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A Golda Meir biopic starring Helen Mirren avoids politics. It premiered as Israel’s government faces widespread scrutiny.
(JTA) — When a film about a group of Israeli youths who visit former concentration camps in Poland premiered on Sunday at the Berlin Film Festival, its Israeli producer took the microphone after the screening to decry the state of his nation.
“The new far-right government that is in power is pushing fascist and racist laws,” said Yoav Roeh, a producer of “Ha’Mishlahat” (“Delegation”) on stage after the film’s premiere. He was referring to lawmakers in Israel’s government who have long histories of anti-Arab rhetoric and their new proposals to limit the power of the country’s Supreme Court, which critics at home and around the world deem a blow to Israel’s status as a democracy.
“Israel is committing suicide after 75 years of existence,” Roeh added.
The next day brought the premiere of “Golda,” a highly-anticipated Golda Meir biopic starring Oscar winner Helen Mirren about the former Israeli prime minister and her decisions during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Hours earlier, Israel’s government took another step closer to passing its controversial judicial reforms, and when asked about the political situation, Mirren didn’t mince words.
“I think [Meir] would have been utterly horrified,” she told AFP. “It’s the rise of dictatorship and dictatorship was what has always been the enemy of people all over the world and she would recognize it as that.”
That was the heated backdrop for the debut of “Golda,” which will not hit U.S. theaters until August. But an onlooker wouldn’t know that from the film’s own introductory press conference with Mirren, director Guy Nattiv and other stars from the film. The headlines that have emerged from it have been dominated by the film’s place in the “Jewface” debate, about who should play Jewish characters on screen. Mirren is not Israeli or Jewish.
“Let’s say that we’re making a movie about Jesus Christ. Who’s going to play him?” Mirren’s co-star Lior Ashkenazi stepped in to answer in response to a journalist, eliciting laughter from the press corps.
The film is framed by Meir’s testimony to the Agranat Commission, which investigated the lead-up to the war. As the film shows through flashbacks, Meir appears to have not acted quickly enough on Mossad intelligence about a possible attack from Egyptian and Syrian forces. Israeli forces were surprised on the holiday and initially lost ground; both sides lost thousands of troops, and the war is seen as a major trauma in Israeli history — the moment when the state’s conception of its military superiority over its Arab neighbors was shattered. The film is claustrophobic, shot mostly indoors — in bunkers, hospital rooms and government offices — and offers an apt visual encapsulation of the loss the war would bring.
Mirren walks the red carpet at the Berlin Film Festival, Feb. 20, 2023. She spent time on a kibbutz in 1967. (Courtesy of Berlinale)
Though Meir has historically been lionized as a tough female hero in the United States and in Jewish communities around the world (even non-Jewish soldiers in Ukraine took inspiration from her in the early days of the Russian invasion last year), her legacy is more complicated in Israel and the Palestinian territories. In addition to being associated with the trauma of the war for many Jewish Israelis, she is remembered as an inveterate enemy by Palestinians.
In recent years, the representation of Meir has shifted more favorably in Israel, said Meron Medzini, Meir’s former press secretary and one of her biographers. He said that historians have begun to view her favorably in comparison to some of the political leaders who followed her.
“I consider the film [‘Golda’] part of this effort to rehabilitate her name,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I think she is now gaining her rightful place in the history.”
“Golda” fits into Medzini’s narrative by emphasizing the intractability and pride of her Cabinet ministers as the prime reasons for Israel’s surprise. It affirms Meir’s honor by portraying her as attempting to protect the ministers from criticism — all men — and to promote national unity.
At the press conference, Nattiv gave the briefest of nods to Meir’s complex legacy but like Medzini compared her to Israel’s current slate of leaders, who he reserved brief criticism for.
“Golda is not a super clean character in this movie,” said Nattiv, who is best known for directing “Skin,” a 2018 film about a neo-Nazi. “She had her faults. She made mistakes. And she took responsibility, which leaders are not doing today.”
Meir has long enjoyed a kind of star status in the United States. She was interviewed by Barbra Streisand in 1978, close to the Israeli leader’s death from cancer, for a TV special on Israel’s 30th anniversary.
“She clearly is the great-grandmother of the Jewish people [in the special] and Streisand is very reverential toward her,” Tony Shaw, a history professor at the University of Hertfordshire and the author of “Hollywood and Israel: A History,” said about the Streisand interview. “She just comes across as very humble, slightly out-of-date, out-of-time.”
“Of course, it’s very different from what we now know Golda Meir was really like,” he added, referring to her strong character and political pragmatism, which the film seeks to convey.
Since William Gibson’s critically-panned 1977 play also titled “Golda,” there have been a number of representations of Meir. Most famous among them is Ingrid Bergman’s final performance in “Golda Meir,” a four-hour-long television biopic from 1982. That production “was very much in keeping with Hollywood’s treatment of Israel in that period,” said Shaw, “which was very sympathetic towards Golda Meir, towards Israel and the troubles it was having in the first 30 years of its life.” More recently, Meir appears in Steven Spielberg’s more ambivalent 2005 film “Munich,” in which she helps to recruit the film’s protagonist to track down the figures behind the 1972 Munich Olympics attacks.
Golda Meir meets with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and troops on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, Oct. 21, 1973. (Ron Frenkel/GPO/Getty Images)
Nattiv’s work, which has received mixed early reviews, focuses on the war as reflected in Meir’s character, forgoing engagement with broader politics or history.
“My inspiration was ‘Das Boot,’ in the way that she is in the trenches,” said Nattiv, referencing the revered World War II movie from 1981 set in a German U-boat. “She is very alone in the mayhem of war around these men.”
“This is the Vietnam of Israel,” he explained. “It is a very tough and hard look at the war and every soldier that died…Golda takes it to her heart.”
Despite the “Jewface” questioning, Nattiv compared Mirren to an “aunt” figure who, for him, had the “Jewish chops to portray Golda.” Mirren explained to the AFP that she has long felt a connection to Israel and to Meir, especially after a stay on a kibbutz in 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, with a Jewish boyfriend.
“She was at her happiest on the kibbutz actually,” Mirren said. “Their idealism, their dream of the perfect world. And I did experience that which was great.”
Sanders Isaac Bernstein contributed reporting from Berlin.
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Italy is having a Yiddish moment. An unprecedented I.J. Singer translation is part of the boom.
(JTA) — In September 1932, Israel Joshua Singer boarded a ship bound for New York, where he had been invited to report on the United States for Yiddish-speaking Jews like himself.
“Americans are a difficult people to understand,” the famed novelist wrote in one of his first articles from the U.S. “They have tried at all costs to be, in every aspect, the opposite of Europeans.”
In a series of articles commissioned by Abraham Cahan, the famed editor of the Yiddish Forverts, Singer sought to help his readers understand this mirror world. On the eve of the Nazis’ rise in Europe, he marveled at the landscapes, the Jewish strivers and dreamers and the Christians who lent a sympathetic ear to the challenges facing Jews back home.
Nearly a century later, Singer’s astonished first encounters with America have appeared together in translation for the first time — not in English, but in Italian. “Viaggi in America” (Travels in America), published by the historic Italian Jewish publishing house Giuntina and translated from Yiddish by Enrico Benella, brings together I.J. Singer’s witty American dispatches for the Forverts.
The articles follow Singer from New York’s Jewish heart on the Lower East Side to Coney Island, the Catskill Mountains, the Warner Bros. studios in Hollywood and a General Motors factory in Michigan, among many other stops. Singer returned to Poland after his visit and moved permanently to the United States with his family in 1934, but he continued to observe the country with the distance of a European Jewish outsider. Most of the pieces in the new volume have never been translated, including into English.
The collection arrives amid an Italian revival of Singer and Yiddish literature in general, enabled by newly accessible digital archives, a new generation of translators and readers increasingly interested in Yiddish culture.
“Yiddish is alive and well — even in Italy,” said Shulim Vogelmann, the book’s publisher.
“I think the reason books like ‘The Family Carnovsky’ succeed [in Italy] is that they are books written in blood,” said Anna Linda Callow, who translated that Singer novel into Italian. Yiddish literature, she explained, emerged from a society being “violently confronted with modernity, the collapse of empires, and profound historical questions.”
Born in Poland in 1893, I.J. Singer was the elder brother of the future Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Their sister Ester Kreytman also became a novelist and short story writer.) Within the Yiddish-speaking literary world, I.J. was once the better-known of the Singer brothers, but his work has long been eclipsed by Isaac Bashevis’.
When the Italian publisher Adelphi published the first Italian edition of his masterpiece “The Family Carnovsky” in 2013, the book became a major success, selling more than 120,000 copies. That was a watershed moment for Yiddish literature — and for I.J. Singer’s popularity — in Italy.
Before “Carnovsky,” Italian publishers had brought out a handful of Yiddish literary works, many of which were translated through English rather than directly from Yiddish (a practice that continues today). Since the success of “Carnovsky,” over 50 new editions of Yiddish books have appeared in Italy, from authors including Kreytman, Sholem Aleichem and Chaim Grade.
Interest in Yiddish culture has not been limited to books — and it does not appear to be closely entwined with surging anti-Israel sentiment in Italy, even as some Yiddishists report renewed interest from those who are embracing diasporic Jewish traditions.
Yiddish began reaching Italian audiences in the late 1980s, when director Mara Cantoni and performer Moni Ovadia staged a Yiddish-themed production at one of Milan’s most established theaters. Their work helped popularize Yiddish culture in the years that followed. (Ovadia later became one of Italy’s most prominent Jewish anti-Zionist public figures.)
But Miriam Camerini, an Italian artist and theater director who specializes in Yiddish culture, said presenting Yiddish material live has become more difficult during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Speaking to JTA from Yiddish Summer Weimar, a festival in Germany that draws Yiddishists from around the world, she said theaters and cultural institutions increasingly told her it was “not the right time” for Jewish programming — even though her work focuses on diasporic and non-Zionist traditions.
“The fact that my work dealt with the history of the Bund,” Camerini said, referring to the Jewish socialist movement founded in the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century, “did not lead people to say, ‘How interesting — let’s listen to Jews with different, non-Zionist ideas.’ No: anything Jewish was to be excluded.”
Instead, the Yiddish publishing boom can trace its roots in part to a practical matter: The copyrights for Singer’s work expired in Europe in 2015. While Elisabetta Zevi, an executive and Jewish literature editor at Adelphi, insisted on publishing “Carnovsky” just a couple of years before the copyrights expired, the financial barrier has been lifted for new titles.
Adelphi’s status as one of Italy’s most prestigious publishers also gave Singer a visibility in the country that earlier editions lacked and primed the pump for further interest.
“It was a masterful publishing coup,” Callow said, who recently began teaching a Yiddish course at the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara.
Another factor in the Yiddish boomlet was the emergence of new translators able to work directly from the language, a tiny but significant trend helped along by technology and the commitment of a passionate few.
“There are no university-level Yiddish courses in Italy, so you either have to go abroad to study or learn on your own,” said Enrico Benella, the translator of the new collection, in an interview. “It is therefore hardly surprising that so many major authors have been left behind.”
Within the remarkably narrow circle of Yiddish translators in Italy, Benella is an outlier — first and foremost, because he is not Jewish and did not start his career as a translator or a scholar of Jewish literature. Born near Padua in 1979, he only began learning Yiddish a few years ago, driven by a desire to read I.J. Singer’s work in the original.
Benella began studying through the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages, which offers free online courses on 18 Jewish vernacular languages, including various Judeo-Arabic dialects, Ladino and Judeo-Italian. Almost immediately, he began reading and practicing translating Singer’s work.
Digital access, also made possible by U.S. donors and research institutions, created another opening. Large collections of Yiddish books, magazines, and daily newspapers are now available online, including almost a century of the Forverts. The Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library at the Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts includes more than 11,000 Yiddish titles. YIVO, the Yiddish research center in New York, is digitizing its prewar library and archival collections.
“Yiddish literature will soon become the first modern literature to be completely digitalized,” Benella said.
Benella was inspired to pursue the translation of Singer’s American dispatches while reading “The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer” by Anita Norich, one of the most prominent living scholars of I.J. Singer’s work. Benella worked through her bibliography of Singer’s Forverts journalism, much of it published under the pseudonym of G. Kuper. That’s where he first encountered the titles that “sounded American.”
He then approached Vogelmann, Giuntina’s publisher, and pitched the idea for the collection. Benella had already translated two other books from Yiddish for Giuntina. (Giuntina has also published a book by the author of this article.)
Anita Norich still remembers the painstaking work behind that bibliography, which she compiled in the 1980s while working on her first book on I.J. Singer.
“There was no index of the Forverts, and there was no search engine you could use,” she recalled. “I went to the YIVO library in New York, and turned the Forverts microfilm page by page, looking for his name.”
The desire to explain America to Yiddish-speaking American readers reflected a central part of the Forverts’ mission, Norich said.
Singer, who arrived speaking very little English, often looked beyond the stories and places familiar to Yiddish readers, and instead reported from Harlem and Chinatown, compared poverty in New York with poverty in Warsaw, and explored American commerce, culture, and religion.
“There is America to be described, there are American Jews, and then there is Singer, who is neither an American Jew nor an American,” Benella said. “Precisely for that reason, he has an additional point of view. His distance gives him a different perspective on an America that American Jews may be seeing from too close up.”
“You could define ‘Travels in America’ as the encounter between the Jews of Eastern Europe and true modernity in the United States.”
Singer encountered that modernity on his initial voyage. He marveled when the ship’s Christian passengers packed into a talk by a rabbi on the just-completed First Preparatory World Jewish Conference in Switzerland, Hitlerism and antisemitism.
“The large hall immediately filled with crowds of Christians,” Singer wrote. “They sat there listening … and applauded the speaker enthusiastically. It came as a surprise to me. Such a thing is completely incomprehensible to a Jew … and with what interest those genuine Americans listened to a Jewish man speak about Jewish problems!”
The dispatches also move from travelogue to comedy to political witness. One of the collection’s most notable pieces recounts a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden — an article that Italian reviewers have highlighted in a country with its own Fascist past and wartime alliance with Nazi Germany.
“Whenever Jews were mentioned, the crowd roared like bloodthirsty beasts,” Singer wrote. “That hall reeked of a medieval hatred and bloodlust directed against everything honorable, just and humane.”
Norich said Singer’s journalism and fiction cannot be neatly separated. He reported what he saw, but he also turned the people he met into characters.
Benella described Singer’s humor as understated. “It never makes you burst out laughing; it’s closer to a form of analysis, a kind of sly teasing that shows you reality and laughs at it — but not in order to diminish it or belittle it.”
Norich, who has studied and translated Singer for decades, edited a recent three-volume English-language collection of his work for the Israeli publisher Koren. (The collection does not include the American dispatches.)
“I think readers are responding to something that’s going on now in our own world,” Norich said. “Antisemitism and the condition of Jews in Europe are an ongoing theme of his.”
Readers are responding to Singer’s “honest sense of uncertainty,” she said, about “all of these panaceas, all of these cures, all of these convictions that don’t listen to one another.” His work repeatedly returns to “Jewish arguments, political and religious messianism, and the fractiousness of communal life. As Singer put it, ‘I have the diagnosis, but not the cure.’”
Nearly a century after Singer used his European perspective to interpret America for Yiddish-speaking immigrants, the Italian translation adds another layer of distance: American Jewish life returns to contemporary readers through Yiddish and Italian.
“The sign of a great writer is that he’s steeped in his own world but speaks to other worlds and other times,” Norich said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Italy is having a Yiddish moment. An unprecedented I.J. Singer translation is part of the boom. appeared first on The Forward.
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In praise of difficult languages
די גאַנצע וועלט מיינט, אַז לערנען זיך ענגליש איז גרינג ווײַל ענגליש האָט אַזוי ווינציק סופֿיקסן: כּמעט אַלע סובסטאַנטיוון פֿורעמען דעם פּלוראַל אויף -s; ווערבאַלע קאָניוגאַציעס זענען זייער פּשוט; נישטאָ קיין גראַמאַטישער מין, בשעת פֿראַנצייזיש און שפּאַניש האָבן צו צוויי גראַמאַטישע מינים און רײַכע ווערבאַלע קאָניוגאַציעס.
וואָס שייך דײַטשיש און ייִדיש האָבן זיי אַלץ וואָס פֿראַנצייזיש און שפּאַניש, ווי אויך דרײַ גראַמאַטישע מינים, דרײַ אָדער פֿיר בייגפֿאַלן און כּלערליי פֿלעקסיעס (סופֿיקסן וואָס בײַטן דעם גראַמאַטישן טײַטש פֿון אַ זאַץ; grammatical inflections בלע״ז). וועגן לאַטײַן און די סלאַווישע לשונות שמועסט מען נישט: אַלץ וואָס אין דײַטשיש און ייִדיש, אָבער אויך פֿינעף, זעקס אָדער גאָר זיבן בייגפֿאַלן.
איז דאָך קלאָר ווי דער טאָג, אַז ענגליש איז דאָס גרינגסטע. וואָס דאַרפֿט איר מער? בער באָראָכאָוו, דער ייִדישער פֿילאָלאָג און טעאָרעטיקער פֿון דער ציוניסטישער אֵרבעטער־באַוועגונג (1881־1917), האָט נאָך געשריבן אין שמואל ניגערס „פּנקס“ (1913), אַז צוליב דעם וואָס די ענגלישע גראַמאַטיק איז אַזוי פּשוט איז ענגליש איינע פֿון די פּראָגרעסיווסטע שפּראַכן, און אַז הלוואַי וואָלט מאַמע־לשון געגאַנגען מיטן זעלביקן וועג און פֿאַרלוירן זײַנע איבעריקע סופֿיקסן: „דער געזעץ פֿון אַנאַליטישער שפּראַך־פֿאַראיינפֿאַכונג דריקט זיך בולט אויס סײַ אין די סעמיטישע, סײַ אין די [אינדאָ-אייראָפּעיִשע] פּראָגרעסיווסטע, די פֿאָלקסטימלעכסטע און צום מייסטן אַנאַליטישע שפּראַכן פֿון אונדזער צײַט: נײַ־פּערסיש, ענגליש, פֿראַנצייזיש און — ייִדיש“.
נו, מי לנו גדול כּבאָראָכאָוו, אָבער דאָ בין איך מיט אים מחולק: דאָס האָבן אַ שפּאָרע צאָל פֿלעקסיעס איז דווקא נישט קיין חסרון, נאָר גאָר אַ מעלה. פֿאַר וואָס?
לאָמיר אָנכאַפּן פּויליש. אמת, דער אָנהייבער מוז פֿאַרגעדענקען אָן אַ שיעור פֿאָרמעס: פֿלעקסיע פֿון סובסטאַנטיוון, ווערבן, אַדיעקטיוון, פּראָנאָמען און נאָך און נאָך, ווי אויך די דרײַ גראַמאַטישע מינים. אויף ענגליש, ווידער, דאַרף מען כּמעט גאָרנישט פֿאַרגעדענקען — עטלעכע אומרעגולערע סובסטאַנטיוון און אַ צאָל אומרעגולערע ווערבן. אָבער פֿאַר דער טירחה בײַם לערנען זיך פּויליש קריגט מען אַ „פֿעטן ביסן“; מע קען דאָס פֿאַרגלײַכן מיטן טעאַטער און מיטן קינאָ.
איז אַזוי: אַז איר זעט אַ פּיעסע אָדער קוקט אַ פֿילם דאַרפֿט איר דרינגען פֿון די טווּנגען ווער ס׳איז ווער: ווי די פּאַרשוינען הייסן, ווער ס׳האָט די הויפּטראָלע און ווער די קלענערע ראָלעס. טייל מאָל ווילט זיך זען די פֿאָרשטעלונג אַ צווייט מאָל כּדי בעסער צו פֿאַרשטיין דעם אָנהייב פֿונעם סיפּור־המעשׂה. אַזוי איז אויף ענגליש. כ׳ווייס נישט ווי איר, אָבער נישט איין מאָל מוז איך איבערלייענען אַ קעפּל אין אַ צײַטונג צוויי צי אַפֿילו דרײַ מאָל איידער איך פֿאַרשטיי עס, וואָרן מע דאַרף ערשט דערקענען וואָסער וואָרט ס׳איז אַ סובסטאַנטיוו, וואָסער אַן אַדיעקטיוו, וואָסער אַ ווערב. אויף ענגליש קען דאָך איין וואָרט זײַן אַלע דרײַ געווענדט אינעם קאָנטעקסט, און די מאָרפֿאָלאָגיע, ד״ה די פֿאָרעם פֿונעם וואָרט, העלפֿט גאָר נישט.
אויף פּויליש, ווידער, דאַרפֿט איר גאָרנישט דרינגען. מע דערקענט גלײַך וואָס ס׳איז דער סובסטאַנטיוו, וואָס ס׳איז דער ווערב און וואָס ס׳איז דער אַדיעקטיוו. ס׳איז אַזוי ווי אין טעאַטער אָדער אין קינאָ וואָלטן די אַקטיאָרן געטראָגן אויף זיך שילדן מיט אַלע פּרטים: „איך בין משה גאָלדבערג, דער הויפּטהעלד פֿון דער מעשׂה“, „איך בין דער צווייט וויכטיקסטער“ אד״גל. מע דאַרף אַפֿילו נישט קענען אַלע פֿלעסקיעס — אויב מע קען האַלב איז גענוג צו פֿאַרשטיין אַ זאַץ אָדער אַ צײַטונגקעפּל. מע דאַרף גאָר נישט דרינגען; די גאַנצע אינפֿאָרמאַציע האָט מען אונטער דער האַנט און פֿאַר די אויגן.
ייִדיש האָט, פֿאַרשטייט זיך, נישט אַזוי פֿיל זיך אויסצולערנען ווי פּויליש, אָבער גענוג, אַז דאָס קענען זיי אויסנווייניק איז שווערלעך; אָבער פֿאַרשטיין אַ זאַץ איז ווײַטער גרינגער ווי אויף ענגליש. חוץ דעם איז די בייגעוודיקייט פֿון מאַמע־לשון אַ מעלה. אַ שטייגער: אויף ייִדיש איז דער ווערטער־סדר אַ סך פֿרײַער; ענגליש איז געפּענטעט דערמיט וואָס דער ווערטער־סדר שפּילט אַזאַ גרויסע ראָלע בײַם פֿאַרשטיין אַ זאַץ. דהײַנו, אויף ענגליש מוז דער סוביעקט בדרך־כּלל קומען פֿאַרן ווערב, מע זאָל אים דערקענען, בשעת אויף ייִדיש, וואָס האָט די בייגפֿאַלן נאָמינאַטיוו, דאַטיוו און אַקוזאַטיוו, קען דער סוביעקט קומען אויף פֿאַרשיידענע ערטער, וואָס דאָס קען מען אויסניצן כּדי אונטערצושטרײַכן דאָס חשיבֿות פֿון אַ סובסטאַנטיוו וואָסער ראָלע ער זאָל אינעם קאָנטעקסט נישט שפּילן.
למשל: אויף ענגליש קען מען בלויז זאָגן Everyone knows David, בשעת אויף ייִדיש קען מען זאָגן „אַלע קענען דודן“ אָדער „דודן קענען אַלע,“ וואָס גיט דעם זאַץ אַ ביסל אַן אַנדער קנייטש.
מאַמע־לשון האָט אויך, פּונקט ווי דײַטשיש, די סלאַווישע און צום טייל אויך די ראָמאַנישע לשונות, אַ ברייטן באַניץ פֿונעם דאַטיוו, וווּ אויף ענגליש מוז מען אָנקומען צום נאָמינאַטיוו אָדער אין גאַנצן פּאַראַפֿראַזירן. למשל, דאָרטן וווּ ענגליש האָט אין תּוך אַרײַן בלויז איין מעגלעכן אופֿן דאָס אַרויסברענגען: he is cold, אַקעגן דרײַ מעגלעכקייטן אויף ייִדיש: „אים איז קאַלט“ (ער פֿילט זיך קאַלט), „ער איז קאַלט“ (ער איז טויט), „ער איז אַ קאַלטער“ (ער איז אַ מענטש וואָס ווײַזט נישט אַרויס קיין געפֿילן).
נאָך אַ משל: מאָטל פּייסיעס „מיר איז גוט, איך בין אַ יתום“ — ווי זשע גיט מען דאָס איבער אויף ענגליש אַז מע האָט נישט קיין דאַטיוו? איך האָב געפֿונען I’m lucky to be an orphan — טאַקע נישט קיין שלעכטער עקוויוואַלענט, אָבער ס׳האָט נישט קיין ייִדישן טעם. אַגבֿ, ווען מע באַקלאָגט זיך, אַז ס׳איז אוממעגלעך איבערצוזעצן ייִדיש, גילט דאָס מער פֿאַר ענגליש ווי פֿאַר אַנדערע אייראָפּעיִשע לשונות. אין דעם באַנד „מאַקס ווײַנרײַכן צו זײַן זיבעציקסטן געבוירן־טאָג“ (1964) האָט דער פֿילאָלאָג טעאָדאָר גוטמאַן געדרוקט אַן אַרבעט „שלום־עליכם אין די רויוואַרגשפּראַכן“, וווּ ער פֿאַרגלײכט איבערזעצונגען אויף דײַטש, העברעיִש, אוקראַיִניש, רוסיש און ענגליש פֿון שלום־עליכמס „דאָס טעפּל“. דאָרטן קומט ער צום אויספֿיר, אַז דער איבערזעץ וואָס שפּיגלט צום בעסטן אָפּ דער אָריגינאַל איז דער אוקראַיִנישער. דאָס איז צום טייל ווײַל שלום־עליכם האָט געלעבט און געשאַפֿן אין אוקראַיִנע, אָבער אויך דערפֿאַר וואָס די ענגלישע גראַמאַטיק איז אַזוי אומבייגעוודיק אַקעגן דער ייִדישער, וואָס דאָס שפּיגלט זיך אָפּ צווישן אַנדערן אין דעם, וואָס ענגליש האָט נישט קיין דאַטיוו!
דאָ קען מען אויך צוגעבן אַ משל פֿון פֿראַנצייזיש. דער אויסדריק s’il vous plaît פֿאַרטײַטשט מען אויף ענגליש if you please. נישטאָ קיין ספֿק, אַז 99% ענגליש־רעדערס מיינען, אַז דאָ איז you נאָמינאַטיוו, דער סוביעקט פֿונעם ווערב. דאָס פֿראַנצייזישע, אָבער, איז טײַטש if it pleases you, וווּ you איז דאַטיוו, דער אָביעקט פֿונעם ווערב. אויף ענגליש ווערט עס האַמעטנע; אויף ייִדיש, ווידער גיט מען עס גרינג איבער: אויב ס׳געפֿעלט אײַך.
אַ כּלל, באָראָכאָוו איז גערעכט, אַז די טענדענץ בײַ אַ סך לשונות איז צו פֿאַרלירן סופֿיקסן, אָבער דערפֿון קען מען נישט אויספֿירן, אַז אַזאַ פּראָצעס איז אַלע מאָל אַ ניצלעכער. ווען אים וואָלט געווען באַשערט לענגערע יאָרן וואָלט ער אפֿשר אײַנגעזען, אַז אין לשון קען פּראָגרעסיווקייט אויך זײַן אַ חסרון.
The post In praise of difficult languages appeared first on The Forward.
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NYPD chief pledges to protect Jews at Central Synagogue one week after Shabbat attack
(JTA) — New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said she felt a “deeply personal” commitment to protect Jews in a speech at Central Synagogue, where she is a member, in the aftermath of an attack during Shabbat services there.
Tisch addressed the Reform synagogue in Midtown Manhattan during its Friday evening prayers a week after a man disrupted the service by shouting obscenities, punched a congregant in the face and spat on and headbutted a Black security guard while calling him a racial slur. Suspect Larry Montes, who was arrested at the scene, has been charged with hate crimes in federal and state court.
Tisch said there were no serious injuries. She called the attack “a message written in violence,” intended to tell “everyone who shares the victim’s identity that they do not belong, that they are vulnerable, and that they should be afraid.”
She also noted that roughly half of confirmed hate crimes in New York City have for years targeted Jews, who make up about 10% of the population.
“As a proud Jew and a lifelong member of this congregation, you have my word that I stand with you in these uncertain and precarious times,” said Tisch, adding that her commitment at Central Synagogue was “deeply personal.”
Tisch spoke after an interfaith group of seven Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders gave remarks about solidarity between their communities.
“Might our presence here be a testament to the ties, the durable ties that bind each of us together,” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan.
“We are here tonight to affirm that you do not walk through this city alone, but you are held in a covenant between our communities,” added Rev. Adriene Thorne of The Riverside Church. “What affects one of us touches all of us.”
Montes told NYPD officers after his arrest that he felt disrespected at the Central Synagogue service and described the incident as “a racial thing” and “all religious motivated,” according to a federal criminal complaint. He also said that he identified as Jewish.
His aunt, Myriam Montes, told The New York Post that he was “mentally traumatized because of his desire to belong to that religion [Judaism].” The New York Times reported that Montes had a history of mental health issues documented by the NYPD.
A Facebook page that appears to belong to Montes is littered with posts about Israel and Judaism. They include an image of a map of Israel with the text, “Keep Israel in your heart,” a video of Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi discussing why evangelical Christians support Israel and a video comparing Mayor Zohran Mamdani with Iran’s former supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post NYPD chief pledges to protect Jews at Central Synagogue one week after Shabbat attack appeared first on The Forward.
