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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
—
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Can this suburban kibbutz and civil rights trailblazer maintain its identity in the 21st Century?
POMONA, NY— The Skyview Acres Cooperative is located about 30 miles north of New York City. Think of it as a suburban kibbutz.
“One felt like they had many parents,” recalled Carol Bowman, a professor of education at Ramapo College who grew up in this close-knit housing development in leafy Rockland County. “When I was growing up I could just walk into any of the houses where I had friends.”
“It was just a giant united family,” said Jo Simons, a retired piano teacher whose parents taught music and organized community singing events at Skyview.
Skyview was created in the aftermath of World War II as an intentionally integrated community. Quakers figured prominently in its creation. The land for Skyview was purchased in January 1947 with loans totaling $16,500 from two Quakers, who were strangers to the founding families and to each other. The loans came with terms that could’ve come from the Hebrew Free Loan Society: They were interest-free and simply said, “Pay us back when you can.”
The founding families scraped together the rest of the $29,500 purchase price. Today, Skyview consists of 115 acres and about four dozen homes. Most of them have at least two acres of land.
About a third of the original 45 or 46 families at Skyview were Jewish, according to Naomi Kleinberg, a retired editor and children’s book author, whose parents were among the original families who cleared land to build homes, make roads and create a swimming pond here. Key residents who played pivotal roles in Skyview’s evolution as a progressive bastion and a caring community included Jo’s father, Edward Simons, who founded what is now the Rockland Conservatory of Music, and Irving Wolfe, a political organizer for whom the cooperative’s ball field is named.
At the community’s recent 80th anniversary celebration, Wally Glickman recited an original poem. Skyview, he wrote, is a “ magic island in suburbia.”
‘My father wanted nothing more than to live in the woods’
Jack and Lena Kleinberg were among four Jewish couples who came to Skyview together from the Lower East Side. Back in the city their social lives revolved around the University Settlement House on Eldridge Street.
They raised a son and three daughters at Skyview. The son, Joseph, remains in the family home where he makes a living as a beekeeper and vegetable farmer.
“My father wanted nothing more than to live in the woods,” Naomi Kleinberg told me.
Jack Kleinberg was a World War II veteran who considered himself an atheist but was “adamantly, proudly, belligerently Jewish,” she said.
His maternal uncle’s entire family perished in Poland during the Holocaust and Kleinberg resolved that his family would know how to defend itself, so he taught them how to shoot revolvers and rifles.
“My father said he would never allow his family to be led like sheep to the slaughter, like in Europe,” Naomi Kleinberg said.
Her parents grew up on the Lower East Side amidst much misery and poverty. That experience prompted her late mother, who was raised in an observant Sephardic household on Orchard Street, to work as a social justice activist. In the 1930’s, Lena Kleinberg campaigned on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, the Black men wrongfully charged with the rape of white women in Alabama. During the 1940’s, Lena worked for the establishment of the Jewish state, volunteering with the American League for a Free Palestine. During the Cold War, she demonstrated at missile sites near Skyview and, in more recent years, stood vigil at a local abortion clinic, to counter anti-abortion protesters intimidating patients.
“All this involvement in social justice, making tikkun olam, it’s so Jewish,” Naomi told me.
‘Can you imagine how dangerous that was in the ’40’s?’
Although there were seders and Hanukkah parties held at the cooperative, Kleinberg remembers only two Skyview families who attended synagogue regularly.
The other families had “Jewish upbringings, Jewish identities,” Kleinberg said, “but not a Jewish existence.”
For the most part, religious tradition was supplanted by political activism. Skyview residents attended seminal civil rights marches in Washington, brought medicine to Cuba, demonstrated against the Vietnam War and went to Nicaragua to aid the Sandinista regime. To this day, residents demonstrate regularly against the Trump administration at an intersection in Nanuet that has long served as Rockland’s town square for political protest.
A handful of key political activists lived at Skyview during the 1960s. Among them were Conrad Lynn, the Black civil rights attorney who defended Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown and one of the Puerto Rican nationalists who carried out the attack on the U.S. House of Representatives in 1954; George Houser, a co-founder of both the Congress of Racial Equality and the American Committee on Africa; and Alfred Hassler, a Methodist minister who served as executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the interfaith peace and justice group. Lynn, Hassler and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin went on a freedom ride down south in 1947.
“They did that in the 40’s, not in the 60’s,” noted the poet Wally Glickman. “Can you imagine how dangerous that was in the 40’s?”
Skyview has also been home to some prominent entertainers, including Krishna Das, a globe-trotting Jewish performer of Hindu devotional music. The late Steven Hill, born Solomon Krakovsky, had starring roles in the TV shows Mission: Impossible and Law & Order. Hill left Skyview after becoming an observant Jew and moved to nearby Monsey. Eliot Asinof, who wrote for such classic western TV shows as Maverick and Wagon Train and authored the nonfiction account of the Chicago “Black Sox” World Series scandal in 1919, Eight Men Out, rented a home at Skyview during summers in the 1950’s and 60’s. And two founding members of the Grammy-nominated jazz fusion group Spyro Gyra currently live at Skyview.
But no one in showbiz had quite the run as Ed Simons, who was said to be the oldest working conductor in the country when he wielded a baton at the age of 100. The maestro’s career included performing in the military band that accompanied President Harry Truman to the Potsdam Peace Conference in the Summer of 1945 and conducting pit orchestras for eight Broadway musicals, including My Fair Lady.
Edmund Gordon, a Black psychologist who was one of the architects of the federal Head Start program, is still professionally active at the age of 105. He treads water in the indoor pool at his Skyview home.
Several people I spoke with offered the same quip to comment on the longevity of the cooperative’s residents: “There must be something in the water.”
‘I was the first Skyview baby’
Some of the children who lived at Skyview Acres inherited their parents’ political sympathies. In the 1950’s, several Skyview kids refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or participate in the “duck and cover” drills held during the Cold War to prepare students for a nuclear attack. In 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign set up a tent city dubbed Resurrection City on the National Mall in Washington D.C., some teenagers at Skyview erected their own Insurrection City in the woods. And, no matter how liberal and left-leaning the cooperative’s grown-ups may have been, young people skinny dipping in Skyview’s man-made pond upset some of the adults.
Several people who grew up at Skyview and are now in their 70s or 80s, recall attending the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” in 1963 where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Skyview’s roughly four dozen households filled two buses for the march. That year, Skyview block party attended by some 400 Rockland County residents raised money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The contribution elicited a signed thank-you letter from Dr. King, then SCLC’s president.
And many of the Skyview kids carried on the good works of their parents.
Two of Edmund Gordon’s children are tenured college professors. Ted Gordon teaches Black Studies at the University of Texas. Jessica Gordon Nembhard teaches political economy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Then there is Laura Hassler, the daughter of Skyview co-founder Alfred Hassler, a conscientious objector during World War II and the man responsible for introducing Martin Luther King Jr. to the Vietnamese monk Thich Nnat Hanh in 1966, a connection credited with influencing King’s opposition to the Vietnam War.
“I was the first Skyview baby,” Laura Hassler told me during a phone interview. “I wear it with pride.“
Hassler started the Netherlands-based non-profit Musicians Without Borders. She recalled kids at school calling the Skyview students hippies and communists. One oral history of the cooperative recounted a local hardware store that refused to service Skyview because its residents were “commies.
Some of the Skyview residents had, in fact, been members of the Communist Party earlier in their lives. Conrad Lynn was active in the party during the 1920’s and 30’s. Irving Wolfe was also a member. Wolfe, whose Honda sedan bore a VIVA CHE license plate, defied the U.S. embargo against Cuba 16 times to bring humanitarian aid to the island. In the 1980’s, he served on a construction brigade in Nicaragua.
Ed Simons, the conductor, was suspected of communist sympathies and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958 where he was successfully represented by a lawyer from Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians.
‘Still a genuine community’
Skyview is located about six miles north of the burgeoning ultra-Orthodox community of Monsey. New Square, another Haredi hamlet, is even closer. Those communities have a pressing need for more housing. Many current Skyview residents told me they are reluctant to speak publicly about the threat posed by new housing development, fearing that their efforts to limit development might be interpreted as antisemitism.
A number of Skyview residents have been active in the NAACP, which has been battling the East Ramapo school board run by Orthodox Jews who tend not to send their children to public schools. Test scores, graduation rates and other data indicate that the school district, once the best in New York State, is now among the worst, according to Oscar Cohen, a Jewish NAACP activist and retired school administrator who lives nearby. A 2026-2027 U.S. News & World Report ranking of high schools noted that Ramapo High School had proficiency rates in math and English of 18% and 44% respectively.
Skyview residents are particularly concerned about the future of a 75-acre forested parcel known as the Stryker property that borders Skyview to the south, according to Anna Friedberg, a lawyer who serves as president of the Skyview’s board. Friedberg noted that the property’s development could impact traffic in the area, as well as the local watershed, which includes a stream that feeds Skyview’s pond and the west branch of the Hackensack River, a source of water for Nyack and Northern New Jersey.
“There have been some plans by the town to suggest that they would develop that entire property,” she told me at the cooperative’s annual Winter Doldrums party in March. “There is a tremendous population boon in this area and so there’s significant pressure to find more housing for folks.”
The Stryker property was purchased with a public bond approved by residents of the Town of Ramapo that earmarked the land for open space and low-income, clustered housing for first responders. But the town subsequently commissioned a planning study that cited a religious campus as one potential use of the Stryker property. Michael Specht, the Ramapo town supervisor, wrote in an email, “There are no plans at this time to develop the Stryker property or use it as a religious campus.”
“I would take anything that the town says with a grain of salt,” said Bob Trostle, a retired builder who grew up in Skyview and now lives just outside its border. “We’ve learned that the hard way, especially concerning development planning, zoning, and things like that.”
In 2015, the Skyview Acres Land Trust was created to preserve the cooperative’s greenery. Membership in the trust is voluntary but once a homeowner joins, subsequent owners of that home can’t add more buildings to their property or clear-cut trees. The trust is headed by Paul Nagin, a longtime Skyview resident who now lives in Connecticut. Nagin not only continues to be involved in the land trust but is still active in the Spring Valley NAACP, which has been in court fighting the East Ramapo school district.
“As far as I’m concerned, the Stryker property is a sword of Damocles hanging over Skyview,” Nagin told me. “It’s going to be an ongoing issue for sure.”
Skyview is “a pretty blue dot in the middle of a reddish part of Rockland County,” according to Robin Shapiro, a Skyview resident who describes himself as a checkbook Democrat active in J Street. He sees the concerns over housing development in the area as “a special case of NIMBYism with an overlay of religion and politics.”
“I don’t think that you can explain the opposition to development plans as antisemitic,” he told me. “There are legitimate and long-standing concerns about preserving open space, water quality, traffic that you’d see in any community that was encountering very rapid growth from new folks of any kind.”
Will Skyview retain its unique political and communal character as its properties turn over? Will it continue to be the kind of place where Wally Glickman and his fellow Skyview poet Brian Kates post their poetry on trees along a pathway in the woods?
“This is still a genuine community. I don’t really see that ending,” said Kates, who won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing when he worked at the New York Daily News. “I think it’s something more than politics. It’s an ethos of people helping each other, of being kind to each other, a kind and caring community.”
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American music producer Justin Goldner at work on a Yiddish album
How many Yiddish rock stars do you know?
Maybe more than you think.
If you watched the Grammy Awards back in 2018, you might have seen one of them, Justin Goldner, accompany Ben Platt as he sang “Somewhere” from the Broadway musical West Side Story.
A multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and lute, Goldner has worked with an all-star array of artists as a session musician and producer, including Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Ricky Martin and Macy Gray. Goldner also appeared on Broadway and in Madison Square Garden, performed with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and recorded music for Disney’s live-action Snow White.
Goldner is no stranger to the spotlight, but for his latest project, he stepped away from the roaring arenas of pop stardom to inhabit a more intimate space: a dive into Yiddish culture. His work in progress, Songs of Longing and Belonging (Vi shturem a benken in Yiddish), sets Yiddish poetry to music, creating tracks that sound refreshingly contemporary even as they plumb the Yiddish literary archives for inspiration.
By the end of the project — which is being supported by a fellowship from the Jewish Writers Institute — the songs will comprise an entire album. Goldner estimates the full album will appear next spring. For now, he has been releasing them one at a time on YouTube under his Yiddish moniker, Reb Tsudek.
Like many younger people interested in Yiddish today, Goldner didn’t grow up with the language. Although Judaism was part of his upbringing in suburban Philadelphia, it was not a central part of his identity. “I grew up in what I would imagine is a pretty typical Reform family,” Goldner said when I spoke with him. “I had a bar mitzvah. I went to Jewish summer camp. But in retrospect, my memory of my Jewish upbringing was a little bit like: ‘Here’s Judaism. Don’t get too close to it.’”
If he had anything resembling religious commitment, it was to music, specifically the guitar, an instrument he took up at 13. “Relatively quickly it became an all consuming pursuit,” he recalled. “In high school, I barely did anything else. I was a very obsessive listener and wanted to devour as much music as possible.” After graduating high school, he earned a degree in music from NYU.
Goldner said he began to think differently about his Jewish heritage when he saw how his friends related to their own cultural backgrounds. “The thing that sort of primed the pump for me was getting into Greek and Spanish and Arabic and other languages and cultures,” he said. “I just found that so engaging. I was really inspired by my friends and colleagues who come from these backgrounds and carry their culture and their heritage with them, but they’re not living in the past.”
That epiphany, combined with the experience of getting to know a great-aunt with dementia who increasingly reverted to her native Yiddish, led Goldner to purchase a copy of College Yiddish, the classic textbook by Uriel Weinreich. For many years, Yiddish was a linguistic passion that he nurtured privately. Now it has become central to the evolution of his musical career.
The Yiddish title of Goldner’s project — Vi shturem a benken — comes from “Dos lid fun a meydl” (The Song of a Girl), a poem by Anna Margolin, a 20th-century Yiddish poet who immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in 1906. Previously unfamiliar with her work, Goldner was drawn to the “intensity” of Margolin’s lyric, which he translated for me as “it rocks me like a storm, this yearning.”
“I feel like she, as a writer, leaps off the page,” Goldner told me. “The intensity of wanting to do something or be something and not even knowing what, but just feeling like you can’t hold yourself back.”
Featuring vocalists Temma Schaechter and Ben Abraham, Goldner’s version of “The Song of a Girl” reveals another facet of Songs of Longing and Belonging: its blending of heritage languages and diasporic experiences. Besides Yiddish and English, “The Song of a Girl” also includes lyrics in Indonesian, one of the languages spoken by Abraham’s parents.
Future songs will take a similar approach. For example, “Meyerkepl” ( Seashell), based on a poem by the Yiddish writer Yehoash, will include words by Cuban poet José Marti. “I’ve been fascinated by Cuban music for a very long time,” Goldner said. “My wife’s family is Cuban. I was struck by how this sense of exile, of diaspora, of being far away from something or someone that we construe as home, manifested with these two very different authors in very similar imagery.”
In taking up Yiddish as a medium of musical expression, Goldner joins a growing group of artists recording contemporary music in the language, including Daniel Kahn, whose Yiddish versions of classics by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits are ingenuous feats of translation; Isabel Frey, whose 2020 debut album Millennial Bundist repurposes Yiddish labor and protest anthems; and the Bashevis Singers, a Melbourne-based folk band who, like Goldner, frequently turn to Yiddish poetry as a source of musical inspiration.
Meanwhile, independent record labels like Borscht Beat are producing Yiddish music that runs the gamut from traditional to experimental.
This thriving world of Yiddish popular music reflects a larger cultural and linguistic renaissance in which Goldner is a passionate participant. He has attended the Yidish Vokh, an annual week-long retreat for Yiddish speakers in upstate New York, takes online Yiddish classes, and has even developed a Yiddish keyboard app, YidShrift, that aims to bring familiar features like autocorrect and autocomplete to modern Yiddish communication.
Beyond the Yiddish lyrics he sets to music, Goldner has incorporated his affinity for the language into Songs of Longing by including Yiddish interviews with some of his collaborators, emphasizing the currency of Yiddish as a medium of colloquial expression.
While Songs of Longing and Belonging is firmly rooted in Goldner’s engagement with Yiddish language and lyrics, he also believes that the texts he is drawing on speak to shared human experiences.
“I think that there is a longing for connection that is universal and that manifests itself through the concepts and stories of who we are,” he said. That longing often pushes people to ask themselves probing questions of identity like “Who are my people?” or “where is my home?”
“I don’t think that there are ever simple answers,” he said.
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Katie Zacharia’s brief White House stint included a rebuke from the Auschwitz Memorial
Katie Zacharia’s five-day stint as White House Press Secretary ended almost as soon as it began. But before she was fired on Friday, she managed to draw a rebuke from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
The museum’s reprimand came in response to a claim Zacharia posted to X in November 2025, asserting that the abortion pill is “connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps.”
The supposed connection? A company descended from the conglomerate involved in producing Zyklon B later owned the company that developed the abortion pill, Zacharia intimated in her post.
The official Auschwitz Memorial X account rebuked Zacharia on Monday, calling the argument “a misleading chain of guilt by association.”
Mifepristone, commonly known as the abortion pill, was first synthesized in 1980 — more than three decades after World War II’s end — by Georges Teutsch, a chemist at the French pharmaceutical company Roussel-Uclaf, based on an idea developed by Jewish endocrinologist Étienne-Émile Baulieu.
The tenuous connection to the poison gas used in concentration camps goes something like this: Zyklon B was distributed by a company called Degesch, which was partly owned by the German conglomerate I.G. Farben. After World War II, I.G. Farben was broken up into successor companies, including Hoechst AG, which in 1997 acquired a majority stake in the French company that developed mifepristone.
“A corporate relationship between companies separated by decades is presented as if it proved continuity of products, purposes, or chemical composition,” the Auschwitz Memorial wrote on X. “That is not historical analysis, but the selective combination of unrelated facts to produce a predetermined conclusion.”
Zacharia offered another version of the claim in a June 2025 podcast episode of We the People with Gates Garcia, saying that “the abortion pill has the same chemicals that they used in the exterminant (sic) camps in Nazi Germany.”
Suffice it to say, mifepristone, a steroidal progesterone blocker, is not the same as cyanide. Zacharia, the Auschwitz Memorial wrote, “confuses corporate history with chemical composition.”
After the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, anti-abortion activists have increasingly set their sights on banning the abortion pill nationwide. Prescribing, dispensing, or mailing mifepristone is currently banned in 13 states. In May, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court ruling that would have effectively ended mail delivery and telemedicine prescribing of mifepristone nationwide, including in states where abortion is legal.
Zacharia has framed her opposition to abortion as deeply personal. Zacharia said that, when she met her biological mother at 18, she learned she was “approximately 20, 30 minutes away from being aborted.” A Christian counselor, Zacharia said, convinced her mother to place her for adoption instead.
On the podcast, Zacharia also spoke about her work on the board of the White Rose Resistance, an anti-abortion advocacy group named for the Nazi resistance movement of the same name.
Groups including the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the Anti-Defamation League have condemned comparisons between abortion and the Holocaust, arguing that they trivialize the Holocaust and exploit its victims’ memory for political ends.
Zacharia has also made Nazi comparisons in other contexts: According to CNN, in September 2022, she reposted a Truth Social post comparing then-President Joe Biden and anti-fascist protesters to Nazis. It included the hashtags #Antifa, #PedoHitler and #WrongSideOfHistory.
The White House Press Office did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment Friday morning, before Zacharia’s firing had been announced.
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