In 1935, the experimental theater group Yung Teatr invited audiences in Warsaw to a new play that was virtually all in Yiddish but wasn’t about Europe or Jews. It was a modified retelling of the plight of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Tennessee in 1931. While the case was being retried in the United States for the second time, the three-act play Mississippi exposed Polish Jews to the injustice.

Penned by Yiddish writer Leib Malach, whose work as a journalist took him around the world including to Harlem, and directed by Michał Weichert, a trained lawyer with a love for avant-garde theater, Mississippi premiered in Warsaw in March 1935 at a time Yiddish culture in Poland was flourishing. Several troupes were staging translated works about American race relations, such as a Vilna Troupe production of Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, but scholars believe Mississippi was the first original Yiddish or Polish play on this issue to be performed in Poland.

Although it didn’t have the financial resources or popularity of traditional Yiddish productions, Mississippi had more than 100 performances in Warsaw and several in other Polish cities, where it was widely praised, as Jewish audiences identified with the mistreatment of the Scottsboro Boys. There is evidence of at least one production outside of Poland, all the way in Buenos Aires.

“Yiddish theater was much more given to a kind of transnational existence, probably more than any theater,” Alyssa Quint, a curator at YIVO and a co-editor of their translated Yiddish Voices series, said. “Because of all the communities, all the Jewish settlements that had been settled by that time were still really speaking Yiddish.”

Quint worked with scholars Ellen Perecman and Amelia Glaser to translate Mississippi into English for the first time and it has been published as a book with an introduction and notes from Quint.

Malach, who had been wanting to write a political play inspired by his time in America, made a few deviations from the real Scottsboro incident. In Mississippi, there are only seven Black defendants. Malach also invented characters to represent how the Black community and the boys’ family would react to the trial, although a mother of one of the accused is closely modeled after Ada Wright, the real-life mother of two of the Scottsboro boys who went on a European speaking tour about the case. White actors in blackface played the parts of the Black characters.

Acts Two and Three involve simultaneous actions on multiple small stages throughout the performance space, making Mississippi one the earliest examples of “immersive” or “environmental” theater.

“It’s experimental, but it was actually something that people flocked to as well,” Quint said. “That’s a very hard combination to strike even today, even under the best of circumstances.”

Because Poland’s censors had previously shuttered Weichert’s shows for being “politically provocative,” Yung Teatr left “Scottsboro” out of the title. Malach wrote that they chose Mississippi since it “is the name of a river along which reside communities of Black people, and it is also a state where ‘Scottsboro’ is a regular occurrence.”

Although few members of Yung Teatr had ever met a Black American, the play reads as a nuanced — if at times heavy-handed — investigation of the precarious position of Black people in American society.

The play also focuses a lot on class conflict, as Weichert thought it would make the story more accessible to Jewish audiences. While Weichert and Malach recognized the parallels between anti-Black discrimination in America and the antisemitism they experienced in Poland, Weichert wasn’t sure broader Jewish audiences would automatically sympathize with the Black characters. The communist-aligned Yung Teatr leaders also may have been hoping to inspire their Jewish audience to embrace class solidarity and at times, class seems to usurp race as the primary issue in the play.

One character, Shirley Silverstone, a Jewish labor activist who represents the real-life activists from the International Labor Defense that got involved in Scottsboro, argues that the case is really about “revealing the bloody intention of the ruling class to strangle us all.”

Mississippi offers a contrasting view in the form of Mickey, a Black Pullman train worker, who accosts Shirley for using the boys’ trial “for the benefit of your party” and playing “with the lives of the accused Negroes.”

“I think that you don’t really know where you necessarily stand or where the play stands,” Quint said.

The translation took several years. In 2020, as protests spread across the country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Quint saw a connection between her work and the present, which she said can be a rare experience in the Yiddish world.

“Often you’re in your little corner and you have to have a more indirect relationship with the spirit of your time, or none at all even,” Quint said. “But it seemed like there was something very relevant about this play when I began translating it.”

“People were getting more and more engaged with deeper questions about the Black experience here in America.”

When it came to translating the Yiddish word for the n-word, Perecman, Glaser, and Quint had to decide whether or not to include the original language.

“I felt strongly that since this was placed in the 30’s in the South, we needed to use the word,” Perecman said about the ultimate decision to have the slur in the play.

Both the transcultural and serious nature of Mississippi make it a standout piece of Yiddish theater history. Perecman said that many people have a narrow idea of what makes Yiddish theater, something she’s experienced firsthand running the New Worlds Theatre Project, which translates and stages early 20th century Yiddish plays.

“People would come and they’d say, ‘Oh my God, I thought Yiddish theater was all about singing and dancing,’” Perecman said.

There is music in Mississippi, but it’s jazz and gospel inspired numbers instead of Jewish folk tunes. The translators don’t know how much interaction the composer, Henkh (Henoch) Kon had with Black American music, but the lyrical structures, including a call-and-response gospel, show an intent to mimic what he imagined were traditional forms. YIVO plans to have music experts at a book launch event on Nov. 30 to analyze the lyrics and possibly put them to music.

In the post-Holocaust world, the play’s message about discrimination carries a sense of foreboding. Several of the actors and crew were murdered in the Holocaust. Weichert survived and made aliyah to Israel in 1958, where he died in 1967. Malach died in Paris in 1936 during an operation.

The Nazi invasion forced Yung Teatr to close in 1939 after only ten years of operating, but the troupe left a mark on Yiddish theater with their ambitious, unorthodox projects.

“There was just very, very little support for what they did,” Quint said. “They were just very devoted to what they did, and that’s what kept them going.”

The post A Yiddish theater troupe condemned U.S. racism — then the Nazis came appeared first on The Forward.

The mayor ventured to a Brooklyn synagogue, hoping to assure an overflowing crowd of Jewish New Yorkers who blamed him for fostering an environment of antisemitism that he understood their fears and their place in a city they considered increasingly threatening to their safety.

Not Zohran Mamdani, who stands accused by segments of the Jewish world of turning New York City into a hunting ground for Jews with his invective against Israel. Not David Dinkins, who was mayor in 1993 when violence descended on the Jews of Crown Heights for days and a Jewish man was murdered.

It was 1968, and Mayor John Lindsay’s attempt at making peace was an utter disaster: He had to flee East Midwood Jewish Center into his limo, with a jeering mob behind him. The cause of the furor was Lindsay’s cooperation with an experiment in community control of public schools in a district called Ocean Hill–Brownsville. The neighborhood, once a hub of immigrant Jewish life, was now mostly Black, mostly poor, and eager to exercise self-determination and power as the civil rights movement crested.

As historian Richard Kahlenberg recounted to the Forward, the new district school superintendent sought to have an all-Black teacher workforce. Teachers were largely Jewish — and expendable. The district transferred 19 of them, prompting strikes by the teacher’s union that roiled the city.

The union had another weapon in its arsenal: the charge that the firings were acts of antisemitism.

For his 1973 movie Sleeper, Woody Allen premised the futuristic sci-fi comedy on a joke few today would understand: that the world as we had known it ended when “a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”

Back then, as president of the United Federation of Teachers, Shanker was one of the most newsmaking Jews in America. And he had a compelling story to sell to his members, the media and elected officials. He seized on a flamingly antisemitic anonymous letter placed in teachers’ mailboxes at a middle school and had it reprinted by the hundreds of thousands to show the world.

It read, in part: “It is Impossible For The Middle East Murderers of Colored People to Possibly Bring To This Important Task The Insight, The Concern, The Exposing Of The Truth That is a Must If The Years Of Brainwashing And Self-Hatred That Has Been Taught To Our Black Children By Those Bloodsucking Exploiters and Murderers Is To Be Over Come.”

Jewish alarm in the face of such provocation — not to mention dismissals without cause, something out of a Soviet Union purge — was certainly warranted. Conflicts between the community-control school board and teachers escalated inside school buildings, prompting Jewish teachers to file complaints that prompted grand jury indictments and to seek police protection.

District leaders’ attempt to steamroll the union, and escalating clashes with the largely white workforce, created an intolerant and intolerable climate. All the same, Shanker’s conversion of the complex facts of the situation into a hardened story of war on the Jews only added to the turmoil. Lindsay’s crucial mistake was to deliver his support for a bold experiment in establishing Black and Puerto Rican power without heed to the force of nature that was organized labor in its heyday — which was by extension organized Jewish power. By the time he faced the furious mob during the second of three strikes, it was too late.

When thinking about Mamdani and the frenzy of the moment over the fate of New York Jews under his mayoralty, my mind sometimes flashes to the Daily News photo capturing Lindsay’s truly awful moment — dashing out of a synagogue turned into a battleground, after Rabbi Harry Halpern tried in vain to keep decorum in the sanctuary.

East Midwood today is my congregation and community, a vantage point from which to look at the present landscape through the lens of history and see two kinds of power at play.

There is the kind of war that Shanker fought: where Jews, faced with a competing claim for power, resort to charges of antisemitism as a shortcut to establishing moral authority and political leverage. Ultimately, what Shanker was doing was protecting the jobs of union members and the civil service apparatus that organized their world. That was his job! But saying that would have been a much harder sell than “antisemitism” against the enormous public sympathies for Black power as a righteous cause.

Benjamin Netanhayu, in a newly released campaign video responding to Mamdani’s declaration that he is a war criminal, is playing the same game Shanker did. The video, based on a Fox News interview with the Israeli prime minister, is a smear job, seizing on the recent stabbing of a Jewish man on the Upper West Side to accuse Mamdani and his wife of being personally responsible for making New York City unsafe for Jews. But they serve to elevate Netanyhu’s standing as a defender of Israel.

I found Mamdani’s video indictment of Netanyahu alarming, too: prosecutorial, selective in the facts presented, and utterly unconstructive in providing leadership, even knowing his goal of eliminating Israel as a Jewish state. It only turns up the heat fueling what has become a panic in American politics over U.S. aid, doubling down on Israel as a pariah nation.

But he is, ultimately, a mayor — someone who admitted he has no power to follow through on his vow to arrest Netanyahu but very much does control how he runs his city. As much as anything, the Upper West Side stabbing reflects years of leaders’ failures to fix broken mental health services, on top of which his nothingburger move to create a new Department of Community Safety to respond to mental health crises is just another layer of sedimentary crud.

Meanwhile, the fear that Netanyahu and others are exploiting for their own political purposes clouds a clear view of the second kind of power, which Mamdani’s administration is actually exercising on the ground. We see it in how his police department has responded to conflict involving Jewish communities: not pitting one group against another, the world against Jews, but carefully balancing rights, safety and interests in potentially explosive situations. Lindsay could have learned something here.

Infinite credit goes to Mamdani’s appointee as NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a Zionist and a capable leader — and to Mamdani for letting her do her job.

I was witness to how Mamdani and Tisch’s NYPD responded to the extremely difficult challenge of synagogue protests, which erupted this spring outside land sales events that included properties on the occupied West Bank. And once again, the story came to East Midwood Jewish Center’s doorstep, thanks to a sale happening at Young Israel across the street.

The protests culminated in some upsetting moments. Marchers parading through a Jewish neighborhood’s streets carrying Palestinian flags and “Free Gaza” banners sent an unmistakable message of disdain and exclusion. And yes, some scary clashes you might have seen on social media, such as a protester shining a strobe light into a Jewish teen’s eyes, actually happened.

But what the world did not see was the discipline the NYPD brought to keeping the demonstrators at a distance from the synagogue — and to keeping taunts and chants from escalating into anything worse.

The rival camps and their flags met face to face in the middle of a major intersection in what could have been a Brooklyn rumble, but police did their best to steer the sides into separate zones. Some of the most aggressive insults came from Jewish teens blindsided by a hostile presence on their turf. One protester-counterprotester pair got locked into an extended debate about their opposing views on the fate of Israel and Palestinians. I gave them my card and said, only half jokingly, that they should consider doing a podcast.

None of this is to say that Mamdani’s words on the global stage are making Jews any safer. His fixation on uniquely attacking Netanyahu, when a mayor’s job description requires governing all New Yorkers, gives permission to those determined to antagonize Jewish supporters of Israel — as does his encouragement to protest the prime minister when he visits for the UN General Assembly in September, where clashes could break the containment that was possible in sleepy Brooklyn.

But a look back at John Lindsay’s catastrophic scramble to make peace is a reminder that it’s the decisions about how to deploy power within a mayor’s domain that ultimately determine Jewish safety.

The post A mayor exposed New York City Jews to chaos. It wasn’t Mamdani. appeared first on The Forward.

 די ייִדישע שרײַבערין, דראַמאַטורגין, פֿאָרווערטס־קאָלומניסטקע און באַליבטע לעקטאָרין מרים שמולעוויטש־האָפֿמאַן איז מיטוואָך אַוועק אין דער אייביקייט אין קאָראַל ספּרינגס, פֿלאָרידע. זי איז געווען 90 יאָר אַלט.

אַלע וואָס האָבן מרימען געקענט האָבן געוווּסט וואָס פֿאַר אַ געניטע דערציילערין זי איז געווען. סײַ אינעם דאָקומענטאַר־פֿילם, וואָס דער פֿאָרווערטס האָט אַרויסגעלאָזט אין 2017, סײַ אינעם בוך זכרונות אויף ענגליש וואָס זי האָט פּובליקירט אינעם זעלבן יאָר, דערציילט זי אויף אַ פֿאַרכאַפּנדיקן אופֿן וועגן איר דראַמאַטישן לעבן פֿון סיביר קיין ניו־יאָרק.

מרים איז געווען אַ פֿרוי מיט אַ סך טאַלאַנטן. זי האָט יאָרן לאַנג געפֿירט אַ לעבעדיקן רובריק אינעם פֿאָרווערטס, וווּ זי האָט קאָמענטירט מיט אַ בײַסיקן הומאָר אויף דער ייִדישער געזעלשאַפֿט, באַניצנדיק זיך אָפֿט מיט אויסדרוקן פֿון איר היימישן פּויליש־ייִדיש. אַ טייל פֿון אירע עסייען האָבן אָבער געהאַט אַ מער ערנסטן, ווייכערן טאָן, בפֿרט ווען זי האָט איבערגעגעבן אירע זכרונות ווי אַ יונגע אימיגראַנטקע אין אַמעריקע. אין דעם רירנדיקן אַרטיקל למשל דערציילט זי ווי זי האָט מיידלווײַז פּלוצלינג אָפּגעשניטן אירע לאָקן כּדי זיך צו אַמעריקאַניזירן — און ווי אַזוי איר מאַמע האָט רעאַגירט אויף דער טאָכטערס „רעבעלירונג“.

פֿון 1999 ביז 1988 האָט זי געפֿירט אַ פּאָפּולערע ייִדישע ראַדיאָ־פּראָגראַם אויף דער פֿאָרווערטס־סטאַנציע WEVD.

מרים האָט אויך געשריבן אַ צאָל פּיעסעס פֿאַרן ייִדישן טעאַטער. אין איינעם מיט רינע באָראָו האָט זי געשאַפֿן דעם מיוזיקל „לידער פֿון גן־עדן“, וואָס האָט אין 1989 געשפּילט אין ניו־יאָרק, סײַ אינעם אָנגעזעענעם „פּאָבליק־טעאַטער“ סײַ אינעם שעקספּיר־פֿעסטיװאַל. אירע פּיעסעס האָט מען אויך אױפֿגעפֿירט אין מאָנטרעאָל, קאַנאַדע און איבער אײראָפּע.

במשך פֿון 23 יאָר איז זי געווען אַ באַליבטע ייִדיש־לערערין אין קאָלומביע־אוניווערסיטעט, און עטלעכע זומערן אויך אין אָקספֿאָרדער אוניװערסיטעט און אין װילנער אוניװערסיטעט. אין 2011 האָט זי אַרויסגעגעבן אַ ייִדיש לערנבוך, „אַ שליסל צו ייִדיש“, וואָס האָט אַרײַנגענומען נישט בלויז שפּראַך־לעקציעס, נאָר אויך געשיכטע, מנהגים, לידער און יום־טובֿ־מאַטעריאַלן.

אויף מיר פּערזענלעך האָט מער פֿון אַלץ אימפּאָנירט מרימס קעמפֿערישע איבערגעגעבנקייט אויפֿצוהאַלטן ייִדיש ווי אַ לעבעדיקע שפּראַך בײַם ייִנגערן דור. אין די 1960ער יאָרן האָט זי, אין איינעם מיט דרײַ אַנדערע פֿרויען — געלע שווייד־פֿישמאַן, מלכּה גאָטליב און צירל וואַלעצקי, אַרויסגעגעבן אַ סעריע קינדערביכלעך אויף ייִדיש דורך אַ פֿאַרלאַג וואָס זיי האָבן אַליין געשאַפֿן, „אויפֿגאַנג“.

ווי מרים און געלע האָבן מיר מיט יאָרן שפּעטער דערציילט, איז די שטימונג אין דער ייִדיש־וועלט דעמאָלט געווען אַזאַ פּעסימיסטישע, און דער צוגאַנג צו פֿרויען אַזאַ נישט־בכּבֿודיקער, אַז קיינער פֿון די ייִדישע אָרגאַניזאַציעס — אַרײַנגערעכנט דעם אַרבעטער רינג און דעם ייִדישן קולטור קאָנגרעס — האָט די ביכלעך נישט געוואָלט אַרויסגעבן.

מרים און אירע מיטאַרבעטער האָבן זיך אָבער נישט אונטערגעגעבן. אַ דוגמא דערפֿון איז דאָס פּרעכטיקע מוזיקאַלישע פּורים־שפּיל, „פּורים איז אַ שפּיל אַזאַ“, אַרויסגעלאָזט אין 1968. אויף דער הילע שטייט אַז דער מחבר איז „גבֿריאל טאָליעס“. דאָס איז אָבער געווען אַ פּסעוודאָנים; מרים איז געווען די אמתע מחברטע. „מיר האָבן פֿאַרשטאַנען, אַז קיינער וועט דאָס ביכל נישט אויפֿנעמען ערנסט, אויב מע דערוויסט זיך, אַז דאָס האָבן פֿיר פֿרויען אַרויסגעגעבן,“ האָט מרים מיר געזאָגט. „האָב איך גענומען מײַן מאַמעס נאָמען, טאָליע, און געמאַכט דערפֿון: גבֿריאל טאָליעס.“

מרים שמולעוויטש איז געבוירן געוואָרן אין טאָבאָלסק, סיביר אין 1936. איר משפּחה איז אָנגעקומען קײן אַמעריקע אין 1950, וווּ זי האָט זיך געלערנט אין ייִדישן לערער־סעמינאַר ביז 1957; אין מיאַמי־אוניװערסיטעט ביז 1981, און פֿאַרענדיקט אירע גראַדויִר־שטודיעס אין קאָלאָמביע־אוניװערסיטעט אין 1983.

אין די 1970ער יאָרן האָט זי מיט איר מאַן מענדל און קינדער אַבֿרהם און בנימין פֿאַרבראַכט עטלעכע יאָר אין ישׂראל, וווּ זי האָט אין איינעם מיטן קאָמיקער שמעון דזשיגאַן אָנגעפֿירט מיט דער ערשטער ייִדישער טעלעװיזיע־פּראָגראַם אין דער ייִדישער מדינה.

בײַ מרימען איז דאָס לערנען ייִדן די ייִדישע שפּראַך, קולטור און געשיכטע, און נאָך מער — אָפּשטעלן די געוואַלדיקע אַסימילאַציע — געווען אַ הויפּטציל אין לעבן. אין 2015 האָט זי אין איינעם מיט איר עלטערן זון — דעם אָנגעזעענעם ייִדישן אַקטיאָר, רעזשיסאָר און פּראָדוצענט אַבֿי האָפֿמאַן — פֿאַרלייגט די אָרגאַניזאַציע „ייִדישקייט איניציאַטיוו, ווי אַן אופֿן צוריקברענגען ייִדן צו זייערע ייִדישע וואָרצלען דורך לעקציעס און פֿאָרשטעלונגען וואָס שילדערן די ייִדישע ווערטן און קולטור.

מרים האָט פֿאַראָבֿלט אירע זין אַבֿי און בנימין, פֿיר אייניקלעך און אַן אור־אייניקל.

אַנשטאָט בלומען אָדער מתּנות, בעט די משפּחה מע זאָל געבן אַ בײַשטײַער דער „ייִדישקייט איניציאַטיוו“ אויף דעם אַדרעס, YILoveJewish.org/donate.

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