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YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory

(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.

A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.

As Max explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure. 

Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s W. 16th Street.

This week YIVO and the NLI will announce the completion of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had to invite Max, not just because of his connection to Inna Grade but because he has become a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel “The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.

We met on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)

Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)

The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies the years of effort that went into putting them in order. Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he visited shortly after Inna’s death.

“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apartment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks, there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts and books and books…. But the thing I remember most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart. 

Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind his mother and his first wife under the assumption that the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in 1925, and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948. 

Chaim Grade had already established a reputation as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war; English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish press brought him recognition in America for what the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, says that Grade was possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”

Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, showed us the physical evidence of that possession: Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Sacrifice”); a photograph of Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy. 

Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.

Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)

The archivists are also careful to give Inna her due. After arriving in America she studied literature and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her, hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles about him have survived. 

Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,” said Brent. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”

If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is: In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that had happened to him — his fame — but this they never referred to,” wrote Ozick. “Instead they discussed his style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.” 

Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her husband read and hated the story. In it she describes Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”

For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval, “this is probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of the archive. He described publishing projects already underway with Schocken Books and other publishers that will draw on the material. 

Max and I discussed what it felt like to see what had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary preservation. Max was struck by the way Inna’s personality came through in the papers. “This was her,” he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It was definitely remarkable to see that.”

I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna, and how her behavior could seem funny and exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation may also have prevented scholars from doing the work that would have made him better known. 

“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are true at the same time,” said Max. “Those kinds of scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody really cared and that literature was taken so seriously. And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite divest from the rest of it.”

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The post YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Two Years Since Oct. 7: A World That Lost Its Moral Compass

People react near the scene, after an attack in which a car was driven at pedestrians and stabbings were reported at a synagogue in north Manchester, Britain, on Yom Kippur, Oct. 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Phil Noble

Two years have passed since October 7, 2023 — a day of unspeakable horror for Israel and the Jewish people.

Across Israel and Jewish communities worldwide, this weekend was marked by somber commemorations, filled with dignity and tears. Candles were lit, names were recited, and prayers rose for the 1,200 victims, for the hostages still held in Gaza, and for the survivors who carry the trauma of that day.

But even as Jews mourn, the streets of Europe and particularly in the Netherlands, have been filled with anger and hatred. More than a quarter of a million protesters recently marched, not to demand the release of hostages or condemn terrorism, but to denounce Israel. Some waved Hamas flags, others shouted calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, and openly echoed antisemitic slogans. Among them were politicians, cultural figures, and so-called “human rights activists” who have chosen ideology over morality.

The renewed peace initiative led by former President Trump receives little attention, as does the suffering of Israeli hostages or the trauma of their families. The same protesters who speak the language of “human rights” fall silent in the face of atrocities that do not involve Israel.

Ignored Tragedies Around the World

While the global media fixates on Israel, genuine humanitarian catastrophes unfold elsewhere, largely unnoticed:

  • In Sudan, a brutal civil war since April 2023 has displaced over 12 million people and claimed tens of thousands of lives.
  • In Ukraine, the war continues to devastate both sides, leaving hundreds of thousands dead.
  • In Myanmar, entire villages have been destroyed amid ongoing conflict.
  • Across the Congo and the Sahel, armed groups massacre civilians daily.
  • In Yemen, famine and war push entire families to starvation.
  • In Somalia and the Horn of Africa, drought and fighting threaten tens of millions with hunger.

Even more overlooked are the massacres of Christians in Africa. Since 2023, over 22,000 Christians have been murdered by Islamist extremists across the continent.

  • In Nigeria, the Yelwata massacre (2025) left 200 dead and entire Christian communities destroyed.
  • In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Komanda and Kasanga attacks killed more than 100 worshippers, many inside their churches.
  • In 2023 alone, 4,761 Christians were killed for their faith.

There are no mass demonstrations, no “solidarity weeks,” no campus rallies for these victims. Their suffering does not fit the fashionable narrative.

The Moral Epidemic of Selective Outrage

This is the defining moral crisis of our time: selective outrage. The global community claims to champion justice and peace, yet its attention and anger are rationed, directed almost exclusively at the world’s only Jewish state.

In Paris, Amsterdam, London, and New York, chants of “intifada” echo through the streets. At leading universities, students glorify Hamas as a “resistance movement.” At the United Nations, Israel is condemned more often than all other nations combined.

The evidence is clear: this is not about human rights. It is about hatred, the oldest and most adaptable hatred in history, repackaged as activism.

When the World Turns Upside Down

Today, we live in an age where terrorists are celebrated, and their victims are blamed for defending themselves. Where Jewish blood is once again cheap, and the world remains silent. And yet, Israel endures. The Jewish State mourns, rebuilds, and defends itself because it has learned, time and again, that Jewish survival cannot depend on global approval.

Two Years Later: The Truth Remains

On this October 7, 2025, we remember the murdered, we pray for the hostages, and we reaffirm an unshakable truth: “Israel is not the cause of the world’s chaos. It is the moral measure of it, a nation that proves, even after centuries of hate, that the Jewish people still choose life.”

Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel

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Pro-Palestinian LA Times Heiress Seizes Left-Wing Outlet to Push Agenda

May 1, 2024; Los Angeles, California, USA; A flag is waved during a sit-in outside of a pro-Palestinian encampment at the campus of UCLA. Violence broke out early in the morning at the encampment, hours after the university declared that the camp “is unlawful and violates university policy.” Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.

The pro-Palestinian daughter of the Los Angeles Times owner has recently been appointed publisher of the left-leaning outlet Drop Site News— a new platform for her to espouse her hateful views about Israel.

Nika Soon-Shiong, 32, daughter of billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, is no stranger to newsrooms. She has allegedly interfered behind the scenes at her father’s newspaper to influence coverage, meddling with headlines and clashing with editors who didn’t align with her activist agenda.

Soon-Shiong’s own public statements reveal a consistent hostility toward Israel and Zionism. On social media, she has displayed a Palestinian flag in her bio, dismissed the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, described Israel as an “apartheid state” that is engaged in “genocide” — and even alleged that the Los Angeles City Council was funding a “Zionist militia.”

Despite this pattern of rhetoric aligning with fringe, hardline narratives rather than journalistic neutrality, Soon-Shiong has, since 2021, sat on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) — an organization that redefines international law to designate terrorists as journalists.

How much influence has Soon-Shiong exerted on the CPJ? Even before the October 7 massacre and the resulting war, the CPJ published a report accusing the Israeli military of acting with “impunity” and severely undermining freedom of the press. This, even while according to the organization’s own data, Israel did not even feature in its so-called “Global Impunity Index,” which charts the countries in which press freedom is curtailed and where there is a lack of accountability when journalists are killed.

The double standards were glaring.

The CPJ has also been at the forefront of eulogizing so-called “journalists” who were killed in Gaza while working for outlets like Al-Aqsa TV and Quds News Network, which are affiliated with Hamas.

As we will see below, Soon-Shiong isn’t overly concerned when it comes to distinguishing between journalists and terrorists. One can only assume that this has played an active role in the CPJ’s willful blindness on this issue.

A New Platform for Anti-Israel Hate

So what happens if someone who brings both money and an extreme pro-Palestinian agenda is given her own media outlet?

We’re about to find out. Soon-Shiong has been appointed publisher of Drop Site News, a proudly left-wing outlet positioning itself as a corrective to what it calls mainstream media’s failure to cover “genocide” and “apartheid.”

It’s a media outlet devoted to delegitimizing Israel and promoting terrorist agendas. Alarmingly, its audience keeps growing.

The move provides Soon-Shiong’s ideological agenda a direct platform with more than 400,000 followers, which is most likely now set to receive a significant injection of cash.

Funding Gaza Journalists or Terrorists?

For starters, just before Soon-Shiong’s new role was announced, she launched a fund to support an undisclosed list of Gaza “journalists” whose vetting process raises questions about possible terror ties.

The fundraising initiative is run in partnership with Unmute Humanity, which describes itself as “a grassroots collective to disrupt media complicity and call for accurate reporting of the U.S.-funded genocide by Israel against Palestinians.”

The so-called “Gaza Journalist Fund” has already raised more than $200,000, but no list of beneficiaries has been published. Instead, the group says it supports “journalists who have appeared on Unmute Humanity’s Voices of Palestine webcast or weekly TikTok Lives, or individuals with whom Unmute Humanity maintains ongoing direct communication.”

That vague “vetting process” has already spotlighted troubling figures. One is Bisan Owda, an Al Jazeera reporter exposed as a longtime member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — a terror group responsible for suicide bombings, shootings, rocket fire, and the 2014 massacre of five Jewish worshipers in a Jerusalem synagogue. Unmute Humanity repeatedly promoted Owda across its platforms throughout 2024.

Another example is Anas al-Sharif, a Hamas operative who masqueraded as an Al Jazeera journalist until being killed by the IDF. Unmute Humanity openly eulogized him in posts and collaborations with other pro-Palestinian groups. Had he survived, it appears he would have been eligible for Soon-Shiong’s Gaza Journalist Fund.

Another “journalist” whose material was promoted is Mohammed Salama, a Hamas terrorist who posed as an Al Jazeera journalist and was targeted by the IDF together with al-Sharif.

If these examples are the norm rather than the exception, Soon-Shiong may effectively be financing terrorists under the guise of supporting Gaza reporting, through partnerships with groups that present them as journalists.

And she does not even try to hide her agenda.

Soon-Shiong also proudly announced her plans to turn her new media toy into an instrument of propaganda, for the sake of “the verdict of history”:

And Drop Site News’ Middle East editor recently explained — in an agenda-driven panel with CPJ’s CEO and former head of Human Rights Watch — that journalists should join the Gaza-bound flotilla (and thus take part in a blatant breach of international maritime law) because avoiding it is a “political” decision.

Many questions arise: How much cash is Soon-Shiong funnelling into Drop Site News? Is she planning to tighten her grip on her father’s newsroom, too? And who are the so-called “journalists” in Gaza now poised to receive US dollars?

The American public is owed absolute transparency — because when media power and US money are funneled into agendas that imperil Jewish lives — silence is complicity.

HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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Satire on ‘Saturday Night Live’ used to be a deadly weapon; is it still enough in the Trump era?

A funny thing happened when I went to Austin last week. My youngest child, Basil, a junior at the University of Texas, and I paid a visit to the university’s Harry Ransom Center.The crown jewel of UT, the Center is named after its founder, Harry Huntt Ransom, who began as a professor of English at the university and ultimately became its visionary president. In a speech he gave to the Philosophical Society of Texas in 1956, he declared “that there be established somewhere in Texas — let’s say in the capital city — a center of cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation.”

Jane Curtin, Dan Aykroyd and Laraine Newman as The Coneheads on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Photo by Getty Images

Nearly 75 years later, the massive stone and glass building in the heart of the campus stands as the realization of Ransom’s dream. The Center’s holdings include nearly one million books along with some 42 million manuscripts, five million photographs, and 100,000 works of art; the manuscripts of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing, Jack Kerouac and Ezra Pound are here; so are the papers of Albert Einstein and Robert de Niro; even original works by Frida Kahlo and Pablo Picasso.

Three of those last four iconic figures also appear in the Ransom Center’s most recent acquisition: the papers of Lorne Michaels.

Born Lorne Lipowitz in Toronto in 1944 — and not, as some folks still believe, on a kibbutz in Israel — Michaels is, of course, the creator of Saturday Night Live, the weekly NBC television comedy show that has been running, and often stumbling, since 1975. (Now 80 and with no plans to retire, Michaels has said he would like “Uneven” inscribed on his tombstone.)

The collection begins with Michaels’ years in theater productions at the University of Toronto and his early work in television — including his stints with The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show in 1968 and, that same year, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In — before moving on to the half-century of SNL as well as the dozens of films on which Michaels served as producer.

As my Longhorn and I visited the just-opened and eye-popping SNL exhibit, I noticed, with a surge of verklempt, the index cards that Michaels tacks to a bulletin board every Friday, outlining the segments of the following night’s show. The show, after all, has to go on — a huge weight for a handful of cards to carry. According to his recent biographer Susan Morrison, Michaels often shakes his head slowly as he gazes at the index cards, concluding “We have nothing.”

But as anyone with a good memory or, lacking that, a good pair of walking shoes knows — the exhibit covers figuratively and literally a good deal of ground — there is much ado, and much to do, with that nothing. It is impossible to exaggerate the show’s impact on American culture and politics. There are, of course, the gag lines that have bled into everyday usage where the user usually has no idea of the line’s origin, such as Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella, who ends every misunderstanding with “Nevermind” and Stuart Smalley aka Al Franken’s mantra: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.” And, of course, the motivational blast of Matt Foley, played by Chris Farley, “I live in a van down by the river” as well as, yes, Mike Myers’ Linda Richman, who punctuates her monologues with “I’m getting a little verklempt.”

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Yet, while this sort of humor zeroes in on cultural fads and ethnic tics, SNL has also specialized in satire with political bite, such as Will Ferrell’s coinage “stratergery” in his brilliant impersonation of George W. Bush — which, hilariously, Dubya proudly assumed he had himself coined — or the 2016 debates between Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump and Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton. In a small theater at the exhibit, this very sketch was repeatedly replayed. As I watched and listened — not for one, but two replays — I noticed that the knots of visitors, while mesmerized, did not often laugh. The silence was especially loud when Baldwin, playing Trump, suddenly given two more minutes to talk, lurches into this hallucinatory riff:

“The thing about the Blacks is that they’re killing each other. All the Blacks live on one street in Chicago, all on one street. I just read that this morning. It’s called ‘Hell Street’. And they run Hell Street and they’re all just killing each other. Just like I am killing this debate.”

In 2016, silence from the audience in Studio 8H would have been unimaginable; a decade later, laughter seems equally unimaginable. With the events now unfolding in Chicago and other “Democrat” cities under Trump 2.0, Baldwin’s rant is more a matter for laments than laughs. Perhaps some of the visitors wondered, as I did, what the Republican state leaders, housed just a short walk away in the capitol, would have thought of their state’s premier university showcasing this sketch. (One need not wonder very long,though, given that Jay Hartzell, the university’s former president, decided to resign rather than resist pressures from crusading Republicans to enforce the state’s ban on the use of DEI.)

Gilda Radner, late 1970s. Photo by Getty Images

Perhaps more important, the sketch raises a question worthy of “Coffee Talk” as well as for our collective and growing vibe of verklempt: Is comedy, even the middle of the road satiric fare at which SNL excels, the proper response to the tragic situation our country now faces? The answers to this question, long debated by political thinkers and actors, generally fall into two camps. In the first camp are those who believe that laughter is subversive, a weapon of the weak that reveals, through mockery and, as Dubya might say, snarkery, the incoherence of their justifications for taking power and the corruption that inevitably follows.

In short, comics show us an emperor with no clothes. This is a notion that Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park, unlike Michael’s middle-of-the-road SNL, have taken quite literally this year.

But as those in the other camp point out, even the sight of a butt-naked Donald Trump in bed with Satan has hardly dented the standing of a man who would be emperor. This camp’s slogan, to paraphrase W.H. Auden’s famous line about poetry, is that comedy makes nothing happen. Or, even more discouraging, it makes matters even worse. Comedy distracts us from grave matters at hand and, by diluting every event through entertainment, deadens our sense of outrage at the sheer cruelty and stupidity of this administration. Amusement, the sociologist Neil Postman observed 40 years ago, is “the supra-ideology of all discourse on television.”

Even, it seems, when the entertainment might qualify as Jewish humor. The efforts that have been made to explain Michaels’ humor, and that of SNL, through the prism of Michaels’ Judaism have mostly fallen flat for a simple reason: When Lorne Lipowitz opted to become Lorne Michaels, the biographer Morrison suggests, he also opted out of his Jewish upbringing. Morrison quotes one colleague who said that Michaels’ “yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah” verbal tic “is the one bit of Jewishness still left in him.” And yet, a way of being and seeing is not so easily uprooted. In Morrison’s book, Conan O’Brien marvels at his old boss’s achievement: “A Jewish kid who started out with a furrier for a father, and he somehow makes it to this place? Our insecurities, our defense mechanisms, are what we use to survive, and they build up, like plaque.”

Those insecurities and defense mechanisms, so fundamental to Jewish humor, are no longer unique to Jews in the Age of Trump. When we left the Ransom Center, Basil and I chatted about this subject. They thought there was something Jewish, or at least Jewishy, about the show. When I asked what made for Jewish humor, they paused before replying that it was self-deprecating yet also irreverent. This observation struck me as right, but also worrying. When the target of our humor is a president whose utter lack of reverence for our nation’s laws and norms endangers us all, irreverence makes for a dubious weapon, even for the weak.

 

The post Satire on ‘Saturday Night Live’ used to be a deadly weapon; is it still enough in the Trump era? appeared first on The Forward.

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