Kibbizter, kvetcher, nudnick, nebbish, nudzh, meshugener, alter kocker, pisher, plosher, platke-macher

These ten Yiddish/Yinglish insults are mounted on the cornice of the Haus der Kunst art museum in Munich, Germany. The installation, entitled The Joys of Yiddish (2021), is the final iteration of a work by the late conceptual artist Mel Bochner (1940–2025).

According to the Haus der Kunst’s website, this word chain is supposed to “convey a particular humor that survived the National Socialist regime, despite all odds.” The color scheme — yellow-on-black — is meant to evoke the stigmatizing patches of the same colors forced upon Jews under Nazi rule.

The installation was named for the 1968 book The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten — a collection of Yiddish words and phrases that made its way into English.

Unfortunately, the installation is an ill-conceived attempt to honor the Jewish humor of millions of Yiddish speakers murdered by the Nazis. It cheapens and reduces a nearly millennium-old language and culture to kitsch. Is this tired, old rehashing of Yiddish insults not itself a badge of stigmatization — a “yellow patch” if you will?

When Bochner’s The Joys of Yiddish debuted at the Spertus Institute in Chicago in 2006, it was meant as a statement on the Jewish immigrant experience in America. It dealt with linguistic barriers, between immigrants and their new country, and between immigrant parents and their children. (Bochner was raised by Yiddish-speaking parents but never learned the language himself.)

At the Haus der Kunst, however, the piece takes on a very different meaning. Originally called the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) when it opened in 1937, it was intended by its Nazi builders as a temple to “Aryan” art. Mounting Yiddish insults on that building is, at first glance, a defiant and transgressive act.

Yet the cutesy terms Bochner chose (a subset from the Chicago original) are wholly insufficient to the task. Instead of switching out a word here and there, he could have transgressed against the art-school reject Hitler (may his name be obliterated) on the façade of his would-be temple to Aryan art, with some stronger epithets. Perhaps yimakh-shmoynik, paskudnyak, or the well-known mamzer?

Of course, no words in any language can convey the evil of what Hitler’s Nazis did to the Jewish people, and to Jewish diasporic languages. But that’s no excuse for not trying. Was Bochner’s intent to jab the viewer, or merely to tickle?

Prof. Sunny S. Yudkoff, in a 2022 journal article, notes that Bochner’s oeuvre often deals with the failure of words to sufficiently convey a particular meaning, with language’s perceived transparency and its actual instability. Yet despite the “performative failures” (as Prof. Yudkoff puts it) of Bochner’s other works, the failures of The Joys of Yiddish seem to be a bug rather than a feature.

To convey the Yiddish humor that survived the Nazis, we might look to the Jews of Lublin. During the German occupation, an SS officer commanded a group of Jewish men, at gunpoint, to entertain him. According to testimony recorded by Moshe Prager, they sang a well-known Yiddish song, replacing the refrain lomir zikh iberbetn (let’s make up) for mir veln zey iberlebn (we will outlive them). Despite the similarity of Yiddish to German, the SS officer apparently didn’t understand the phrase, giving those Jews a good laugh at their oppressors’ expense.

This time around, Bochner unwittingly perpetuates a long American Jewish tradition of treating Yiddish as a punchline. To do so in Munich is to internationalize that tradition in a shamefully conspicuous way.

According to a 2021 conversation between the artist and curator Andrea Lissoni, Bochner’s parents “were not really interested in us kids learning Yiddish, because […] it was a secret language.” This dynamic is all too familiar. But instead of digging in and working with Yiddish on its own terms, the artist engaged with it only superficially, in what Prof. Jeffrey Shandler has termed the “post-vernacular” mode. Bochner simply picked some words out of Rosten’s book, several of which are Yinglish Americanisms, that he thought most American Jews of his generation would have heard and known.

To do so in Chicago or New York as a comment on cultural assimilation is a sad reflection on American Jews’ cultural impoverishment. To recycle the piece into a provocation toward German Holocaust memory, or a tribute to the humor of murdered European Jewry, is lazy and demeaning.

In fairness, the late Mr. Bochner isn’t here to defend his honor. Then again, neither are the millions of Yiddish-speakers murdered by the Nazis.

So what could the curators of the Haus der Kunst do instead to honor them? Maybe host an exhibition of works by Yiddish-speaking artists who survived or perished in the Holocaust. Or commission a new work inspired by Yiddish anti-Nazi jokes and folksongs. It shouldn’t be hard to improve on what’s there now.

The post A German museum aimed to honor Jewish wit. The result is downright demeaning. appeared first on The Forward.

Israeli film director Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s latest film, “The Sea,” is about a young Palestinian boy from the West Bank who is denied a permit to visit Tel Aviv with his classmates. Longing to see the Mediterranean, he courts danger as he sets out to make the journey on his own.  

The Arabic-language drama was released in Israel in July; in September, it won five Ophir Awards — Israel’s version of the Oscars — including for best picture, which means “The Sea” is also Israel’s submission into the Academy Awards for best international feature film. 

And now, “The Sea” is making its North American premiere on Thursday at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan (334 Amsterdam Ave.). The screening — which also includes a reception and a Q+A with director Carmeli-Pollak and Palestinian producer Baher Agbaria — kicks off this year’s Other Israel Film Festival, an annual event that spotlights untold stories from Israeli and Palestinian societies.

Filmed in the summer of 2023, “The Sea” is partially inspired by true events: Carmeli-Pollak visited the West Bank for the first time in the early 2000s, during the Second Intifada.

“Seeing what’s going on really influenced me,” Carmeli-Pollak, 57, said, describing how a border wall between the West Bank and Israel, begun in 2002, restricted Palestinian travel into Israel. “And I started to go more and more and more and became an activist.” 

Carmeli-Pollak became an activist alongside groups like Anarchists Against the Wall, a group advocating against the concrete security wall between Israel and the West Bank. His experiences informed the 2006 documentary, “Bilin, My Love,” about a Palestinian village set for demolition by the Israeli government. 

No one particular moment or event inspired “The Sea,” Carmeli-Pollak said. Rather, the director said it was the West Bank residents’ longing for the sea — something Carmeli-Pollak said he frequently heard — as well as their desperate need for employment, that informed the film. ”it was a long period that I met people, and they spoke about this,” he said. 

Since its release, “The Sea” has been ensnared in political crosshairs: It was produced with financial support from the Israel Film Fund, a public fund that was described as an institution “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people” by a growing boycott against the Israeli film industry signed by more than 1,200 prominent Hollywood stars. 

On the other end of the political spectrum, Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar, a Likud Party member, has called for the defunding of the Israeli Academy of Film and Television, which runs the Ophir Awards. Zohar, who has only seen “the most important parts of the movie.” claims the film portrays the Israeli military in a negative light.

“It is probably the hottest Israeli film of the year,” Isaac Zablocki, the executive director of the Other Israel Film Festival and the JCC’s senior director of film programs, said of the festival’s sold-out screening of “The Sea.” 

“Since all this noise with the boycott of Israeli films — and on the other side, the Israeli government declaring its lack of support for this film specifically, and Israeli cinema in general — it’s felt even more important for us to highlight this film as much as possible and really give it as much support,” Zablocki added. “I think this movie, right now, is exactly what Israel needs.”

The New York Jewish Week spoke with Carmeli-Pollak just days before the film’s North American premiere. Keep scrolling for our conversation. 

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Was the idea always to tell this story from a Palestinian perspective?

The idea from the very beginning was to tell the story from the point of view of a Palestinian child. That perspective allows us to strip away the almost automatic “political” baggage that comes with an adult’s point of view.

A child’s perspective is free from all that complexity. In that sense, for me the film is not necessarily just a Palestinian story, but rather a story about two societies living on opposite sides of the wall — the Palestinian and the Israeli.

We have an opportunity to see Israeli society through the eyes of this child, and perhaps to look again at things that are usually invisible or taken for granted.

How did you find the cast and crew? 

The cast is a mix of professional actors and non-actors. Naturally, the boy, Muhammad Gazawi, was not a professional actor. I met him when I visited a Thai boxing club in a Palestinian city inside Israel called Qalansawe. I met there a group of tough young athletes, and he quickly struck me as a boy with remarkable acting abilities.

You said the rough cut of the film was already completed by Oct. 7, 2023. Can you tell me more about what the cross-cultural collaboration looked like at the time?

We shot the film in the summer of 2023. Apart from the fact that the producer is Palestinian, the crew was mixed — Palestinians and Israelis.

On set you could hear both Hebrew and Arabic blending together naturally. The crew made the same journey shown in the film — moving between Palestinian villages, where we received a warm welcome and generous hospitality, and cities inside Israel. Even before Oct. 7, it wasn’t common to see a joint production like this, and it was a special experience for everyone involved. For many of the Israeli crew members, it was their first time being hosted in a Palestinian village. After the war broke out, Baher and I were deeply worried and heartbroken — first and foremost for the people we care about, but also for the film.

We thought no one would want to watch such a small story when horrific events were happening all around. And indeed, at first we faced difficulties in distributing the film. But as time went by, it seems that openness to a story like this is slowly returning, and we hope the film will reach as wide an audience as possible.

What was that partnership like in the wake of Oct. 7?

I was in contact all the time with Baher, the producer. He’s Palestinian, and we were both horrified by what’s going on — by the 7th of October, and with the reaction in Gaza, which was terrible. We were really, really worried. But we also felt like maybe nobody would want to watch the film now. I spoke to the actors, like Khalifa Natour [who plays Ribhi, Khaled’s father], who were devastated with what’s going on. But our communication was just the same — as friends, as people that are in the same circle. It’s not that now, suddenly, I’m from one side, and he is from the other side. It felt like we’re still connected.

At the end of the film, when Khaled and Ribhi are being arrested by the police, there’s a shot where the Israelis at the café kind of pause for a moment; they look shocked or horrified, and then they go back to their coffee. What were you trying to say about Israeli society and their attitudes toward police or military violence against Palestinians?

I tried to make this film not just to speak about Israeli society, but about human beings, to make it more universal in a way. I was really, really inspired by “Bicycle Thieves,” the Italian film by Vittorio De Sica from the 1940s. It tells the story of a father and son, also. And I was so emotional by this film, 80 years after it was made. I felt that I wanted to make a film that people can watch years from now, and still get the story.

So the idea was about human beings and the way that people are behaving, of course, in political arrangements, because everything is politics. I don’t think people in other countries would behave differently in this kind of system that exists here.

People just live their lives. They sit in a café, they see this scene, and then, like the viewers in the cinema, they go back to their lives after they sit.

In a way, I think generally, what I was trying to say is that people are not evil. They’re not looking to hurt other people, but because the system is very, very corrupt and discriminative and injustice unjustified, this is what caused all the problems.

The Israeli Culture Ministry, led by Miki Zohar, wants to defund the Ophir Awards, which had granted you many awards for this film. Is there any update on that?

He did establish his own competition and to offer a lot of money for each prize. So he is using public money for his agenda, which is not surprising. This is the way this populist fascist government is working. And besides this, I don’t know anything new.

I would prefer to live in a place where the minister of culture supports films and supports the freedom of speech and doesn’t try to block it. But when the situation is like this, at least, he saved me from — now that the film goes out to the world — having to explain that I’m not representing this government. 

What do you hope that New York viewers — especially Jewish viewers who may be unfamiliar with Palestinian life in the West Bank, or their interactions with Israelis — will get out of your film?

I don’t know if I’m telling something new to people, but maybe so. I guess liberals know there is discrimination against people that live under the occupation. But it’s not an article; it’s different when you read about it and when you experience it more in a more emotional way.

So maybe the idea is that the film can give you another aspect of this — to actually have some feelings about the story of this kid, and to maybe open these channels of understanding, and know that what’s going on here can’t go on like it used to be before. We can’t go back to the same point as before the war. There should be a deep change, and we need the support from the outside for this change. That’s for sure. There are a lot of forces inside Israel and forces in the United States that are against these kinds of changes.

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BROOKLYN — There were plenty of “Jews for Zohran” at Brooklyn Paramount, the recently refurbished music venue where Zohran Mamdani and his biggest supporters celebrated his mayoral election victory Tuesday night.

Present at the rally were many of the Jews who make up left-wing organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, whose endorsements and campaigning under the Jews for Zohran mantle became a driving force behind the democratic socialist’s support.

“This is an amazing night for Jews for Zohran and Jewish New Yorkers,” said Carlyn Cowen, co-chair of JFREJ’s board, in an interview. “This is an amazing night for everyone who has been fighting for our democracy, for housing, for childcare, for the entire vision of Zohran’s campaign, which is joy and love. Incredible.”

Mamdani’s long-held anti-Israel views made the 34-year-old democratic socialist a polarizing candidate for many Jews in the city, with the Jewish establishment and a significant majority of Jewish voters backing his main rival, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

“There’s going to be important bridging work to do in the Jewish community … so we can move forward and everybody can feel like their interests are being looked after and they can feel safe in the city,” said Jamie Beran, CEO of the progressive Jewish organization Bend the Arc.

But healing would need to wait for another day. On Tuesday night, the mood was jubilant as eager energy erupted into an all-out dance party celebrating Mamdani’s decisive victory. News of the race being called, only about 40 minutes after polls closed, sent the at-capacity room into a frenzy. Waves of shouts and shrieks erupted. Friends hugged and cried tears of joy, some expressing disbelief despite Mamdani’s long stretch at the top of the polls.

“New York, tonight you have delivered,” Mamdani said during his victory speech. “A mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics.”

For progressive Jews in the city, the change could not be starker. Suddenly, following an Eric Adams administration largely unsympathetic to their views, left-wing groups such as JVP and JFREJ will have an ally in City Hall who’s aligned with them on an array of issues including income inequality, taking on Donald Trump and pro-Palestinian advocacy.

As his Jewish supporters gushed about what parts of Mamdani’s agenda they are most keen to see enacted, most did not bring up his longstanding, unwavering support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that has put a wedge between segments of the Jewish community.

“Universal childcare, number one!” said Cowen.

“All of his campaign promises around affordability are so critical for the lives of everyone who lives in New York City,” said Beran, who also said she is “really grateful” for Mamdani’s “commitments around hate crime prevention.”

“I think the fact that he was the only candidate that had a clear and specific platform, committing to an 800% increase to hate crime prevention to protect Jews and everyone in New York, is such an important part of his platform,” Beran said.

Katie Unger, who co-founded JFREJ’s political arm, the Jewish Vote, said she was most eager to see Mamdani fight back against Trump and protect immigrants.

“After 10 months of watching our immigrant neighbors getting abandoned by our mayor, I’m so glad that on day one, we’re gonna have a mayor who stands up for an immigrant city against ICE,” Unger said. “It’s been heartbreaking and appalling, particularly as a Jew, to watch this city of immigrants abandon our immigrant neighbors, from City Hall down.”

Rabbi Moishe Indig, the Satmar Hasidic rabbi who endorsed Mamdani in a split in his community, stood out for wearing a black suit and kippah, rather than the typical blue “Jews/tenants/hot girls/etc. for Zohran” T-shirt.

“We have large families, we could use affordable housing and to have a better life, hopefully,” Indig said about his community, saying he felt “great” about Mamdani’s win.

But while Stefanie Fox — JVP’s executive director who traveled from her home in Seattle for the event — said she was “thrilled about the affordability for this city,” she also emphasized that the mayor “has a tremendous role to play in defining the way that New York’s support for Israeli occupation and apartheid happens.”

She added, “So I’m really happy to see an administration where that might be possible to move.”

In a sign that pro-Palestinian activists are already geared up to lobby a mayor inclined to agree with them, Fox mentioned JVP’s new campaign, “Break the Bonds,” which is advocating for comptroller-elect Mark Levine to follow Brad Lander’s lead in not reinvesting in Israel bonds; Levine, however, has stated his intention to invest in them.

“That’s the kind of example where even though it’s the comptroller’s decision, it’s a different conversation in this New York,” Fox said.

Mamdani’s candidacy coincided with amid surging pro-Palestinian sentiments among the broader liberal electorate, and inside the hall, evidence of the cause was on vivid display. Some attendees wore keffiyehs as they embraced in celebration. Mamdani was joined on stage by his wife, an artist who was wearing a top by a Palestinian designer, and parents, a scholar and film director who are prominent supporters of the boycott Israel movement. And outside, a group of Neturei Karta anti-Zionist Jewish protesters stood holding a sign that read, “Congratulations NYC. Zohran Mamdani 0% AIPAC Funded.”

A number of Mamdani’s backers from the political and cultural worlds were in attendance, many of whom share his strongly critical views of Israel, including actress Cynthia Nixon, streamer Hasan Piker, and Jamaal Bowman, the former congressman whose name has circulated as a possible schools chancellor for Mamdani. (Mamdani has not indicated if he has a preferred chancellor.)

Brad Lander, Mamdani’s most prominent Jewish ally in city politics who cross-endorsed him ahead of the Democratic primary, was also on hand.

So was Jewish stand-up comedian and podcaster Adam Friedland, who went on a passionate rant against Israel to pro-Israel Rep. Ritchie Torres back in August.

“It’s a crap job, right?” Friedland said in an interview. “It’s really tough to be the mayor of such a big city, right? But I think he’s a genuine person. I met him and he’s kind of, like, he’s just a millennial. He likes soccer and democratic socialism.”

Mamdani did not mention Israel or Palestine during his speech, keeping his focus on New York City and the diversity of New Yorkers whom he hopes to represent as mayor.

“We will build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism,” Mamdani said, drawing cheers.

As the election drew closer over the last two weeks, Jewish leaders and rabbis came out in droves to warn Jewish voters about his anti-Israel rhetoric. A letter signed by 1,100 rabbis from across the country warned of the “political normalization” of anti-Zionism, naming Mamdani.

Bend the Arc’s Beran said the election result may very well be a sign that the letter, despite its many signatures, did not achieve its intended effect.

“We’ll have to see how the actual vote shook out, but I think it’s clear that a lot of Jews saw through the fear-mongering,” she said. “I think people were able to see the complete picture of the campaign and also understand that Zohran actually cares about Jewish safety.”

An early exit poll conducted by CNN suggested that about a third of Jewish voters had cast their ballots for Mamdani, with two-thirds backing Cuomo.

Rafael Shimunov, a JFREJ member who hosts a radio show called “Beyond the Pale,” said Mamdani’s victory was proof that the tactics used by Cuomo and his mega-donors need not be successful.

“I’m feeling exhilarated and hopeful and excited about what this means for the rest of this country, every city and town in this country,” he said. “This proves tonight that even among all the attempts at dividing us, using my people, antisemitism, using the Jewish community as a wedge in the coalition — didn’t work.”

Now, Mamdani’s challenge will turn from campaigning, where he has a long track record of explosive success, to governing, which he said — slyly quoting Cuomo’s father Mario, himself a former governor — he intended to do “in prose.” He has never held an executive role.

“I don’t know if we’re going to accomplish everything, I don’t know how long it’s going to take,” said Rabbi Abby Stein, who’s closely involved with JVP and JFREJ, and was responsible for the Yiddish translations of the Mamdani campaign signs posted around Hasidic areas of Brooklyn. “But I know that we have someone who’s going to try.”

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