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Yiddish New York
Jan. 4th, 2023 05:24 pmSomeday I will remember how long it takes me to write up posts on multi-day events.
This past week was Yiddish New York, which was done as a hybrid conference this year. The lectures were entirely on-line, while music / concerts were live-streamed. As is typical of this sort of thing, I didn’t have time for nearly everything I wanted to see, but the recorded sessions will be available until mid-February, so I should be able to catch up some.
I went to all four sessions of Vayberishe Zabababones: The Forgotten Rituals and Minhagim of Eastern European Jewish Women presented by Annie Cohen. (Note: “minhagim” is Hebrew and Yiddish for “customs.”) She discussed several types of women’s religious roles, ranging from prayers to midwifery and more. For example, women created religious objects like the curtains around the Torah ark and the gartel (belt) wrapped around the Torah scroll. The major emphasis was on life events, e.g. birth, marriage, and death, all of which are points of transition. She talked a lot about people making a distinction between folk practices and formal religion.
Some of the rituals she talked about were really interesting. One was the “plague wedding,” which was a wedding (often between a poor bride and groom) held to ward off disease. Instead of the normal white chuppah (wedding canopy), a black chuppah was used. Apparently there was at least one example of a plague wedding being held in the context of COVID.
She talked at more length about measuring graves (or entire cemeteries), which was done with string, which was then used to make candles. This was done either during the month of Elul (the month before Rosh Hashanah) or at times of crisis. The idea was a mixture of calling on the dead to intervene on behalf of the living and setting boundaries. Apparently this practice goes back to the 12th century and was practiced at least through the 19th century.
Another major role was the "zagerin,” a female prayer leader. She knew how to read Hebrew and could translate to Yiddish, as well as call out prayers for other women to follow. There was a certain expectation that she would capture the emotional connection to prayer. She also worked with people visiting cemeteries and her first question to them would be “with tears or without,” which would influence how much money people should give her for her prayers.
Another role was healing, including acting as a midwife. Various healing practices were used, including passing an egg over the sick person, the cemetery measuring that was already mentioned, and placing grass from the cemetery at the head of a sick person. There was some discussion about whether Jewish law allows communication with he dead, but there was also a comment that the more Jewish texts forbid a practice, the more common that practice is.
Overall, this was a really interesting series of talks. I also watched a related 15 minute video, “di Zagerin,” (i.e. The woman Prayer Leader) which has to do with a woman who is angrily yelling that all the success the other women in town have is due to her efforts, but she has nothing. She vows to pray only for their downfall and for revenge. Her grandson is trying to soothe her, but fails.
There were related lectures on Reenchanting American Judaism: The Search for Ashkenazi WOmen’s Folk Magic & Ritual and Its Modern Day Potential by Rokhl Lafrissen. I only went to the first of those (on Sunday) because there was another talk I wanted to hear at the same time on Monday. One of her major points was that, in general, American Judaism is in harmony with American values, with an emphasis on the synagogue and life cycle events and tends to be hostile to the supernatural.
She talked about “The Curious Case of the Dybbuk Box,” which was the subject of two movies (and possibly some newspaper articles) around 2001. The story has to do with an antique dealer in Oregon and is a typical haunted object story. One movie was a Hollywood production (“Possession”) but the other is an Indian movie set in Mauritius, called “Dybbuk Box: The Curse is Real.”
In general, she divided folk magic and folk ritual into a few categories - divination, communication with the dead, and magical protection / healing rituals. One particular divination practice she discussed was the Chabad practice of choosing a random passage from the Rebbe’s letters in answer to a question or problem, i.e. bibliomancy. There is apparently at least one website that will do this for you. She also talked about a blog about “Jewitches,” i.e. Jewish women who also practice witchcraft.
The final talk I went to on Sunday was Off the Derekh by Malky Goldman. This is a term that refers to formerly religious people leaving (primarily) Chasidic communities. The lecture was in Yiddish, so I only followed about a third of it. She talked about her background, growing up in a Chasidic family before coming to Boro Park (part of Brooklyn), where she learned English to be able to deal with stores and doctors. She went on to study art at Hunter College. The biggest step into American culture was realizing it was okay to be an individual. If I followed this correctly, her husband is a scientist and basketball player. When she married him, she had to choose everything. She changed how she dressed and got involved with acting, which she said gave her inner child a good feeling. At the same time. she had to deal with her family, who took a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy towards her, just telling other people that she was “in Manhattan.” She also had to fight for individuality with other people who assume everyone who is Off the Derek is the same. Overall, this was an interesting talk, or at least what I understood of it.
There were several music performances. The only one I listened to in real time was by Kateryna Ostrovsky, a Ukrainian Jew based in Hamburg, Germany, who performed a mix of songs, including some Brazilian ones. She was accompanied by Leandro Pellegrino on guitar. Pleasant enough, but nothing revolutionary. I will go back and listen to some of the other music segments, however.
I listened two talks by Vivi Lachs that had to do with the Jewish East End of London. The first of those was Where’s the Goy in the London Music Hall. Yiddish music halls were generally small venues, e.g. the back rooms of pubs. The audiences were almost entirely working class. While there were attempts to put on more serious theatre, those were not successful. The word “goy” to refer to a non-Jew was rarely used and, when used, was considered neither positive nor negative. Instead there were references to people like the Russian tsar, old retired men in Victoria Park, coal men, gamblers, and British police. There were a lot of songs with references to pogroms, Russia, and the tsar. Other songs had to do with London streets, e.g. a woman complaining that her British husband beats her or a man complaining about police enforcing vagrancy laws. (There were also Jewish gangs, by the way.) Other song topics included politics and sexual relationships. The best part of the presentation was her singing a few of the songs.
The other talk by Vivi Lachs I went to was Where’s the Goy on the London Yiddish Stage. She mostly focused on fictional slice-of-life newspaper stories, rather than actual plays. A lot of these seemed to have to do with conflict between new immigrants and the more established Anglo-Jewish community. For example, the Anglo-Jewish community supported the World War I draft, but few immigrants signed up until the draft became compulsory in 1916.
Amanda Miryem-Khaya Siegel gave a talk on Women on the Yiddish Stage. This is related to a publication and translation project that is not just about actresses, but also writers, directors, choreographers, etc. The work, done along with Dr. Alysa Quint started with a summer conference on Women, the City, and Yiddish Theater in 2016 and has progressed to include a collection of scholarly articles and translations of plays by women. Some of the performers who were discussed included Sophia Karp, who was the first woman to join the Yiddish theater and was forced to marry another member of the troupe to be considered respectable, Regina Prager who was mostly an opera singer, and Bertha Kalich, who was the first Jew to perform on the stage of the Romanian National Theatre and the first woman to perform Hamlet on the English stage. There was also a mention of an article (maybe a book) about women in the Lithuanian Yiddish Theatre in Kovno, which I should probably look for given thats where my roots are.
A very different presentation was Am Yisroel High: The Story of Jews and Cannabis by Eddy Portnoy. (This is a pun on the phrase “Am Yisroel Chai,” which means “the people of Israel live.”) This was related to a current exhibit at YIVO in New York at the Center for Jewish History Building. For those who are not familiar with YIVO, it was founded in Lithuania and moved to New York in 1940 and is sort of the Ashkenazi Jewish equivalent of the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. Some of the things the exhibit discusses are documents relating to cannabis, e.g. a 1911 novel titled “Hashish,” the entry for “hemp” in the Yiddish Encyclopedic Dictionary, and various historic texts, including some found in the Cairo Gneza (a repository of Jewish religious books buried in a cemetery). Hashish was generally accepted by both Jews and Muslims in North Africa and some people think cannabis may be the “aromatic cane” used in making the fragrant mixture used for anointing and for burning in incense. Some of the people who were regular cannabis users include the revisionist Leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the poet Alan Ginsburg, and the astronomer Carl Sagan. Rafael Meshalem at Hebrew University was one of the first people to research medical marijuana and isolated both THC and CBD. Another point he made was that Jews often got involved in risky (i.e. illegal) businesses because of restrictions that kept them out of the legitimate economy. I was amused that he included not just cannabis and alcohol in this, but also comic books! This was an interesting talk and I might check out the exhibit the next time I am in New York, even though I have no intention of using cannabis.
One area of particular interest to me is novelty songs so I really enjoyed Uri Schreter’s talk on Micky Katz: Yinglish Comedy and the Continuity of Klezmer. For those who don’t recognize the name, Mickey Katz did a number of shows and records incorporating Yiddish and a broken English dialect into American music, but is probably best known these days as the father of Joel Gray. He played the clarinet in swing bands and started performing with Spike Jones in 1946, leading him to move to Los Angeles. Before that he had published a book of Yinglish parodies with stories like “Little Red Rosenberg” and “Yoshki and the Beanstalk.” He went out on his own in 1947, doing klezmerized versions of American songs. Some examples include “The Baby, the Bubbe, and You,” clearly based on “Bibbidy-Bobbidi-Boo. (“Bubbe” is Yiddish for “grandmother, by the way.) He also did shows like Borscht Capades. Anyway, the best part of this presentation was listening to all the clips. His work was played frequently in my house when I was growing up (though not as much as Allen Sherman) so I have fond memories of songs like “The Purple Kishke Eater,” “Duvid Crockett,” and “16 Tons of Delicatessen.” I liked the description of him as “the hyphen in the middle of American-Jewish culture.” However, he was controversial and some people were embarrassed by his dialect comedy and thought he was too crass.
Mickey Katz was also one of the people discussed in a talk by Miriam Isaacs on Language in Yiddish Vaudeville and Radio. Note that this talk was almost entirely in Yiddish, but was fairly easy for me to follow. But before him, she talked about the Rechnitzer Rejects who did songs like “Mein Boro Park” to the tune of “New York, New York” and “Balabustas” to the “Ghostbusters” theme. (A balabusta is basically a perfect housewife.) Other people who were mentioned include Sophie Tucker and Eli Basse. There were also diversions into subjects like what is called the “gefilte fish divide” and other differences between Litvaks and Galitzianers, e.g. Litvaks make money while Galitzianers make children. This was, again, fun mostly for the music clips.
The final presentation I went to was Yiddish Songs of Drunkenness by Bob Rothstein. Most of the folk songs he talked about are either sung by drunkards or about drinking, while Slavic folk songs often deal with people dealing with drunks. One interesting thing he mentioned was that in 1863 Russian Empire laws changed from tavern leases to state monopolies on taverns, which some people disliked because Jewish tavern keepers gave credit, while the government didn’t. The only song I particularly noted was one about a drunkard’s testament in which he wants to be buried with liquor.
Overall, there was a lot of interesting material here. And there are still several talks (and music performances) I want to go back and watch/listen to the recordings of. Definitely worth my time (and the conference fee.)
This past week was Yiddish New York, which was done as a hybrid conference this year. The lectures were entirely on-line, while music / concerts were live-streamed. As is typical of this sort of thing, I didn’t have time for nearly everything I wanted to see, but the recorded sessions will be available until mid-February, so I should be able to catch up some.
I went to all four sessions of Vayberishe Zabababones: The Forgotten Rituals and Minhagim of Eastern European Jewish Women presented by Annie Cohen. (Note: “minhagim” is Hebrew and Yiddish for “customs.”) She discussed several types of women’s religious roles, ranging from prayers to midwifery and more. For example, women created religious objects like the curtains around the Torah ark and the gartel (belt) wrapped around the Torah scroll. The major emphasis was on life events, e.g. birth, marriage, and death, all of which are points of transition. She talked a lot about people making a distinction between folk practices and formal religion.
Some of the rituals she talked about were really interesting. One was the “plague wedding,” which was a wedding (often between a poor bride and groom) held to ward off disease. Instead of the normal white chuppah (wedding canopy), a black chuppah was used. Apparently there was at least one example of a plague wedding being held in the context of COVID.
She talked at more length about measuring graves (or entire cemeteries), which was done with string, which was then used to make candles. This was done either during the month of Elul (the month before Rosh Hashanah) or at times of crisis. The idea was a mixture of calling on the dead to intervene on behalf of the living and setting boundaries. Apparently this practice goes back to the 12th century and was practiced at least through the 19th century.
Another major role was the "zagerin,” a female prayer leader. She knew how to read Hebrew and could translate to Yiddish, as well as call out prayers for other women to follow. There was a certain expectation that she would capture the emotional connection to prayer. She also worked with people visiting cemeteries and her first question to them would be “with tears or without,” which would influence how much money people should give her for her prayers.
Another role was healing, including acting as a midwife. Various healing practices were used, including passing an egg over the sick person, the cemetery measuring that was already mentioned, and placing grass from the cemetery at the head of a sick person. There was some discussion about whether Jewish law allows communication with he dead, but there was also a comment that the more Jewish texts forbid a practice, the more common that practice is.
Overall, this was a really interesting series of talks. I also watched a related 15 minute video, “di Zagerin,” (i.e. The woman Prayer Leader) which has to do with a woman who is angrily yelling that all the success the other women in town have is due to her efforts, but she has nothing. She vows to pray only for their downfall and for revenge. Her grandson is trying to soothe her, but fails.
There were related lectures on Reenchanting American Judaism: The Search for Ashkenazi WOmen’s Folk Magic & Ritual and Its Modern Day Potential by Rokhl Lafrissen. I only went to the first of those (on Sunday) because there was another talk I wanted to hear at the same time on Monday. One of her major points was that, in general, American Judaism is in harmony with American values, with an emphasis on the synagogue and life cycle events and tends to be hostile to the supernatural.
She talked about “The Curious Case of the Dybbuk Box,” which was the subject of two movies (and possibly some newspaper articles) around 2001. The story has to do with an antique dealer in Oregon and is a typical haunted object story. One movie was a Hollywood production (“Possession”) but the other is an Indian movie set in Mauritius, called “Dybbuk Box: The Curse is Real.”
In general, she divided folk magic and folk ritual into a few categories - divination, communication with the dead, and magical protection / healing rituals. One particular divination practice she discussed was the Chabad practice of choosing a random passage from the Rebbe’s letters in answer to a question or problem, i.e. bibliomancy. There is apparently at least one website that will do this for you. She also talked about a blog about “Jewitches,” i.e. Jewish women who also practice witchcraft.
The final talk I went to on Sunday was Off the Derekh by Malky Goldman. This is a term that refers to formerly religious people leaving (primarily) Chasidic communities. The lecture was in Yiddish, so I only followed about a third of it. She talked about her background, growing up in a Chasidic family before coming to Boro Park (part of Brooklyn), where she learned English to be able to deal with stores and doctors. She went on to study art at Hunter College. The biggest step into American culture was realizing it was okay to be an individual. If I followed this correctly, her husband is a scientist and basketball player. When she married him, she had to choose everything. She changed how she dressed and got involved with acting, which she said gave her inner child a good feeling. At the same time. she had to deal with her family, who took a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy towards her, just telling other people that she was “in Manhattan.” She also had to fight for individuality with other people who assume everyone who is Off the Derek is the same. Overall, this was an interesting talk, or at least what I understood of it.
There were several music performances. The only one I listened to in real time was by Kateryna Ostrovsky, a Ukrainian Jew based in Hamburg, Germany, who performed a mix of songs, including some Brazilian ones. She was accompanied by Leandro Pellegrino on guitar. Pleasant enough, but nothing revolutionary. I will go back and listen to some of the other music segments, however.
I listened two talks by Vivi Lachs that had to do with the Jewish East End of London. The first of those was Where’s the Goy in the London Music Hall. Yiddish music halls were generally small venues, e.g. the back rooms of pubs. The audiences were almost entirely working class. While there were attempts to put on more serious theatre, those were not successful. The word “goy” to refer to a non-Jew was rarely used and, when used, was considered neither positive nor negative. Instead there were references to people like the Russian tsar, old retired men in Victoria Park, coal men, gamblers, and British police. There were a lot of songs with references to pogroms, Russia, and the tsar. Other songs had to do with London streets, e.g. a woman complaining that her British husband beats her or a man complaining about police enforcing vagrancy laws. (There were also Jewish gangs, by the way.) Other song topics included politics and sexual relationships. The best part of the presentation was her singing a few of the songs.
The other talk by Vivi Lachs I went to was Where’s the Goy on the London Yiddish Stage. She mostly focused on fictional slice-of-life newspaper stories, rather than actual plays. A lot of these seemed to have to do with conflict between new immigrants and the more established Anglo-Jewish community. For example, the Anglo-Jewish community supported the World War I draft, but few immigrants signed up until the draft became compulsory in 1916.
Amanda Miryem-Khaya Siegel gave a talk on Women on the Yiddish Stage. This is related to a publication and translation project that is not just about actresses, but also writers, directors, choreographers, etc. The work, done along with Dr. Alysa Quint started with a summer conference on Women, the City, and Yiddish Theater in 2016 and has progressed to include a collection of scholarly articles and translations of plays by women. Some of the performers who were discussed included Sophia Karp, who was the first woman to join the Yiddish theater and was forced to marry another member of the troupe to be considered respectable, Regina Prager who was mostly an opera singer, and Bertha Kalich, who was the first Jew to perform on the stage of the Romanian National Theatre and the first woman to perform Hamlet on the English stage. There was also a mention of an article (maybe a book) about women in the Lithuanian Yiddish Theatre in Kovno, which I should probably look for given thats where my roots are.
A very different presentation was Am Yisroel High: The Story of Jews and Cannabis by Eddy Portnoy. (This is a pun on the phrase “Am Yisroel Chai,” which means “the people of Israel live.”) This was related to a current exhibit at YIVO in New York at the Center for Jewish History Building. For those who are not familiar with YIVO, it was founded in Lithuania and moved to New York in 1940 and is sort of the Ashkenazi Jewish equivalent of the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. Some of the things the exhibit discusses are documents relating to cannabis, e.g. a 1911 novel titled “Hashish,” the entry for “hemp” in the Yiddish Encyclopedic Dictionary, and various historic texts, including some found in the Cairo Gneza (a repository of Jewish religious books buried in a cemetery). Hashish was generally accepted by both Jews and Muslims in North Africa and some people think cannabis may be the “aromatic cane” used in making the fragrant mixture used for anointing and for burning in incense. Some of the people who were regular cannabis users include the revisionist Leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the poet Alan Ginsburg, and the astronomer Carl Sagan. Rafael Meshalem at Hebrew University was one of the first people to research medical marijuana and isolated both THC and CBD. Another point he made was that Jews often got involved in risky (i.e. illegal) businesses because of restrictions that kept them out of the legitimate economy. I was amused that he included not just cannabis and alcohol in this, but also comic books! This was an interesting talk and I might check out the exhibit the next time I am in New York, even though I have no intention of using cannabis.
One area of particular interest to me is novelty songs so I really enjoyed Uri Schreter’s talk on Micky Katz: Yinglish Comedy and the Continuity of Klezmer. For those who don’t recognize the name, Mickey Katz did a number of shows and records incorporating Yiddish and a broken English dialect into American music, but is probably best known these days as the father of Joel Gray. He played the clarinet in swing bands and started performing with Spike Jones in 1946, leading him to move to Los Angeles. Before that he had published a book of Yinglish parodies with stories like “Little Red Rosenberg” and “Yoshki and the Beanstalk.” He went out on his own in 1947, doing klezmerized versions of American songs. Some examples include “The Baby, the Bubbe, and You,” clearly based on “Bibbidy-Bobbidi-Boo. (“Bubbe” is Yiddish for “grandmother, by the way.) He also did shows like Borscht Capades. Anyway, the best part of this presentation was listening to all the clips. His work was played frequently in my house when I was growing up (though not as much as Allen Sherman) so I have fond memories of songs like “The Purple Kishke Eater,” “Duvid Crockett,” and “16 Tons of Delicatessen.” I liked the description of him as “the hyphen in the middle of American-Jewish culture.” However, he was controversial and some people were embarrassed by his dialect comedy and thought he was too crass.
Mickey Katz was also one of the people discussed in a talk by Miriam Isaacs on Language in Yiddish Vaudeville and Radio. Note that this talk was almost entirely in Yiddish, but was fairly easy for me to follow. But before him, she talked about the Rechnitzer Rejects who did songs like “Mein Boro Park” to the tune of “New York, New York” and “Balabustas” to the “Ghostbusters” theme. (A balabusta is basically a perfect housewife.) Other people who were mentioned include Sophie Tucker and Eli Basse. There were also diversions into subjects like what is called the “gefilte fish divide” and other differences between Litvaks and Galitzianers, e.g. Litvaks make money while Galitzianers make children. This was, again, fun mostly for the music clips.
The final presentation I went to was Yiddish Songs of Drunkenness by Bob Rothstein. Most of the folk songs he talked about are either sung by drunkards or about drinking, while Slavic folk songs often deal with people dealing with drunks. One interesting thing he mentioned was that in 1863 Russian Empire laws changed from tavern leases to state monopolies on taverns, which some people disliked because Jewish tavern keepers gave credit, while the government didn’t. The only song I particularly noted was one about a drunkard’s testament in which he wants to be buried with liquor.
Overall, there was a lot of interesting material here. And there are still several talks (and music performances) I want to go back and watch/listen to the recordings of. Definitely worth my time (and the conference fee.)
