale in support of the anti-Zionists.

At the conference’s small official book and merchandise stand, nearly all the items on sale were either works of Yiddish art or music, or were related to Yiddish culture in some way — except for a set of T-shirts that read “Free Palestine.” My husband, who attended the conference with me, sent an email to the conference “coordinator” asking why. He received a response saying that his email had been forwarded to the conference “director” but heard nothing further.

On a break between programs, a woman approached me after she heard me expressing pro-Israel views to a participant wearing a keffiyeh.  She said she was concerned that I might have surreptitiously recorded that conversation.  I told her, truthfully, that I had not, and wondered aloud why she was taking an interest.  She said that she was one of the leaders of the conference, though I did not catch her name or position.  She also amiably told me that she “identifies with the ideology” of the keffiyeh-clad activist.

During a program about what Jews in America contemporaneously knew about the Holocaust during World War II, a member of the audience — who, like me, joined the session on Zoom — took the floor to ask the attendees to say by a show of hands how many of them could see a resemblance between the Nazis’ actions against the Jews and the Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. The moderator, or perhaps it was the instructor, redirected the discussion back to the topic at hand, without objecting to or otherwise commenting on the substance of what was said.

But, upset by the baseless equation of Nazis and Israelis, I posted this response in the group chat:

“The activists propagating the fiction that there is a comparison between the purposeful slaughter of six million Jews and the unintended loss of life in a defensive war (in which Israelis have made historically unprecedented efforts to warn their adversaries of their intentions in order to save civilians) are telling lies and threatening to ruin this conference.”

This time the management objected. The moderator wrote back in the Zoom group chat to say:

“This is unnecessary. If there are any further comments like this I will have to remove you from the session.”

A moment later, the moderator added that the same would go “for anyone boosting this comment.”

I knew that I was taking a position that some might see as political. But I felt someone had to answer, albeit quietly, the calumny against Israel that no one else had objected to.

I know that many Jews disagree with my views on the war, and without question the Palestinians in Gaza have suffered immensely. And I know that Yiddish culture has long been — and is once more today — a haven for Jews on the political left, some of whom today may cling more tightly to the mamaloshen precisely because of their political differences with the government of Israel.

But were my words stronger or more political than those of the pro-Palestinian activist who had attempted to hijack the session to conduct a survey on his thesis that Israelis were Nazis? Why was one enough to draw a rebuke from the conference leadership, but not the other?

Scoffing at the slaughter of Jews and referring to the Palestinians as the “real victims of genocide” — as if Jews were not— should be seen as crossing a line. It certainly does not create an environment inclusive of all Jews.

The Yiddish New York website lists 27 Jewish cultural and religious groups, plus the New York State Council on the Arts and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, as “partner organizations.” I bet many of them would be disappointed to see what Yiddish New York has become. I know my bubbie and zayde would be heartbroken.

Gila Fortinsky, a native of Teaneck, is writing a book about how her family survived the Nazis’ liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Kaunas, Lithuania.

read more:
comments