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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome everyone. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the Public Programs Director of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research. I'm very pleased to be able to share with you this conversation about this wonderful new book, Yiddish in a History. And we have Rachel Rajansky here, who's a wonderful scholar, wrote this book, she's going to be presenting on it. And then we're very lucky to have Rachel Brenner, Sonny Yudkoff and Shachar Pinsker to join us for a conversation about it. So I'm going to hand it over to Rachel Rajanski and she's going to present. But before I do, I just want to say thank you all so much for joining us. Of course, we wish we were in person sharing book talks and lectures and all sorts of things that we do at yivo, but we're making the most of the situation and we were actually doing a lot of things like this. So if you are curious to engage more to learn about Jewish history, Jewish culture, please find us on our website, YIVO.org, come to our social media channels. We have recordings of a lot of events and we have a lot of these kind of things happening live as well. So please do come back. And now go ahead and introduce Rachel Rajansky. Rachel Rajanski is Associate professor of Judaic Studies at Brown University. She is author of Conflicting Labor Zionism in North America, 1905-1931, as well as many articles on political and cultural history of East European Jewish immigrants in the US and in Israel.
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Welcome Rachel.
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Thank you Alex. Thank you for organizing this event and thank you Rachel, Shachar and Sani for participating. I am really excited and looking forward to hearing your our sponsors and thank you all the people who are watching, who are watching us now. So I would say I will say a few words about my book. I'll present my book, I'll tell you what are the main ideas and main themes. So the point of departure of my book is the commonly held view that Tiddish was suppressed, even banned and persecuted by the Israeli authorities during the first decades of the state for ideological reasons even in the 21st century. Ben Gurion's unfortunate one off description of Yiddish as a foreign engraving language has been used by many as an ultimate proof of the direct link between Zionist ideology of negating of the Diaspora and the poor state of Yiddish in Israel. So my book challenges these views and offers instead a new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew culture. It is based on Richard Kaval and other sources, newspapers, literature, interviews. So the book unfolds the broad history of Yiddish in Israel from 1948 to the beginning of the 21st century. It not only paints a picture of Yiddish as a vibrant culture in Israel's first decade, but also presents Yiddish as an integral part of the neo Israeli culture that developed in those years. So the background for this is the unique situation of the language in the nascent state of Israel. Mass immigration that followed the proclamation of the state meant that Israel's immigrant population outnumbered those already settled. This was an unprecedented situation that obviously created difficulties in terms of housing and jobs, but also brought with it a great number of different languages, Jewish and non Jewish. Now, making Hebrew the language of the country common to all its citizens became, of course, a central practical need. But there was also an ideological aspect, as Hebrew, as we all know, was the crowning jewel of the Zionist ideology. So no wonder then that the Israeli authorities looked for creative ways to teach Hebrew and instill it among the new immigrants, including restricting the use of non Hebrew Jewish languages. Now, among those languages, Yiddish had a unique status. Since many of the Israeli leaders came from Eastern Europe, they were aware that Yiddish had been the strongest Jewish language before the Holocaust. And some did see it as a potential obstacle for the inculcation of Hebrew. But at the same time, many had a soft spot for Yiddish and even loved it. This need to negotiate between the practical and ideological considerations on the one hand, and the emotional attachment on the other, led to the development of a dialective attitude to Yiddish that included love and misgiving, acceptance and rejection at the same time. So the book raises two big questions. One, was there in fact a clearly defined official policy toward Yiddish in Israel? And two, what were the most important influences that shaped the development of Yiddish in Israel? Were these the actions of the state or did other factors come into play? So the answer to these questions are clustered around three major issues that form the thread that connects all the seven chapters of the book. So, the first one is the development and nature of the cultural hegemony in the State of Israel. The second is the problems arising from the tension between the trans regional nature of Finnish and the local nature of the Israeli Hebrew culture. And the third are attitudes towards the past, such as nostalgia, the creation of usable past and the tension between individual and collective memory. So there is no doubt that the press has always been the heart of modern Yiddish culture. And also minority press has always been a major player in most immigrant societies. No wonder then, that in Israel, the Yiddish press became the first and central arena for the conflict between Yiddish speakers and the state. Based on existing laws of press censorship, the Israeli authorities banned the publication of foreign language daily, including those of Yiddish, those in UDIs. However, it became clear that Yiddish. However, when it became clear that Yiddish newspapers were circumventing the ban by publishing the daily under two titles and bringing it up in alternate days, the authorities simply ignored it. Beyond that, the major political parties themselves published Yiddish newspapers in effort to reach out to the Yiddish readership and to gain their political support. This culminated in 1960 with Mapai, the hegemonic Labour Party, actually purchasing the main Yiddish newspaper label, Alets Tenayes, and publishing it for the next three decades. So when forced to choose between cultural hegemony and strengthening their political hegemony, the Israeli authorities preferred the latter. The result was that those same forces that wanted to restrict the publishing of Yiddish newspapers actually contributed to the development of a vibrant Yiddish press. Another popular realm and another popular and important realm Yiddish culture was the theater and its development in Israel during the early years reflected the tension that grew up with between Hebrew as a local culture and Yiddish as a trans regional culture. Yiddish theatre in early years, like the Yiddish press, struggled with a series of limitations that were, like the case of the press, based on existing licensing laws. However, in early 1951, in the wake of a petition to the High Court of Justice, all the limitations on Yedish theater were lifted. As a result, popular performances, shunned, as we call it in Yiddish, flourished. And though they were mocked and despised by both Hebrew and Yiddish press, they proved the big box of its success. Yiddish repertory theater, however, did not prove attractive to the Israeli audience and so didn't survive. However, though the Israeli leadership was indeed preoccupied with strengthening Hebrew culture, it was also very much investing a great deal of thought in how to establish Israel as a cultural center of world Jewry. In that effort, Yiddish, the quintessential trans regional Jewish culture, actually played a key role. Government official, therefore invested effort in welcoming visiting Yiddish actors, star with international reputations who came to Israel for tours. Beyond that, they also tried to convince them to stay, even offering them help in establishing Israeli theater that would help make Israel the center of Jewish culture for the entire Jewish world. Incidentally, this was the same reason that the hysterotic brought the eminent poet of Rom Sutzkeville to Israel in 1947 and created for him the Golden Ecate, the Yiddish literary quarterly that actually did make Israel during the 1960s as the center, the world center for Yiddish literature. That, of course raises an important question. If the reality was one of an Israeli leadership torn between its ideology and. And its political interests, between its commitment to Hebrew and its fondness for Yiddish, as a result of which a vibrant Yiddish culture developed in Israel, where did the bitterness toward the state of Israel and its early leaders with which I started come from? So one source, of course, is the expectations of Yiddish speakers, writers and actors who came to Israel after the Holocaust that they would be welcome as people returning home. In truth, they didn't expect Yiddish to become the language of the state of Israel. Most of them even didn't teach it to their children. They supported Zionism and even Hebrew. But unlike the Israeli leadership, they didn't see the life in Israel as severed from the diasporic past, but rather as its continuation. The best expression for this perception can be seen in the literature that was written in Israel in the 1950s by young writers who created the literary group Yungislaim. They wanted their culture to be venerated and were very hurt when it was not. As time went on, the speaking immigrants naturally moved to Hebrew and abandoned the Yiddish press and the Yiddish theater. The 1961 Eichmann trial brought with it a wave of nostalgia and which did support a short revival of Yiddish theater with the performance of Dimegilli by Itzik Mangil. But it wasn't followed by a real development of Yiddish in Israel. The real comeback of Yiddish theater and the emerging new interest in Yiddish literature belongs to the cultural settings of the late 20th century, with a retreat from the ideology of the melting pot and the development of the politics of identity as the entrance of the third denturation to Yiddish cultural scene. Natural processes of social and cultural development prove then once again as a stronger factor in the history of Yiddish and than administrative and restrictive measures. Thank you.
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Can everybody hear me? Can everybody hear me?
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Yeah.
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Can you hear me? Rachel? Can you.
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Yes, yes, yes, yes, we hear you.
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Okay, well, so I hope other people hear me too. And I want to tell you I'm delighted to be here, and I'm very grateful to Rachel for invited. For inviting me. I am not an idiot and I'm not even a historian, but I know the subject from my personal experience, and that's why I appreciate Rahel's contribution to this particular scholarship, but also to scholarship in general. And I'll explain what I mean as far as I remember, and I was educated in. Yiddish, was not very well considered in those areas. And Rahel will agree with me. Even history, Jewish. We had two kinds of history. One was historia Klali the general history. And one was Historia Amisrael. And the hierarchy was clear. Everybody preferred the former one rather than the later one, which was considered very boring and weak. And, you know, all the stereotypes that were piled on the Jewish life, which was defined by this. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Which was defined by this motto, rejection, negation of the Diaspora. So I am representing this kind of. So I'm representing this kind of ideology. But what is Raphael's particular contribution to scholarship in general is that she. Can you just forgive me for one second? Hello, I am on webinar. Well, these are the pleasures of working from home. But what I am particularly grateful is that you complicate this issue. Life is not like that. Life is not black and white light is gray, hopefully with some shadows of yellow, sunshine and so on. And what you did here is to take something that was so ideologically entrenched and you complicated in such a welcoming manner. I mean, there is no jargon here. Everything is clear, is clearly explained what happened. And I think that this is a contribution to scholarship. This is real scholarship. So let me just summarize very quickly. Just repeat in a sense what you did, the complication that emerges between the dialectic of the ideology and the personal, the emotional. I think these are the two poles that you deal with and you contrast them and you show how they work in this particular situation. So you cover. I'm not going to repeat that, because you cover the major aspects of Yiddish in Israel, which is the Yiddish press, with this major figure that you described so wonderfully, Mordechai Zamir. I mean, he was a character. All of them were characters. All of them. I really enjoyed reading about them. Then you cover Yiddish theater, which is major figures. And even I remember Ida Kaminska coming to Israel, you know, and she was. This was really a great event. But also Jigan and Schumacher and the birth family. Then you go into the academia and you cover and you talk about the Golden Chain. I don't know Yiddish, so I'm not risking going there. But the Golden Chain, which was inspired by Sutzkover, who's readers discussed with. With Sani at one point, Sutzkober and a great poet and a great hero. And the chair, Dov Sadan, that you mentioned, which is a very important, very important development. And finally you talk about the young Israel, the writers who tried to introduce the aspect of the Galo, of the Jewish life before into the Israeli, into the Israeli reality. So what are the contrasting attitude. Let me just very briefly summarize so you have, on the one hand, so you have the dialectic between the ideological struggle for the dominance of Hebrew versus the political interest, and you mentioned it, the political instrument interest in Yiddish speaking voters. So here we have ideology that doesn't so well, is not so well serving the political interest. Another note that I think that we need to emphasize here that you so clearly explain is the ideological struggle between the Hebrew speaking theater, okay, that wanted to have their own audience and at the same time the desire of the state to become a center of the Jewish theater. So here we have the dialectic of these two kind opposite interests that we have. And then we have the literature, which is my topic, Israeli literature, which wants to be born from the sea, as we know that. Shamir, you mentioned it. Shamir, talk about it. And at the same time, the tremendous, tremendous tradition that was lost in the Holocaust. So we have here this really dialectic play. And that's why this book is so interesting because it really shows the life and, and difficult subject to deal with. And now today you're talking about the Yiddish interest that is in Shalom Aleichem and Levi. Okay, So I want to add, to end my presentation, which my input, a little bit of input as a literature person, because you treated. Your discipline is history and you cover everything. I mean, I don't think there was one newspaper or one source that you haven't covered. And this is really amazing. I am a literature person and I want to mention, to kind of build on what you've done and mention two things that, that may deal rather with the emotion, with the psychological aspect of language. So one of them is. Okay, one of them is what I found in this book. This is a book by pioneering women, edited by Hadassah and which list articles. It was first published in Yiddish and then it was translated in into English and finally it will translate it into Hebrew. So this is the English edition, the new edition that Hadassah put out. And in this volume there is, and I recommend it to everybody because it's a beautiful piece of writing. And this is the article that. Written by Rahel, Rachel Katzenelson. I'm checking, okay, Rachel Katzenelson, Shazam 1918. So it's very early. The article is called From Language to Language. It turns out, and I didn't know it either, that the Zionists, the pioneering Zionists, and here were women, these are all women. First started with Russian because that's what they knew. Then they moved to Yiddish in the settlement in the Yishuv, they used to move and finally they moved into Hebrew. And this is a piece of wonderful psycholinguistic exploration of how our minds work. So let me just read the final piece that she's doing. So I hope it will whet your taste, your appetite for reading the whole article, which is really wonderful. It's really wonderful. So let me just read that. Yiddish was the language of the folk of democracy. But in Yiddish literature there reigned narrowness, inertia. And as seen by our generation, the spirit of reaction, the stream of thought that meant revolution for us found its expression in. In Hebrew literature. And every person of living thought, and this is truest for the children of our generation, our people and our situation, feels himself drawn towards the sources of revolution. So I am connecting with what you said throughout your talk about, you know, the conflict or the directed between the Hebrew and the Yiddish. But she shows it was not that simple to leave this Yiddish. And I want to conclude with a book that you mentioned. And this is the book of Meget. Okay, so Meget wrote the Foigelmann that you mentioned in your book. I worked on Feigemann millions of times ago, but you reminded me of him. So here we are. So I would think that if we have two bookmarks or two poets, one is Rachel Katzenelson and the other is this supposedly Sabra. Well, he was not Sabra. He came when he was five years old, but he really was everywhere in the issue. He did everything. And he writes this fann about the poet who wants to introduce exactly what you were talking about, wants to introduce Heap into Yiddish, into the gestalt of Israel, and he fails. But what Aharon Meged does is the failure of F. And he takes the psychoanalytical approach. What Father's failure really represents is the failure of Israel as well. The person, the protagonist, who. Who wants to encourage him and who is really attracted to him so much is a Israeli historian of Zionism. His life falls apart. His life falls apart. The failure of Feuerman really destroys the Hebrew myth that he built. The book ends with a young student who is engaging in. In writing on two movements that were established in the same year, 1897. Now, one is Zionist Herzl and the other is Medem, who established the Bund. So what Megette is trying to do to find some synthesis between the two languages, the two cultures, okay? And here we are talking about a perfect, perfect Sabra. I mean, there couldn't be a more perfect Sabra than Maget was trying to pray. So I just want to thank you. This is A wonderful book, and it's a true scholarship, and I'm sure that people will really learn from it about Israel from a different perspective than we usually do. Thank you.
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Thank you. Thank you very much.
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Rachel.
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Rachel, before we move on, could you show the COVID of that book? A lot of people missed it.
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Okay.
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Yes, please.
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You ask me, Rachel Brenner, because the
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one that she read. Yeah, yeah. Can you show a little higher? Yeah. Can you read it out loud for us?
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Yes. It calls the Plough Woman. The Plough Woman, and it is records of the pioneering of the pioneer women of Palestine.
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Wonderful. Thank you. Sorry to interrupt.
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No, it's. That's what we're here for. Learn about books.
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Okay, so it's my turn now.
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No, I think that's Sunny. And then you will conclude this the way I remember it.
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Sunny, who's going first? She like and go first.
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Shakhkar, why don't you go first?
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Okay, thank you very much. First of all, thank you to Rachel and to Alex for inviting me. I'm very happy to participate here in this wonderful panel on this wonderful book, Elish in Israel A History. And both of you mentioned the personal dimension, so I might as well start with that. There's actually a double personal connection. One is that I became very interested in this topic about 10 years ago, and I met Rachel in Tel Aviv, and we and I conference together in a double conference, one in Haifa University and one in Ann Arbor, and that began a dialogue that continued many, many years. And, you know, this book is one product of it, and hopefully there'll be many more the other one. Since both of you mentioned the issue of the generations, you know, I'm really maybe representing here the third generation of somebody who studied Yiddish as a foreign language at Yivo in New York City. But in fact, I heard a lot of Yiddish from my. At home, from my grandparents and my parents. I mean, I wouldn't be born in Israel unless my grandmother in Warsaw, who was born into a Hasidic family, Ger Hasidim, read a poem yin Yiddish about Tel Aviv and said, wow, I have to go and visit this place. And, you know, her father didn't want her to go there, but she did. She insisted on going how my father was born, and that's how I was. Good. So I think many of us have these personal connections, and some of them are inside the scholarship, and some of them are outside the scholarship. And I'm sure all of us can tell all kind of stories about these personal elements. I want to join what Rachel Brenner said, and agree with her that really, Rachel did wonderful job in this book, which is so difficult because it's a topic that really requires a lot of knowledge and a lot of work of finding all these different sources, both what was published and printed, and a lot of archival materials, which Rachel did so well. But it's also a topic that really requires very close analysis because it's very easy to go to one extreme or the other and just say, you know, the rejection of Fidi show the love of Fiddish, or one way or another. And the dialysis here is really essential. And it shows us how. It shows us really how dialectical and complex and nuanced the picture is. So, you know, Rachel wrote in the introduction to the book on page 17, the full history of Yiddish language and culture in the state of Israel, and especially the nexus of the development of kid Yiddish with that of Israel's Hebrew culture, is yet to be told. And I totally agree with it. You know, until a few years ago, when people ask about Yiddish in Israel, I think many people assumed, well, what there is to study or what there is to say about it. There isn't really much. The height of Yiddish culture was between the middle of the 19th century and the Holocaust. And then it's really a story of decline. You know, we mentioned Avraham Sutzkever a few times, and many people refer to him as the last great Yiddish poet. Right. But the truth is that what many of us, and Rahel has been leading this trend, is showing is that there's actually a lot more that needs to be studied. And maybe, you know, since I am also like Sunny and like Rachel Brenner, literary scholar, I want to focus mostly on the literary side of things. But, you know, I'm thinking here about Sutzkever, just as one very prominent example. What if we think of Sutzkever not as the last great Yiddish poet, but as the first great Yiddish Israeli poet, one who really fostered. Third, as Rahel is showing, you know, a lot of creativity of younger people who continue to create in Yiddish. So I think, really one thing that I took from Rahel's book is the fact that we really need to understand the connection between Israel and Yiddish culture. And we can't seriously understand Yiddish culture, especially after the Holocaust, without taking into consideration what was created in Israel. You know, you can't just look at what's going on in New York or in Canada or even in Australia and, you know, in Europe without taking into consideration what was going on in Israel. And not just Sutzkever and the Golden Arcade, right, Which was definitely very central. So that's on one. But then at the same time, you cannot understand Israeli culture without taking into consideration what was created in Yiddish. And that maybe is the surprising part aspect, because again, as both of you said, normally when we think about Israel, we think about the conflict between. We think about Israel and its Arab neighbors, and we don't really think about Yiddish as something that is so central to Israeli culture. So, you know, this is the main point that I took out of the book. And again, you really need to see the nuances. And, you know, you have to read the book chapter by chapter to see the analysis that Rachel is doing with the press, with the theater, with literature and with other elements. You know, I want just to mention, before I let Sunny speak, just focusing on literature again, a few important figures which Rachel is discussing. But I think there's so much more for us to study and to analyze. You know, there's a huge amount of literature and other cultural products, the film and artwork that was created in Israel. A lot of it is about Europe. It is about what's. What was going on in the Holocaust. But a lot of it is about Israeli life and the connection between life in Israel and. And the diasporic, transnational Jewish culture. And I'm thinking here about certain figures. You know, you mentioned Yungi soil. So I'm thinking about people like Yossel Bierstein. I'm thinking about people like Mendy Rifka, Bassman, Hey Bill Yomin, Benjamin Arushowski, Harshav. And I'm thinking here about the. And what I'm mostly interested here is the role of certain people who were mediating in between the Hebrew culture or what was known as, you know, kind of what is familiar to us as, you know, Israeli culture. We think about Israeli poetry, of course, we don't really think about the poems of. Or we didn't used to think about the poems of Sutzkever and Rivka Bassman and so many other great poets. But, you know, we think about Yehuda Amichai and Atenza, right? Or we think about Moshe Shamir was already mentioned and Aron Meged, right. And other people. But, you know, some of these figures seem to be like Yossel Bierstein, like Benjamin seem to be marginal, right? But they were also an important role of mediating, right? Mediating between the world of Yiddish through translation, through their connections. Right? And we mentioned, or I think Achel mentioned, or it's in the book about the Connection between a group like Yung Yisrael, which didn't exist for many years, it didn't seem to be so important in Israeli culture. But really the connection between them and the group of Likrat, where Zach and Amichai and so many others, you know, you can't really understand it without the mediating role of people like Hay Bin Yomin, who participated in both and brought the innovation of Yiddish literature from America and from Eastern Europe into Israel. So many of these links and these influences were actually not acknowledged. They were submerged, they were hidden. They were not even acknowledged, even after many, many years. And I'm thinking here also about people like Aaron Appelfeld, who actually began his career as a student of Dov Sadan of Yiddish literature and wrote both in Hebrew and in Yiddish, and even presented himself as a Hebrew, Yiddish bilingual writer, and then very quickly switched to Hebrew and made a name for himself as maybe the most important Holocaust writer in Hebrew. But really his way of discovering Hebrew was through Yiddish. And his knowing the Yiddish, Israeli milie people like Leigh Brachman and other writers was really, really important for him. And that's even true for younger people like Yaakov Shaptai, who did not speak Yiddish, but grew up in the Yiddish speaking home and then later on translated Sholem Aleichem, Eli Tsikmanger and many others for the theater in Hebrew. Right? So the role of these mediating characters also, you know, I don't want to speak just about literature, but also think about art. People like Yossel Bergner, we mentioned Yossel Bilstein, but Yossel Bergner, the artist who became hugely popular in Israel, was also one of these mediating characters. And it's really important both for the literature and for the theater as well, the role of these mediating figures. I just want to end with thinking about something that Rachel is touching on the book and I'm very interested in now, which is what happens. How do we understand Israeli culture in a different way if we take seriously what was created in Yiddish or even in Hebrew, but influenced by Yiddish? And I just want to give one specific example. And I. And with that, 1948, right? The war of 1948, that is really the foundational event in Israel. And so many people wrote about it and reflect on it. And many of these people who came as Holocaust survivors and Sheris of Plata, right, as platim, as refugees, some of them, the young people, some of the young people were brought from Europe from DP camps and fought in the war. Some of them who were older, did not fight in the war, but because there was no Israel was very. There was a very difficult situation. People were put in transit camps and in abandoned houses of Palestinians. And they wrote about it now in Yiddish. Now people wrote about these experiences in Hebrew as well, but the people who wrote about it in Yiddish did it in a different way. And I became very interested recently in how they wrote about it. It doesn't mean that they were anti establishment or subversive, but they wrote about it from the point of view of people who experienced, experience what was going on in Europe in the Holocaust, and their experience of being refugees and their kind of empathy with the others, even if it's an Other that they don't understand, that they don't know very well. They can communicate because they don't know Arabic. But this kind of traumatic experience influenced the way they depicted the Israeli, you know, the experience of 1948 and what was it like to live in Israel in the 50s and early 60s in a way that is both central to understanding Israeli culture, but also very different from the usual way that we are thinking about 1948. So this is really just a small example and also something that I think many of us using Rachel's book can
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use
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to study more and to write more. Because I think that this is really just the beginning. You know, it's such a rich topic that people didn't take into consideration until now. And I think that from now on, there's going to be a lot more work done.
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Okay, Sunny, this is your turn now.
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Okay, so let me start by thanking you, Rachel Rozhansky. And forgive me, I'm going to use Rozhansky just for clarity's purpose when I continue speaking. Rachel Brenner, my colleague, and Jahar Pinsker, for sharing their thoughts and research today, as well as to Alex Weiser Yibo, for facilitating. I'm looking forward to the discussion that will follow. And I see that the hard part for me about going third in a book response panel is that I don't want to be repetitive, but if you'll indulge me, I know that from teaching, repetition is key. So. So I'd like to start by briefly summarizing Rozhansky's work to set the frame for my comments. And what Rozansky's recent publication, Yiddish in Israel through my Reading, does is it's work that lowers the pitch. So what do I mean by that? When I teach Yiddish literature, I usually offer five reasons for the decline of Yiddish in the 20th century as a vernacular language. The first is the Holocaust and the decimation of the largest population population block that spoke the language. The second is the suppression of Yiddish cultural expression in the Soviet Union after a period of flourishing. The third is the cultural pressures of linguistic assimilation in America and other areas where the descendants of Yiddish speakers found themselves. The fourth is the suppression of Yiddish and Palestine in the State of Israel in the name of Hebrew. And the fifth is the long standing reputation of Yiddish as a non language or jargon, something to be evolved beyond. And Rajansky's work focuses in on the fourth and fifth reasons, the suppression of Yiddish and Israel and the negative associations of the language. And she argues that from the late forties to the late sixties and somewhat in the decades that follow, Yiddish and Israel was contrary to the received narrative, often supported by the state and its political institution. What ultimately proves, perhaps more debilitating for the language in Israel was the cultural reputation that that attached to Yiddish in Israel. So to putting this another way, when Yiddish was no longer a threat to the ascendancy of modern Hebrew, politicians at the highest level expressed moderate support for Yiddish cultural production and assigned Israel the role as a self designated center of global Jewish culture. In Orzansky's words, quote the status of Yiddish in Israel at that time was not shaped by legislation, but rather by public opinion.
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End quote.
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So this is how Rozhansky for me lowers the pitch of the historiographic record. Her subject is not the overt suppression of Yiddish and mandate Palestine which saw for example, the founding of a group known as Qudood Mekhi Nehasafah. But Rajansky translates as defenders of the Hebrew language. But rather she turns her attention to historical moments such as when the dominant political party in the early years, the State Mapai, chose to publish a Yiddish newspaper to spread their message while never distancing themselves formally from a Hebraist stance. The historiographic argument is field changing and Rajelensky has patiently end with copious archival documentation that we've all commented upon. I mean reading through some of the protocols of those meetings. I'm eternally grateful for it for that. The work that led to this argumentation, along with our textured analysis, demonstrates the State of Israel did not actively hear meaning by law suppress the Yiddish language or Yiddish culture. Her work reveals a rich intellectual and cultural landscape from the founding of a Yiddish Chair at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to the establishment of an elite journal of Yiddish literature and culture and society. We've heard about now the Golden Ecate under the editorship of Poet Hebrew Poet Hero of Sutzkever to the mounting of multiple plays in Yiddish in the 1960s, to the creation of a Yiddish literary group known as Young Israel. Young Israel. But let me return to that quote I mentioned earlier. Rajansky writes, quote, that the status of Yiddish in Israel was not shaped by legislation, but rather by public opinion. And to this she adds a parenthetical aside, quote though that was itself influenced to some extent by the attitude of the authorities. To repeat, the status of Yiddish in Israel was not shaped by legislation, but rather by public opinion. Parentheses though that was itself influenced to some extent by the attitude of the authorities. And I want to think more about that term influence. Think here of the official designation of Avraham Levinson, a representative of the Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish labor, or what Raharzhantzi calls the executive arm of the Israeli government in the early years as Sutzkever's co editor of Tikhotenikate. So even if everyone knew that this Yiddish poet hero, Sutskoper, was the man behind the operation, he was not officially allowed to be the sole editor. This is even after, for example, Gautamair herself facilitated his illegal migration to Palestine. When I'm circling around here and it betrays my own interests in the work of literature, of how literary traditions are created, how influence works, and also how writers come to write what they do, the power structures, what I'm sensing is in this analysis of influence, in this analysis of power in Rozhansky's text, that Rozhansky is actually telling a story about how Israeli governmentality works. So the political establishment, as it were, had been so successful at suppressing Yiddish in Yeshu, right, that it simply did not need to formally legislate against the language. After the founding of Israel, to put it a different way, the government no longer had to emphasize anti Yiddish sentiment because the population had already been disciplined to be against Yiddish, right? The government even could go so far as to support, via the Histadrut, the publication of Dikultenikkeit. And one of the terms Rashinsky uses, and I've used it a number of times now, is to paraphrase Rajan's D that he said didn't see the publication of Dikultenket as a threat. But as she writes, they also anticipated that it would get a negative response from the population. And I guess what I want to hear more and think more together, and what this book really urged me to think about methodologically, is how to understand this power dynamic. That's right. At the center between politics and culture, between the government and the people. Hegemony is a key word for the book, but I want to wonder if we can really talk about cultural hegemony disentangled from governmental hegemony. Is this a different way? Is this an absence of government restrictions? Or is it the success of the government's insistence on Hebrew over and against Yiddish? A history. And here I'm going to use like a little bit of jargon, right? History in which the will of the sovereign doesn't need to be imposed from top down because it's already imposed from the bottom up. At no point, for example, does the Israeli government seem to actively fight against the negative reputation of Yiddish, you know, or go so far as to encourage its use as an official language, you know, These are counter historical propositions. And to be sure, as Rashansky demonstrates, some government leaders did see themselves as advocates for Yiddish, especially in as much as they saw Israel as the center of global Jewish culture. And other officials began to speak of Yiddish through the lens of stereotype, right by the 1960s, 1970s, through the haze of nostalgia, alternatingly adoring and condescending, always affectively. And toward the end of the study, Rozansky points out that Yiddish and Israel from the 1960s until today has borne with it a reputation as a language that is funny and tinged with nostalgia, a reputation that's very legible in Jewish American cultural discourse. And she argues that this reputation, in fact, has counterintuitively helped sustain the presence of Yiddish and Israeli society. But again, I want to sort of question this power dynamic. Is this a vision of Yiddish that has been scripted by Hebraist stereotyping? Or is this a form of Yiddish culture that's participating in its own mocking? I don't know. These are just questions I was thinking about when I was reading the final chapters. So to close, Yiddish in Israel is a critical source for any student of modern Yiddish culture and language politics. And I be miss not to note here that my own writing about Avron Siskar is heavily indebted to Rozhansky's work. So the importance of this text is clear, but for me it's also just raised the important questions of how we navigate these complicated power dynamics of state and culture, when it comes to Yiddish, no less, when it comes to Yiddish in Israel. So I look forward to discussing this and the questions raised by the other respondents together and hopefully in future years.
- [49:18]
D
Okay, so shall we open the discussion? I don't know where Alex is.
- [49:24]
B
Yes, Alex. Yes, I'm right here. Do you want me to come in for questions, or do you want to talk first amongst yourselves before we do that?
- [49:32]
D
Well, you have to tell me how much time we have.
- [49:36]
B
Why don't we talk for maybe 10, 15 minutes and then we'll do questions?
- [49:41]
D
Okay.
- [49:42]
C
Can I just add something in, just to comment on something that Sunny raised? I also asked myself this. The state and the kind of the culture that comes from below, from the people themselves. Right. And what was the interchange between that? You know, I mean, you can see Rachel Rozhansky in some. Some examples that you brought. There was a little bit of ambiguity there about the policy of the government, or for a short time, they didn't want a theater production to go, but then they said, oh, no, okay, it's fine, let's do it. Or the same thing happened with the press. And it does raise the question of how the people themselves, without the government, without Ben Gurion, without the authorities, how they understood it. I also want to mention, since Rachel Brenner mentioned Ron Meged and Feigelmann, Meged was very important figure in the early 50s, as you mentioned, he was not Sabra. He came the age of five, but he claimed to not know Yiddish. But already in 1945, when he was the editor of Masa, which was official from mapai, he wrote an article called Nahalash Hukha about inheritance of Yiddish as early as 1948. And he said two contradictory things there in the same article. He said, you know, Yiddish is gone. Yiddish is died together with East European Jews in the Holocaust. And, you know, whatever is left is going to die very, very soon. Right? Which made all the Yiddish and all the Yiddish writers mad and say, what are you talking about? There's so much is going on. But he also said, you know, this is an inheritance for us, for Israel, and the way to do it is to make sure that whatever was created in Yiddish needs to be translated, need to be ontologized, need to be preserved for the creation of Israeli culture, because without it, we're going to be poor. Israeli culture is going to miss something that is so important. And you can see so early in the 1950s, as a young person from the suburb generation, many of the ideas that later on came in Fogelman in 1987, how he deals with it. So I don't know. I think that for me, it kind of captures both these dialectics and also the question that Sonny asked about what comes from above and what comes from below. And it's really interesting to see all the people who responded by letters and to what Maged was suggesting.
- [52:28]
A
Can I say something, Rachel?
- [52:30]
D
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [52:32]
A
Okay. So I want to respond to both to Shahar and Saniya and to say that actually, as the government didn't create any law or any restriction for Yiddish, all the restriction came. Restrictions came from bureaucrats. And if you're talking about coming from a bottom up, there was a huge pressure of the Union of Hebrew, of Hebrew, of Hebrew Journalists to restrict Yiddish in all kinds of creative ways. And also they put pressure on members of the Knesset in the goal to pass some laws that would restrict Yiddish. And members of the Knesset didn't cooperate with the. So when you say from bottom up, I would say it came from the public. There were interests here. Now, the other thing that I want to respond is I start the book with. I mean, I started the book with Berlstein and I ended it with Megod. So I mean, these are the two Poles. And then if we talk about Megid, there is an article that he wrote in his. He has a small book of essays from my desk. And then he has a. Then he has an essay about Yiddish. And he says, Yiddish is soft, Yiddish is sweet. When I speak Yiddish, I come home. And also, you know, over. And there is. In one of the chapters I discussed, there was a discussion about among Yiddish journalists, led especially by the laten who died a few, two, three years ago. And we, we knew him very well, and also Mordechai Chalamesh. And they were saying, yes, people now love Yiddish like an old woman who should sit, an old grandma who should sit by the fireplace and knit socks and will not interfere in anything that we are doing. And Chalame said to him, it's our fault. We didn't teach our children. We didn't pass it on. And there it gave me the impression that on the one hand, this Yiddish activists, writers, journalists, they didn't pass Yiddish to the next generation, but. And they didn't like the, you know, the image of Yiddish as cute, funny. But at the same time, the fact that Yiddish did have this image opened the door to Yiddish for people who had nothing to do with it. And once the door was open, they were inside. So in a way, these public opinions are interests against Yiddish perceptions of Yiddish. Open the door for the next stage of Yiddish.
- [55:25]
D
I think that we should open the questions maybe. Alex, are you there?
- [55:31]
B
Yes, sure.
- [55:33]
D
We should ask. Entertain a few questions.
- [55:36]
B
Sure, yeah.
- [55:37]
D
From our faithful audience.
- [55:40]
B
Okay, so from the audience, some questions Debbie Rothman asks. Both English and Arabic are considered national languages of Israel. Why not Yiddish?
- [55:50]
A
It's not true. Can I answer? I mean, Shama wants.
- [55:54]
B
Please go for it.
- [55:56]
A
But then. Okay, so I, until the Israel didn't have any law about the national language until during Mandatory Palestine. There were three official languages in Mandatory Palestine, which were, of course, English, Hebrew and Arabic. Afterwards. I mean, Hebrew was the language, the spoken language, the language of the country. And there was no official language. Only recently with the Hoka Leon, with the nation law, Hebrew became the only official official language. So actually there was no official language in Israel.
- [56:37]
C
Yeah.
- [56:38]
B
Okay. Philip, sorry, is there other comments?
- [56:41]
A
Maybe Shaha wants to add. No, no, no.
- [56:43]
C
I mean, that's, that, that's true. I mean, there's a difference between the public sphere and the fact that, you know, signs are in all these languages. But this is not, there's not a law about national, about national language. And this is another one of those, those myths. And it's interesting that now in the last few years, the debate about kind of demoting Arabic and other languages and trying to put Hebrew as the only one. Yeah.
- [57:12]
B
Philip, Spain asks, is Western Yiddish also represented in Israel? For those that don't know, Western Yiddish is when people say Yiddish, they really mean Eastern Yiddish. Western Yiddish is a kind of old dialect that people have not been speaking for a few hundred years, particularly that of Alsace and Switzerland. And what kind of Yiddish predominates in Israel? Lithuanian? Polish? Do we know the answer to that?
- [57:34]
A
You're asking me? Well, I think, I mean, I can tell you something about myself. When I was. I was born in Tel Aviv and I grew up in what is called now the old north of Tel Aviv, which is the center of Tel Aviv. And you know, when I went out of our apartment to the lobby, it was like a lingual lab of Swedish dialects. Many, except for the neighbors on the third floor who spoke Arabic, everyone. And yeah, and the neighbor on the first floor who spoke Hungarian and she didn't know Yiddish. Everyone was speaking Yiddish in different, many different languages in many different dialects. And all the dialects existed. But, you know, biology does what it does. And I don't think that there are any more. People don't speak. There are no more native speakers in Yiddish. So the ultra Orthodox, they speak, you know, the dialect, what we, what we call. I mean, the popular name is the Polish, the Hasidic and the Lithuanian. What this person who mentioned is almost not used anymore because the Lithuanian, the Litvak Yeshivot, they speak Hebrew in Israel and in America they speak English. So actually this, the Lithuanian dialect is actually disappearing and people speak standard Yiddish or as I heard once from Shachar, said, I speak Yevo dialect.
- [59:14]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, just. Just to add, in terms of writing, people also did not write in the evil Yiddish. Most of overwhelming majority came from. From Lithuania and from Poland. So, you know, they. They were using. They were using that dialect. But if you look at the poetry, for example, of Favor Rinzler and Hay Binyomin, there is a very heightened awareness of the history of Yiddish language, including Western Yiddish. And, you know, they play a lot with that in the early poetry, but
- [59:49]
A
even later in poetry, even Moshe Leib Halpering does it.
- [59:56]
D
So are we on time or what?
- [60:00]
B
We'll go another 10, 15 minutes. I think there's a lot of questions. I don't want to cut it off, if that's okay for everyone. Yeah, maybe we'll go to 5:15, 5:25, 15 minutes.
- [60:11]
A
Okay.
- [60:13]
D
Because I'm sure other people have other things to do too.
- [60:16]
B
Okay. So we won't get to all of the questions, but we'll try to get to a few more. Did Yad Vashem play a role in the history of Yiddish in Israel?
- [60:25]
A
You're asking me Anyway. Okay, so. So it's a complicated question. Not actively. This is actually my current project on Rochel Oyerbach or Hela Oyerbach, as Rachel Brenner would correct me. She collected lots of testimonies in Yiddish, but also in Polish and in Russian. No. That Yad Vashem was not a player in the place of Yiddish in his way.
- [60:57]
D
She was also the one who established in Yad Vashem the testimony's department. So there were many testimonies, I'm sure. In Yiddish.
- [61:09]
A
Yes, and also in Polish.
- [61:10]
D
Yes. She herself wrote in Yiddish in Davar, and that's what I read by her, and it was translated into Hebrew. So she was writing in Yiddish. Yeah. Yes.
- [61:26]
C
She wrote what became a whole book in Landis where her impressions and stories and. But yeah, I mean, she was in Yad Vashem and she. Now looking back, she was very important in Yad Vashem. But as far as I know, the Rahel knows much more about. About that. She was actually marginalized within the Yad Vashem was mar.
- [61:45]
D
She was marginalized because she was too independent. Yes. Okay. Maybe we can take another question because.
- [61:54]
B
Yes. Are there parallels to the government's attitude towards the Arabic of Mizrahi Jews in the attitude towards Yiddish? Was that negativity similarly legislated or non legislated? How is their relationship to Arabic of Mizrahi Jews.
- [62:13]
D
Can I jump in for this, Rachel, if you, if you don't mind, I just have one comment. I think that in terms of the way I heard about it, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the second generation forgot Arabic. There are young, second generation immigrants to Israel who did not want to study the language of their parents the same way as by the way, the children, immigrant children from the Ashkenazi family. I mean, that's what I know, but maybe Rachel won't.
- [62:53]
A
So Rachel, what you said is actually it's a universal characteristic of immigrant society that the first generation comes with the language and the culture. The second generation turns, they're back on it and the third generation comes back. Now you can't, first of all, you can't compare Arabic to Yiddish because Arabic wasn't a Jewish language. It's the language of the Arab countries. And I mean it wasn't considered a threat to Hebrew. But there's another thing that needs to be said that I mention it very, very, very. I allude to it in my book. It's not the main topic, not the focus. The Ashkenazi East European leaders of the state of Israel didn't think too much about the culture of the Jews who came from the Arab countries. And they didn't think that the culture that they brought is a spread for the Israeli new culture. So they, they more or less ignored it.
- [64:04]
D
There were other considerations there. I totally agree. Maybe we can take some more.
- [64:09]
B
Okay, A sort of related question is other minority Jewish languages like Ladino,
- [64:17]
C
does
- [64:18]
B
their existence in Israel have a similar story to Yiddish or how would you compare?
- [64:24]
A
So okay, so Ladino, it doesn't have a similar story because it was not, I mean it didn't attract the attention of the authorities and it wasn't so dominant in pre state Israel like Yiddish. What happened to Ladino is that it had good luck in the form of Itzhak Navon and other figures that pushed it strongly and toward the end of the 20th century, actually, I mean piggyback on Aladino to get some, some official status in Israel because of, of the power and Yiddish didn't have at the same time, they didn't have it. Hakhn was the fifth president of the state and was from a Saudi family. He didn't have person like they didn't have other figures to push it in the same way. And actually the Ladino pulled Yiddish towards the creation of the national authority of Yiddish culture and Latino culture.
- [65:34]
C
I just want to add here that obviously there are important differences Here between Yiddish and Ladino and also Arabic, which did have a Judeo Arabic, special Jewish dialect. So, you know, we shouldn't really confuse them and see each one on their own at the same time. I think that part of what I was trying to talk about at the beginning, there's a kind of new way of understanding Israeliness and what is Israeli culture, not just as what was created in Hebrew, but in all these different languages. And we get a much fuller and more complex culture picture of Israeli culture when we take these languages into account.
- [66:17]
D
Can I jump in for a second, please?
- [66:20]
A
Yeah.
- [66:20]
D
Okay. I would like. I don't know if you will decide if this is the end, but I would like to emphasize one aspect of Raquel's book that I think needs to be emphasized. And this is the dynamic of the historical development. I mean, she's really doing a wonderful job. And this is not just a compliment, which of course it is, but it's a meaningful compliment that things don't stay in place, things change. And one of the examples that she gives, and it's a wonder, it's a very correct example, one is of her Eichmann trial, how it transformed. But the other is also the Six Day War that there was the waiting and this reminded. And then we have all the personal testimonies of the soldiers. And it was also the October War, so the Yom Kippur War. So I think that what she does is she does a very complicated but a very correct job to show how history doesn't say we change our attitudes to our Hebrew also as a result of changes in the Hebrew mentality of the state. So I just wanted to add it and I don't know, it seems to me that maybe we'll conclude here or.
- [67:48]
B
I'd like to have one final question to end on. What is the role of Yiddish in Israel going forward? Especially with. As the. As Israeli culture changes, as the demographics of Israel change, what role do you think Yiddish may play in that story?
- [68:08]
A
Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm a historian. I can tell you what happened. I mean, I can't make any prophecy what is going to happen. What I see is that over the last two decades, there is, I would say, a new phase in Yiddish culture. We see young people with no Yiddish background stepping in. We have novels that are the protagonists, are Yiddish speakers that are dealing with Yiddish theater, that are describing Yiddish in America. We have it's Matan Ceremony that wrote Arbar at, which is like. I mean, like style Bashevis Zinger and it's about Yiddish writer. And I mean, he plays with Albar Assad, which is the four, you know, the four lands, the Council of Four Lands. It's also a name of the street in Tel Aviv. And this is where it happened.
- [69:07]
C
Company.
- [69:08]
A
Yes, I asked, of course, Hebrew Publishing Company. And then we have Irmi Penkus with the satirical collaborator, Professor Fabricant. And also going back, there was a very, very nice short movie, which is called Beit Avi, which actually presents this situation of the new immigrant and the quintessential Israeli. Strong tent, sun tent, you know, strong and hardworking. And all of a sudden it unfolds that the quintessential Israeli survivor. So Ibish is becoming part of the Israeli. Of the Israeli culture. And there are more. There are more initiatives and writings and Yad Biran with his book and some more, and the activities of Bethel and other things. And I think that the future is still to be seen.
- [70:07]
B
Well, that's a wonderful.
- [70:08]
C
Just want to be. Just time to talk about it. But I just want to thank Yael Javer. I saw that she wrote some wonderful comments and we all, of course, learned from a wonderful book about Yiddish in Palestine.
- [70:19]
A
Yes. Yeah.
- [70:22]
B
Well, I want to thank you all so much for being a part of this conversation. I'm sorry for all those that we can't get to your questions, but I encourage you to get the book. I'm going to send the link for it in the chat. It's a wonderful book and there's a lot more to be discussed and to continue to wrestle with. So thank you all so much.
- [70:42]
A
Thank you very much to all of you.
- [70:45]
D
Thank you all for your book. Thank you.
- [70:49]
A
Thank you.