Uncategorized
Jewish teens, led by Ezra Beinart, are gathering on Zoom to meet prominent Palestinians
(JTA) — When Rep. Rashida Tlaib joined a Zoom with 40 teenagers, she soon found herself talking about the kinds of topics — academic and otherwise — that tend to take up their days.
There was discussion of the stress of AP exams, embarrassing dads and social media memes. She showed them pictures on Instagram of her dog at the U.S. Capitol. Everyone was on a first-name basis.
“My son is a [high school] junior,” she said, responding to a message in the Zoom chat from one of the teen participants. “Oh my God, the SAT — I was stressed out. I’m stressed because he’s stressed. He had to take all his AP exams and stuff.”
Tlaib got personal too — talking about her grandmother, with whom she last spoke on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.
But the conversation also turned to a question many of the teens had encountered at high school, camp, youth groups or elsewhere in their lives: Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?
As the only Palestinian-American in Congress — and perhaps the chamber’s most prominent anti-Zionist — Tlaib was in a unique position to answer. And the students on the call had a particular interest in the question as well: They were all Jewish.
The teens are all participants in a new initiative, launched last year, to expose young American Jews to Palestinian voices through video chats. Founded by Ezra Beinart, a junior at a Jewish day school in New York City, the project’s goal is to bring Palestinian perspectives to a demographic that, he says, sorely lacks them.
“I live in a very Jewish community and most of the people around me are very educated on the Israeli perspective, but not as knowledgeable about the Palestinian side,” Beinart said in an interview. “And that’s why I decided to create the group to inform young Jews about the other side of the story, which I don’t think most Jewish students know much about.”
In her response to the question about antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Tlaib again turned to her grandmother, Muftieh, whom she refers to with the Arabic term “Sity” and whom she has portrayed as the face of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. She said people were “weaponizing antisemitism” in order to chill criticism of Israel.
“My grandmother, literally solely based on the fact that she was born Palestinian, she just doesn’t have equality,” Tlaib told the teens. “Her life would be completely different if that wasn’t the case. And so, you know, for me criticizing that, if anything, is more chipping away at this form of government that does that to my Sity.”
Michigan House Rep. Rashida Tlaib speaks on stage at a concert in Detroit, July 16, 2022. (Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images)
Beinart said he wants to increase opportunities for Jewish-Palestinian interaction. So he said he has reached out to “very Jewish” communities around the country, through chat groups and progressive synagogues, to get the word out. He started out with just a handful of teens, but his numbers are growing: His session with Tlaib drew 40 viewers.
Such interest comes at a time of political flux in Israel, and as young Jewish adults in the United States view the country less favorably than their elders. A 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found that Jews aged 18-30 were less emotionally attached to Israel than older generations, more skeptical of its efforts toward peace and likelier to support efforts to boycott it. In recent years, activist groups founded by young Jews have pushed institutions such as campus Hillels and the Conservative movement’s Camp Ramah network to be more inclusive of Palestinian or anti-Zionist perspectives.
The initiative’s format has speakers introduce themselves for five minutes or so and then take questions, which Beinart selects, for another 30 minutes. It has held about half a dozen sessions with speakers like Ayman Mohyeldin, a journalist at MSNBC, and Amahl Bishara, a professor at Tufts University. Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, is its most prominent guest so far. (Her office did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or for comment.)
Beinart wanted his peers to have their minds opened, as he said his was when he interned last summer at the Jerusalem Fund, a pro-Palestinian think tank and advocacy organization in Washington D.C. He noticed that a friend of his who worked there used “Palestine” as readily as he used “Israel,” and described to him how fraught traveling to the region was for her, whereas he took his ability to enter the country for granted.
“It made it much more tangible to have friends explain how Israel’s actions affect them in everyday life,” he said. “It’s different from just reading about it or seeing a video.”
If Beinart’s name is familiar, it’s because his father is Peter Beinart, the writer who was once an outspoken advocate for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, and now is a prominent Jewish voice supporting a single, binational Israeli-Palestinian state. The elder Beinart declined to comment for this article, as the initiative is his son’s project rather than his. But for a decade, Peter Beinart has been making the case that American Jews need to spend more time listening to Palestinian voices.
Resistance to hearing from Palestinians, the elder Beinart wrote in 2013 in the New York Review of Books, “make[s] the organized American Jewish community a closed intellectual space, isolated from the experiences and perspectives of roughly half the people under Israeli control. And the result is that American Jewish leaders, even those who harbor no animosity toward Palestinians, know little about the reality of their lives.”
Ezra acknowledges his father’s influence, albeit reluctantly. The first speaker in the series was Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist Ezra met when he accompanied Peter on a West Bank tour.
“Yeah, obviously, but I’m going my own way with it,” Ezra Beinart said, asked about his father’s influence. “I’m connecting Israel-Palestine to what I see going on with my peers, my friends.”
In the Zoom session, Tlaib intuited Ezra’s ambivalence about bringing his father into the conversation, so she trod carefully when she quoted the elder Beinart to make a point.
“Ezra, your dad said something once — I know you don’t want me to mention your dad, you’re like my son,” she said. But she then brought up a quote by Peter Beinart to explain why she had chosen, despite considerable backlash, to host an event in the U.S. Capitol commemorating the Nakba, the word meaning “catastrophe” which Palestinians use to describe their displacement during and after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
Peter Beinart’s quote was, “When you tell a people to forget its past, you are not proposing peace, you are proposing extinction.”
Tlaib said, “I used [Beinart’s quote] today when I got interviewed because I love this, but when Peter says it, it’s like okay, look at this is, this is a Jewish American man speaking up about the importance of understanding history.”
After the meeting, Ezra Beinart told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he chose questions that reflected the narrative Jewish youth were exposed to in their communities. In addition to discussing anti-Zionism and antisemitism, one question was, “What is your response to those who believe that using the word ‘occupation’ is harmful?” (Avoiding accurate terminology inhibits the advance of peace and human rights, Tlaib said.)
“Jewish people, when they think about Palestinians, they think of terror, most of them,” Beinart said. “So that’s something they should hear about from Palestinians.”
Teaneck, the northern New Jersey suburb that would qualify as a “very Jewish” community by nearly any standard, is where one of the participants, Liora Pelavin, 15, lives. Her mother, who is a rabbi, saw a post about Beinart’s Zoom meetings on Facebook and thought her daughter might be interested.
“Hearing from Palestinians really humanizes them,” Pelavin, who attended a Jewish day school through eighth grade and now goes to a public high school, said in an interview. “It makes me learn and also realize that they all have different opinions, too.”
Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, an organization whose programs include facilitating dialogue between American Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, said any interaction would be welcome.
However, he was concerned that most of the Palestinians Ezra Beinart had selected were political or advocacy leaders, instead of ordinary Palestinians who might be better suited to explain everyday realities to high school students.
“There’s probably a version of a way to do this like Encounter,” a long-running program that brings American Jews to the West Bank for dialogue with Palestinians, “where you are hearing from people and learn their stories, and you are free to come to the political conclusions you want,” Kurtzer said. “But you humanize their experience. That’s one way of doing any of this work. There’s another way to do this work, which is, ‘I want to influence the politics of your own community.’”
Jonathan Kessler — a former senior official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who now leads Heart of a Nation, a group that facilitates dialogue among Jewish American, Palestinian and Israeli teens — said he was aware of Beinart’s initiative, and that it is an example of how Gen Z may be better able to break down barriers than their elders.
“A generation that does not think of gender and sexuality in binary terms is uniquely well positioned to approach a conflict, which has for too long been defined in a binary way,” Kessler said.
Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian political scientist who has spoken to Beinart’s group, said it was particularly important for Palestinian speakers to reach Jewish teens.
“Within the Jewish community, particularly in the organized Jewish community, there may be a lot of pro-Israel perspectives represented and not a whole lot of Palestinian perspectives represented,” he said. “I’m always inspired when I speak to younger people about this issue who have an interest in learning more.”
For Tlaib, it was also a forum where she had expressed views that she hasn’t otherwise voiced publicly — saying that she felt conflicted about evacuating Israeli settlers because they had lived in the West Bank for so long.
“Just the idea around taking families that — that’s been their home — it’s just completely uprooting, forcibly displacing,” Tlaib said. “It’s something I struggle with because, like, we’re doing it all over again, right? This happened during the Nakba.”
Beinart said he and others on the call, including Pelavin, were moved by her sentiments.
“A lot of the Jewish community thinks like, ‘Palestinians hate us, and don’t think we’re people too,’” Pelavin said. “I think that’s so wrong, and being on these calls has just confirmed that for me.”
Ezra Beinart favors a single binational state — Tlaib is the only elected lawmaker who also takes that position — and Pelavin said her views on Israel trended left. But while much of the organized American Jewish community has historically bristled at criticism of Israel, neither teen said that they were made to feel like a pariah in their Jewish milieus.
“They think it’s cool that I do these types of things, but I think a lot of their goal is to just stay away from this topic around me, because they don’t really want to get into an argument about it,” Pelavin said of her peers.
And Beinart said holding a minority viewpoint hasn’t been a problem for him, either. “The kids in my school know who I am,” Ezra Beinart said. “No one’s mean to me. There are kids who share my views — a few, but not many.”
Despite the weighty subject matter, the conversation had an informal, friendly feel. Tlaib also wanted to learn more about the participants, but when she asked what colleges they were planning to attend, no one spoke up — until she noticed answers to her question piling up in the Zoom chat.
“Oh look there — you guys looove the chat!” she said. She then attempted to get her dog to hop on screen, but settled for showing the teens photos.
Ezra Beinart said he was fine with Tlaib’s cooing and kvelling about the college plans.
“I’m not going to pretend that this is a group of well-educated adults,” he said. “This is a group of kids who don’t know about this stuff as well. And that’s why that’s why I’m doing it — it’s not supposed to be for people who are experts, right?”
—
The post Jewish teens, led by Ezra Beinart, are gathering on Zoom to meet prominent Palestinians appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Why France celebrated a Jewish avenger of Ukrainian pogroms
Some 81 years ago this month, a person in Warsaw would have enjoyed the odd spectacle of a mob of Jews surrounding France’s Polish embassy, wildly proclaiming the greatness of the French Republic. The occasion: Jews everywhere were celebrating France because, after a sensational eight-day trial (which even made the front page of The New York Times), a jury of 12 petit-bourgeois Parisians had astonishingly acquitted the Ukrainian-born Jewish immigrant and anarchist Sholom Schwartzbard of the charge of murder for shooting to death former Ukrainian president Symon Petliura in the middle of the Latin Quarter, an act the accused fully acknowledged committing.
Schwartzbard had declared to the police (who in turn informed the press) that he had killed Petliura to avenge the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews in the 1919 Ukrainian pogroms. The massacres had been perpetrated by armies fighting in the civil war that erupted after the Russian Revolution — among them troops of the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic, which Petliura headed. (To this day, historians debate the extent of Petliura’s responsibility for the pogroms.)
In court, Schwartzbard’s attorneys managed to turn the tables, and effectively put Petliura on trial. The defense successfully argued that Schwartzbard should not be held guilty of murder, because Petliura was responsible for the pogroms, which claimed the lives of 15 of Schwartzbard’s relatives. A French law review of the day described the argument on Schwartzbard’s behalf as yet another crime-of-passion defense.
This defense worked because France rallied to Schwartzbard’s cause, in an outpouring of pro-Jewish, anti-pogrom sentiment. Seventeen months passed between Petliura’s assassination on May 25, 1926 ,and Schwartzbard’s trial, which ran from October 18 through October 26, 1927, and all that time France’s newspapers mainly kept up sympathetic coverage, with the notable exception of right-wing stalwarts Le Figaro and l’Action Française. The country’s most respected intellectuals flocked en masse to the Schwartzbard camp, publicly endorsing the justice of his deed.
Today, that national outburst of pro-Jewish sentiment would likely strike most American Jews as surprising and somewhat unbelievable, sandwiched as it was between France’s notorious antisemitic episodes — the Dreyfus trial over 30 years before and the Vichy government’s deportations of Jews to German concentration camps 15 years later. What is more, in recent years, Jews have been reminded of this ugly history by high-visibility anti-Jewish violence coming from France’s Muslim youths — often poor, disaffected and furious about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The frequency of violence probably peaked in 2004, but the 2006 kidnapping-torture-murder of a 23-year-old French Jew, Ilan Halimi, left more American Jews than ever convinced that France is an antisemitic country.
How is it, then, that the world saw such an upswell of philosemitism in France around the Schwartzbard case? Was this an aberration, merely a time-out from prejudice?
Actually, things were going well for Jews in general in France in the 1920s. So much so that one American Jewish tourist, fresh off the ship from Europe, declared to the Forward newspaper, “There is no antisemitism in France.”
Those were halcyon days partly because the country was relatively prosperous, which tends to enhance tolerance. France had near-full employment and the economy and the wages of workingmen were growing. During the 1927 trial, the French were enjoying a particularly strong sense of well-being because the return to power of Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré in July 1926 had brought an end to years of financial crises and stabilized the franc, which had been ruined by war.
At the same time, Jews had become curiously chic. A circle of Jewish literary lions came of age and sold their books to a wide audience. These included books about Jews and Judaism, such as Edmond Fleg’s (né Flegenheimer) “Why I Am a Jew.” Best-selling writer Albert Londres, a gentile, spent months visiting the world’s Jewish communities in order to write “Le Juif errant est arrivé” (“The Wandering Jew Has Arrived”).
In addition, it was crucial to the trial that the terrible war of 1914 to 1918 remained the foremost fact in French consciousness through the 1920s. All of France had pulled together for the war effort, making taboo antisemitism and other forms of prejudice. And Schwartzbard himself was emblematic of the French cause in the war — no one could miss the Croix de Guerre he wore to court, which had been awarded him when he was wounded in battle after volunteering to fight for France (as had 36,000 other Jewish immigrants).
Even the staunchly right-wing and hitherto antisemitic newspaper La Liberté ran a front-page editorial calling for Schwartzbard to be acquitted — as a noble soldier who had fought for France. Whereas, as the defense never missed an opportunity to remind the court, Petliura had allied his army with Germany in 1918.
Paradoxically, the Dreyfus Affair deserves major credit for Schwartzbard’s acquittal. First of all, it recruited intellectuals into a leadership role in civic affairs and institutionalized them as a lobby that Schwartzbard’s lawyer, Henry Torrès, was able to activate for Schwartzbard in a massive public relations campaign. They included the likes of the writer Joseph Kessel (perhaps best known today for his novel “Belle de jour”) and future prime minister Léon Blum (one of the five French Jews who, over the course of the country’s history, have served as its head of government, a record unmatched outside of Israel).
Perhaps more important, the years of Dreyfusard activism institutionalized, for many in France, the notion that antisemitism was a distinct evil that there was an absolute duty to oppose — everywhere, all the time. Therefore, when Schwartzbard came along, they had to stand up against pogroms. (The defense, remember, had already converted the trial into a trial of pogroms, not of a man.)
Indeed, the Dreyfusards transfigured the fight against antisemitism into a fight to defend the Republic — and Republicanism. The fight became symbolically enshrined in the official Republican creed when the ashes of leading Dreyfusard and “J’accuse” author Emile Zola were laid to rest in the Panthéon in 1908. Thus, at the very end of Schwartzbard’s trial, Torrès could successfully implore the jury, “You are today, gentlemen, responsible for the prestige of our nation and the thousands of human lives that will depend on the verdict of France.”
France’s Dreyfusard legacy is not dead. True, there are still antisemites in France — including a representation of right-wing French Catholics, along with the angry Muslims. But France also deserves credit for tolerance. France’s Jews are well-integrated into the fabric of French society, and for all the news of anti-Jewish attacks, there are also considerable well-springs of good will, rooted in the very essence of the French Republican tradition. In 1791, the French revolutionaries made their country the first in Europe to grant equal rights and the franchise to its Jewish population. Indeed, among the reasons that many French Jews returned after World War II and that many Jews still love France today is that they know that the best of human impulses can be found there, and not only the worst.
Deborah Waroff is a New York-based writer. She is completing a biography of Sholom Schwartzbard.
The post Why France celebrated a Jewish avenger of Ukrainian pogroms appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Yiddish Glory resounds in China and Korea
די שאַפֿער פֿונעם מוזיקאַלישן פּראָיעקט „ייִדיש גלאָרי‟ — דער מוזיקער פּסוי קאָראָלענקאָ און די ייִדיש־פֿאָרשערין אַנאַ שטערנשיס — האָבן לעצטנס זיך אומגעקערט פֿון זייערע ערשטע אַזיאַטישע גאַסטראָלן איבער כינע און דרום־קאָרעע.
צום ערשטן מאָל האָט אַ ברייטער עולם אין אָט די לענדער דערהערט אַ גאַנצע ריי חורבן־לידער אויף ייִדיש, אַרײַנגערעכנט גאָר זעלטענע, וועלכע זענען אין קיין אַלבאָם נאָך נישט אַרײַן: למשל, די קופּלעטן „אַדאָלף היטלער – ברוינער המן‟. אין אַן אַנדער ליד ברענגט מען אַ קאַטיושע היטלערן פֿאַר אַ כּלה.
אַנאַ שטערנשיס האָט בעת אַ שמועס מיט מיר דערקלערט, אַז דער פּראָיעקט „ייִדיש גלאָרי‟ נעמט אַרום גאָר אַ סך לידער, בערך 260–300 פֿון משה בערעגאָווסקיס ריזיקן אַרכיוו, געזאַמלט בשעת דער צווייטער וועלט־מלחמה אָדער באַלד נאָך איר סוף. בלויז אַ קליינעם טייל פֿון די דאָזיקע אוצרות האָט מען שוין וווּנדערלעך אויסגעשפּילט אין זייער ערשטן אַלבאָם „די פֿאַרלוירענע לידער פֿון דער צווייטער וועלט־מלחמה‟, וועלכער איז אַרויס אין 2018 און נאָמינירט געוואָרן פֿאַר אַ „גראַמי־פּרעמיע‟ (די אָנגעזעענע פּריזן פֿאַר מוזיק), און אינעם צווייטן אַלבאָם, „די פֿאַרשוויגענע לידער‟, וואָס איז אַרויס אין מאַרץ 2026.
בסך־הכּל, זענען זיי בשותּפֿות אויפֿגעטראָטן מיט זעקס לעקציע־קאָנצערטן: פֿאַר יעדן ליד, וואָס קאָראָלענקאָ האָט אויסגעזונגען, זיך באַגלייטנדיק אויף דער פּיאַנע, האָט שטערנשיס דאָס ליד דערקלערט אויף ענגליש. דער עולם האָט אויך געקענט לייענען די איבערזעצונגען פֿון די לידער אויף אַן עקראַן. אַחוץ דעם, האָט די פּראָפֿעסאָרין אויפֿגעטראָטן מיט צוויי אייגענע רעפֿעראַטן.
איין לעקציע־קאָנצערט איז פֿאָרגעקומען אינעם קאָרעיִש־ישׂראלדיקן ביבלישן אינסטיטוט – אַ קריסטלעכע געזעלשאַפֿט, וואָס געפֿינט זיך אין דער שטאָט פּאַדזשו לעבן סעול. דער פֿאַרזאַמלטער עולם, ווי שטערנשיס האָט איבערגעגעבן, איז כּמעט דורכאויס באַשטאַנען פֿון פּאַסטאָרן. די קאָרעער האָט באַזונדערט גערירט די טעמע פֿון צעריסענע משפּחות, ווײַל בײַ אַ סך פֿון זיי זענען קרובֿים געבליבן אָפּגעריסן אין אַן אַנדער לאַנד – צפֿון־קאָרעע.
אינעם שאַנכײַער אינטערנאַציאָנאַלן אוניווערסיטעט זענען שטערנשיס און קאָרעלענקאָ אויפֿגעטראָטן מיט צוויי לעקציע־קאָנצערטן: וועגן די ייִדישע לידער פֿון געטאָ און וועגן הומאָר – אויפֿן סמך פֿונעם זעלבן אַרכיוו „ייִדיש גלאָרי‟. אַזאַ טעמע איז באַזונדערס שווער צו דערקלערן אַן עולם, וואָס פֿאַרשטייט נישט קיין ייִדיש און ווייסט נישט, אַז אַפֿילו אין די ערגסטע צײַטן פֿון רציחה און טויט, האָבן ייִדן ווײַטער געפֿונען כּוח זיך צו וויצלען אָדער נאָך מער – געשעפּט כּוחות און האָפֿענונגען פֿונעם הומאָר.
נאָך איין לעקציע־קאָנצערט איז פֿאָרגעקומען אינעם שאַנכײַער מוזיי פֿון ייִדישע פּליטים, געווימדעט די לעבנס פֿון בערך 23 טויזנט ייִדן, וועלכע האָבן זיך געראַטעוועט פֿון די נאַציס אין שאַנכײַ.
אינעם כינעזישן אוניווערסיטעט פֿון האָנג־קאָנג איז פֿאָרגעקומען נאָך אַ קאָנצערט און דערנאָך האָט אַנאַ שטערנשיס אַליין דורכגעפֿירט אַ סעמינאַר וועגן מוזיק און גוואַלד, ווי אויך אַ לעקציע אינעם האָנג־קאָנגער ייִדישן קהילה־צענטער. אַחרון אַחרון חבֿיבֿ, זענען שטערנשיס און קאָראָלענקאָ אויפֿגעטראָטן אין ביידזשין; דאָס איז געווען אַ בשותּפֿותדיקע אונטערנעמונג פֿון דער שטאָטישער ייִדישער קהילה און סטודענטן פֿונעם פּעקינער אוניערסיטעט.
שטערנשיס האָט באַמערקט, אַז די כינעזער האָט באַזונדערס פֿאַרחידושט דער פֿאַקט, וואָס משה בערעגאָווסקי איז פֿאַרמישפּט געוואָרן אויף 10 יאָר סטאַלינס לאַגערן בלויז פֿאַרן זאַמלען פֿאָלקסלידער. פֿאַרשטייט זיך, זענען געווען אַ סך פֿראַגעס וועגן דער ייִדישע מוזיקאַלישער טראַדיציע און אירע וואָרצלען. „צי זענט איר אַליין ייִדן?‟ האָט מען זיי כּסדר געפֿרעגט.
דאָס איז נישט קיין איבעריקע קשיא. הײַנט טרעפֿן זיך אין כינע מענטשן, וועלכע שטודירן ייִדיש, נישט האָבנדיק קיין ייִדישע וואָרצלען. אין 2015 האָט דער פֿאָרווערטס דערציילט וועגן דער יונגער כינעזישער סטודענטקע יאַנג מענג, וועלכע האָט צום ערשטן מאָל איבערגעזעצט אַ קלאַסיש כינעזיש ליד אויף ייִדיש. שפּעטער, מיט עטלעכע יאָר צוריק, האָט זי געפֿירט ייִדיש־לימודים אינעם פּעקינער אוניווערסיטעט, און איצט פֿירט זי אָן מיטן קורס „די ייִדישע ציוויליזאַציע‟. פּונקט זי, צוזאַמען מיט דער אָרטיקער ייִדישער קהילה־פֿירערין ראָבערטאַ ליפּסאָן, האָט אָרגאַניזירט דעם אויפֿטריט פֿון קאָראָלענקאָ און שטערנשיס אין ביידזשין.
קאָראָלענקאָ האָט מיר דערציילט וועגן זײַן נסיעה אויף ייִדיש. ער האָט איבערגעגעבן, אַז דער אינסטיטוט אין פּאַדזשו איז פֿאַקטיש אַ מין פּראָטעסטאַנטישער קלויסטער, וועלכער האָט אויסגעבויט דעם ערשטן און איינציקן חורבן־מוזיי אין קאָרעע. נאָכן קאָנצערט האָט מען זיי געבראַכט אינעם מוזיי פֿון דער קאָרעיִשער מלחמה, וווּ מע האָט זיי געוויזן פֿאָטאָגראַפֿיעס פֿון אַמעריקאַנער ייִדישע סאָלדאַטן.
אין שאַנכײַ האָט זייערע צוויי אונטערנעמונגען אָרגאַניזירט די פּראָפֿעסאָרין אַנרואָ באַאָ, אַ לערערין פֿון ייִדיש־ליטעראַטור. זי פֿירט אַ קורס וועגן מענדעלע, פּרץ, באַשעוויס און בערגעלסאָן. אויף אַלע קאָנצערטן, האָט קאָראָלענקאָ באַמערקט, זענען אַ סך צוהערער געווען כינעזישע סטודענטן, וואָס לערנען זיך ייִדיש. אַ טייל פֿון די כינעזישע ליבהאָבער פֿון ייִדיש האָבן אים געזאָגט אַז מאַאָ האָט שטאַרק ליב געהאַט שלום־עליכמען. ס׳איז טאַקע אמת, אַז אין מאַאָס צײַטן זענען אַ צאָל ווערק זײַנע פּובליקירט געוואָרן אויף כינעזיש — מסתּמא ווײַל שלום־עליכם האָט מיט וואַרעמקייט געשילדערט פּשוטע אָרעמע לײַט.
נאָך אַ טשיקאַוועס: דער קאָנצערט אין ביידזשין האָט זיך געשלאָסן מיטן קאָלעקטיוון זינגען „לאָמיר אַלע אין איינעם‟. דערנאָך האָט איינער אַ קהילה־מיטגליד אָנגעהויבן זינגען דניאל קאַנס ווערסיע פֿונעם ליד „אוי, איר נאַרישע ציוניסטן‟, וואָס שטאַמט אויך פֿון בערעגאָווסקיס אַרכיוו. „נו, האָב איך אַוודאי מיטגעזונגען‟, האָט פּסוי קאָראָלענקאָ געזאָגט.
ער האָט צוגעגעבן, אַז זייערע גאַסטראָלן האָבן אַרויסגערופֿן אַ גרויסן אינטערעס בײַ דער כינעזישער מעדיאַ. אי יאַנג מענגס סטודענטן נאָכן ביידזשינער קאָנצערט, אי די צײַטונג „מינג פּאַאָ‟ האָבן אים געפֿרעגט: וואָס האָט אים מאָטיווירט זיך אויסצולערנען ייִדיש? האָט קאָראָלענקאָ געענטפֿערט, אַז אַ סך סאָוועטישע קינדער־לידער, מיט וועלכע ער איז אויפֿגעוואַקסן ווי אַ קינד, זענען טיף פֿאַרבונדן מיט דער ייִדישער פֿאָלקסמוזיק. ווען אין בערעגאָווסקיס אַרכיוו זענען נישט געווען קיין נאָטן, האָט די סאָוועטישע פּאָפּולערע קולטור באַגײַסטערט אים צו שאַפֿן נײַע ייִדישלעכע מעלאָדיעס.
דאָס איז טאַקע גאָר אַ ברייטע טעמע פֿאַר פֿאָרשונגען און חידושים; למשל, דער באַקאַנטער ייִדישער קאָמפּאָזיטאָר משה ווײַנבערג האָט געשאַפֿן די מוזיק פֿאַר צענדליקער סאָוועטישע קינדער־פֿילמען און אַנימאַציעס. בײַ אַ ריי אַנדערע סאָוועטישע קינדער־קאָמפּאָזיטאָרן איז דאָס מאַמע־לשון אויך געווען ייִדיש.
The post Yiddish Glory resounds in China and Korea appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Yad Vashem chooses Germany for first overseas education centers
(JTA) — BERLIN – For the first time in its 73-year history, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum and archive, is establishing educational centers outside the Jewish state.
The institution announced in a statement Thursday that the first centers will be in Germany — one in Munich, and a subsidiary in Leipzig.
The Conference of European Rabbis, which moved to Munich from London in 2023, said it looked forward to working together with the new center.
And Rabbi Zsolt Balla, State Rabbi of Saxony, said the decision to open an extension in Leipzig “sends a strong signal in support of a culture of remembrance, education and the protection of Jewish life.”
The sites will be shaped in consultation with partner organizations in Germany, Yad Vashem added. A brainstorming meeting is tentatively planned for early next year, with programming expected to begin in three years.
“Working together with our German partners, this center will help ensure that the truth of the Holocaust is preserved and passed on to future generations,” said Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan.
Wenzel Michalski, chair of the Berlin-based Friends of Yad Vashem, participated in talks leading to the decision.
“We’re coming to an era where the witnesses are dying,” Michalski said. His late father, Franz, spoke with many school groups in Germany about his experiences during the Holocaust.
German Education Minister Karen Prien, who has Jewish roots, said that one of the goals of the centers is to help “combat antisemitism across Germany and Europe.” She added that many young people in the country “still know too little about the Shoah.”
“In a world without Holocaust survivors, one needs new ways to tell the story,” said Michalski. “It is the chief obligation and task of Yad Vashem” to ensure that they do.
The post Yad Vashem chooses Germany for first overseas education centers appeared first on The Forward.