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On stage and in the classroom, Mikhl Yashinsky is stoking the flame of the Yiddish revival
(New York Jewish Week) — In the Yiddish classes Mikhl Yashinsky teaches for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Workers Circle, he begins by asking students to explain why they decided to learn the language.
Often, a student will describe attending a performance of “Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish,” the smash hit from the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene.
This is literally music to the ears of Yashinsky, who not only teaches conversational Yiddish, translates Yiddish literature and writes Yiddish plays and videos, but who also played a beggar and innkeeper in the latest run of “Fiddler” in Yiddish, which closed on Jan. 1.
“Many thousands of people have seen Yiddish ‘Fiddler’ by now and it’s had a real impact on them and how they see the language,” he told the New York Jewish Week. “It makes me happy that one thing feeds into another.”
The 32-year-old Chelsea resident is in some ways the future of Yiddish, at least of the secular, artistic and academic variety that is spoken and studied outside of the haredi Orthodox community, where it is often the first language. While some Yiddishists bristle at the notion that the language of Ashkenazi Eastern Europe is undergoing a “renaissance,” figures like Yashinsky are making sure the language continues to flourish in communities beyond the yeshiva.
”Mikhl has played a very big role in my Yiddish journey,” said Judith Liskin-Gasparro, a retired linguistics professor from the University of Iowa. Liskin-Gasparro had four grandparents who were native Yiddish speakers but who never spoke the language in front of her. She estimates that over the course of her career she’s watched 1,000 people teach a language class. After studying with Yashinsky remotely from Iowa City for five semesters, Liskin-Gasparro said: “I have rarely seen anybody as good as he is.” His YIVO course has been so popular that YIVO had to create a second section.
Liskin-Gasparro now describes herself as obsessed with the language. In November, she made the trek to New York to see Yashinsky perform in “Fiddler.” During her visit she joined about 15 people from Yashinsky’s YIVO class to meet her teacher in person.
Yashinsky, who grew up outside of Detroit, credits his late maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Elkin Weiss, with putting him on the path to becoming a Yiddishist. Weiss and her husband Rube were veterans of Yiddish theater, performing on stage and the radio. His grandmother also performed in English-language radio dramas, and her ability to do accents and characters earned her the nickname “The Woman of 1,000 Voices.” A radio ad in which Weiss imitated the Hungarian Jewish actress Zsa Zsa Gabor convinced customers of an Italian restaurant in the Detroit area that Zsa Zsa herself had done the commercial.
Talent ran in the family, sometimes in unexpected ways: Yashinsky’s uncle, David Weiss, was one-half of Was (Not Was), a major funk-rock band in the 1980s and ’90s. David’s partner, Don Was, is celebrating his 30th year as a record producer for The Rolling Stones.
Yashinsky studied modern European history and literature at Harvard, attended the Vilna Yiddish Language Institute and in 2015-16 worked as a fellow at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. In 2018, Yashinsky performed in the held-over runs of Yiddish “Fiddler “at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, then left New York for a steady gig teaching Yiddish at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He rejoined the musical when it was staged in 2019 at Stage 43, the largest off-Broadway theater in the city.
Joel Grey, the director of Yiddish “Fiddler,” wrote in an email: “Mikhl is one of the most resourceful and delightful actors I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. He has more ideas for a moment than most actors do in a lifetime.”
Jackie Hoffman, the comedian and Broadway veteran who played Yenta the matchmaker in earlier runs of Yiddish “Fiddler,” said Yashinsky “is a truly Yiddish soul. He’s like someone who could’ve crept out of the 19th century. It’s like Yiddish is in his blood.”
Mikhl Yashinsky, center in gray apron, played Mordkhe the Innkeeper in “Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish,” the smash hit from the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. (Jeremy Daniel)
Steven Skybell, who played Tevye in in the latest Yiddish “Fiddler,” attended Yashinsky’s classes for a few semesters, which enabled him to converse with Yashinsky in the mamaloshn (mother tongue) backstage.
Yashinsky’s mother in Michigan, who did not grow up speaking Yiddish, has attended all five semesters via Zoom. Debra Yashinsky, who said she can’t begin to count the number of times she’s seen Yiddish “Fiddler,” used her maiden name in the Zoom interface for the first two semesters.
“Mikhl once asked me, ‘Mom, are you taking the class to learn Yiddish or do you just enjoy seeing me teach?’” she recalled. “I didn’t know the right answer. The truth is I love seeing his punim [face] for an hour and a half and kvelling [being proud] while I watch him teach.”
In addition to teaching and acting, translation has been a big part of Yashinsky’s devotion to the language (and need to earn a living).
He has a deadline looming at the end of January for his translation of the memoirs of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, the Polish-Jewish actress considered the “mother of Yiddish theater.” He’s been working on the project for a few years and could often be found backstage at “Fiddler” translating a couple of sentences at a time between scenes.
Yashinsky has also been translating short stories by the Nobelist Isaac Bashevis Singer for a forthcoming anthology of the author’s early works. He describes them as “little gems” Singer wrote when he was a young writer that have never been translated into English. Yashinsky said he has translated three or four of the short stories so far.
Yashinsky is also a playwright whose Yiddish play, “Vos Flist Durkhn Oder” (“Blessing of the New Moon”), was performed at the Lower East Side Play Festival last summer. One of six plays chosen from more than 100 submissions, it was the only non-English play in the festival. The one-act play, set in a Lower East Side yeshiva in 1912, deals with the tradition of pranks that take place during the month in which Purim falls.
His full-length play “Di Psure Loyt Chaim” (“The Gospel According to Chaim”) will get a public reading this winter at the New Yiddish Rep in Manhattan. The play is based on the true story of Henry Einspruch, a Baltimore Jew who in the 1940s found Jesus and translated the New Testament into Yiddish for the purpose of converting his fellow Jews. Yashinsky said no Yiddish publisher would help Einspruch in his quest.
“I just thought that this was a very curious bit of history,” said the playwright. “It was really insidious in some ways. He was trying to convert Holocaust survivors in some cases. He would preach outside synagogues on Shabbos mornings.”
Yashinsky will be working on a Yiddish musical in 2023, thanks to a LABA Fellowship for Jewish artists. He plans to write the musical in collaboration with Mamaliga, a klezmer band based in Brooklyn and Boston. Yashinsky said he may write something about the underworld of Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
Another bright spot on the horizon: On Jan. 26 he’ll make his Carnegie Hall début, singing in a concert titled “We Are Here: Songs from the Holocaust,” which will feature Broadway stars Harvey Fierstein, Chita Rivera and Shoshana Bean. Yashinsky will perform “Zog nit keynmol” (“Never Say”), the anthem of the Vilna partisans.
And somehow Yashinsky will make time to produce more videos for the Workers Circle #YiddishAlive series on YouTube. Among the 11 videos he’s done so far are a Yiddish rendition of Tom Lehrer’s song “Hanukkah in Santa Monica” and a music video shot in Michigan to celebrate the strawberry harvest. That video featured “Trúskafke-vals” (“Strawberry Waltz”), a Yiddish song he wrote, as well as a strawberry cake baked by his mother.
He also produces humorous Yiddish music videos, including one based on Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ demented, spooky classic, “I Put A Spell On You.” In his version, Yashinsky performs in drag as Bobe Yakhne, a sorceress he played in Folksbiene’s 2017 revival of the classic Yiddish operetta “The Sorceress.”
“This art form continues,” he said of Yiddish theater. “It’s a tradition that hasn’t evaporated and it’s nice to feel that I’m part of the continuity.”
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US-Israel attack on Iran aims to topple regime
The United States and Israel launched a major attack on Iran early Saturday, with U.S. President Donald Trump declaring his intent to overthrow the regime of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khameini.
In a video statement released by Trump, he address the Iranian people directly. “Bombs will be dropping everywhere,” he said. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed Trump, describing Iran as an “existential threat,” and encouraged the Iranian people “to seize their fate” and overthrow the regime.
In the hours since the attack, explosions have been reported across Tehran and multiple military facilities. State news is also reporting an Israeli strike on a girl’s school has killed more than 50 people, with eyewitness footage showing the school partially destroyed and smoldering.
Israel remains on high alert, with residents who have access to shelters bracing for potential attacks.
Elsewhere in the region, Iranian attacks have been reported in Jordan, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar. Footage circulating on social media appears to show successful Iranian strikes near the center of Abu Dhabi in the UAE, as well as a US naval base in Manama, Bahrain.
Conflicting reports are emerging regarding high-profile Iranian leaders, with one unnamed Israeli official telling N12 News, “We’ll fall off our chair if Khamenei makes a statement live. According to the assessment, he is ‘no longer with us,’ but we are waiting for final confirmation.” Separately, three sources have told Reuters that Iranian Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh was killed in a strike. Neither report has been confirmed at the time of writing.
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Israel and US go for regime change in Iran, with leaders few trust
TEL AVIV, Israel — We were woken just after 8 a.m. by a siren, followed within minutes by the notification that there were in fact no incoming missiles. It appeared the government had decided to use the alert system as a kind of national alarm clock, to let the country know that the war had begun. For the second time in nine months, Israel had attacked Iran. This time it was in coordination with the United States.
Within the hour we had already been sent to the shelter by an actual missile alert. By midday, we would make that trip five times. The country, as far as one can tell from the stairwells and the WhatsApp groups, is stoic. Irritated, tired, but stoic. This is absurd, people say, but they lace up their shoes and head downstairs anyway. Or to the reinforced safe rooms that the lucky few have.
The arguments for this round of conflict are not, on the surface, overwhelming. After the 12-day war in June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs had been set back for many years, that the major threat to Israel’s existence had been removed. President Donald Trump, after American B-2 bombers joined on the final day, spoke repeatedly of the nuclear threat being “obliterated” at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan. He bristled at intelligence assessments suggesting otherwise.
There has been little public evidence that Iran rebuilt that threat in the interim. Netanyahu said around midday Saturday in a recorded radio address that Iran’s new capabilities were being placed underground. Trump, meanwhile, demanded that Iran forswear nuclear weapons; but Tehran has long said it does not seek them, even as it enriched uranium to levels with no civilian justification. No one believes them. But they have been saying it.
In the shelter, I had time to contemplate all this with the same cast of neighbors I got to know rather well in June.
The divorced lawyer and her boyfriend. The mathematics divorcee with her enormous dog, which takes up the space of two folding chairs. The sweet elderly couple who sit holding hands, as if the room were a train platform and they might be separated. The religious French family from upstairs preparing to celebrate a son’s 18th birthday; the mother, improbably, in her finest dress at 9 in the morning. Everyone bleary-eyed. Everyone attempting humor. Some trepidation, but not much.
At one point a commotion erupted. Someone had noticed that a shop in the building had installed an air-conditioning unit in such a way that it partially blocked the emergency exit from the underground shelter. The prospect of being herded underground because of missiles while potentially trapped was not exactly welcome. My wife calmly announced she would deal with the management company first thing Sunday morning. I know her. She will.
It is in rooms like that that the big questions feel both distant and unavoidable. Why now? If the programs were truly crippled in June, what has changed? One possible answer lies not in centrifuges but in politics.
Trump had boxed himself in last month when he told Iranian protesters that “help is on its way.” Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, took him at his word and were killed by the regime’s goons. Trump took heat for having encouraged them and then done nothing. He looked ridiculous, and — to paraphrase The Godfather — a man in his position cannot afford to look ridiculous.
In the interim, the U.S. steadily built up an armada in the region. Ships and planes accumulated in a way that was slow, but deliberate and ultimately overwhelming. It began to look like the kind of force that was not likely to go unused.
The more reasonable argument for assuming the risks of war — casualties, disruption in the oil markets, escalation and so on — is regime change. That idea has a grim history. It rarely works as intended. It is unpredictable, destabilizing, morally fraught. The record in the Middle East is not encouraging. The legal right to do it is debatable at best.
But there are exceptions, and the Islamic Republic, in its 47 years, has made a compelling case for being one.
Its internal repression is ferocious. Protesters are shot or imprisoned in numbers that make gradual reform a fantasy. Short of a palace coup, the Iranian people have little chance of dislodging their rulers on their own.
Moreover, Iran has destabilized the region for decades through proxy militias trying to spread jihadism: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Hezbollah helped prop up Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack ignited a war that left tens of thousands dead in Gaza and over a thousand murdered in Israel. Not every evil in the region can be laid at Iran’s door, but a significant share can, and much of it has victimized fellow Muslims.
There is a wide consensus in Israel that the Iranian regime is a menace. Many Israelis believe that if it fell, it would be good for Israel and good for the Iranian people. They harbor a romantic notion that a democratic Iran would become a partner, even an ally, and that ordinary Iranians would thank Israel for helping to bring about that outcome. Whether that is naive is another matter, but the distinction between regime and people is real in the Israeli mind.
And in what was perhaps the only surprise of the day — for the attack itself was widely telegraphed — Trump set regime change as the true aim of the operation in his comments announcing the strikes. In his characteristic rambling, self-congratulatory style, he urged Iranians to take over their government — and catalogued the crimes of the regime, going all the way back to the 1979-80 hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
This from a man whose National Security Strategy, released in December, downplayed democracy promotion, and who has shown little affection for liberal norms at home or abroad. Many assumed he wanted only some agreement he could spin as a win — yet he instead seems intent on transforming Iran.
Might regime change actually work? Without a ground invasion — which is neither contemplated nor remotely plausible — the odds seem low. Authoritarian systems are designed precisely to absorb shocks. Enough of the regime would have to be symbolically and practically shattered — key figures eliminated, command centers wrecked, the aura of invulnerability broken — that mass protests resume at a scale the authorities cannot contain.
The calculation appears to be that sustained external pressure, combined with visible regime weakness, could tip internal dynamics. A military already stretched by external attack might find itself unable, or unwilling, to suppress millions in the streets. What follows would not be a popular revolution in the romantic sense but something closer to a palace coup: factions within the system deciding survival requires abandoning the clerical leadership.
Trump’s rhetoric suggested precisely this. His call for the Revolutionary Guard to stand down, coupled with promises of amnesty, is an attempt to split the regime from within, to persuade those with guns that their future lies in defecting rather than fighting. It could work — because that is how hated the regime actually is.
It would have been better for any such action to have gotten the green light from the United Nations Security Council. But — even beyond Trump’s disrespect for the organization — that body is paralyzed by the veto power of Russia, Iran’s sometimes ally.
Moreover, all of this would be easier to deal with if the leaderships in Israel and the U.S. were trusted at anywhere near a normal level. But we are dealing with Trump and Netanyahu.
Trump, it need hardly even be said, has made dishonesty a kind of performance art. He is the most determined dissembler to ever hold the American presidency, as far as I can tell. It has become something of a joke, in America and across the world. In a moment like this, it is not a joke. So in a crisis that could reshape the region, there is no reliable way to know if his claims are true.
Something even worse can be said of Netanyahu, who is on trial for bribery and trailing badly in the polls ahead of elections that must be held by October and could come sooner. It is axiomatic for many Israelis that he would do anything to cling to power, including starting another war.
So these two men, each viewed by large portions of their publics as self-interested and manipulative, now preside over a conflict that could be ruinous.
And yet there is another astonishing layer. Trump, who has damaged the standing of the U.S., abandoned Ukraine, expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and rattled NATO with talk of seizing Greenland from Denmark, may be on the verge of a historic achievement. If the Iranian regime were to fall with American assistance, it would rank among the most consequential geopolitical events of the past half-century, perhaps second only to the collapse of Soviet communism. Oddly, I am old enough to have witnessed that as well, as a correspondent for the Associated Press.
Back in the shelter, there is a massive improvement relative to June: Wi-Fi has been installed, thanks to my tireless wife. The dog is still panting, the elderly couple still holds hands, the air-conditioning unit still blocks the exit, the French mother is now checking her phone between sirens.
It is possible to feel two contradictory things at once. This might be a reckless, perhaps even insane action launched by unworthy leaders. And it might, just possibly, change everything for the better.
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US, Israel strike Iran: Trump, Netanyahu call for regime change in Tehran as Israelis take shelter
(JTA) — This is a developing story and will be updated.
The United States and Israel jointly launched what U.S. President Donald Trump called “a major military operation” in Iran on Saturday morning, ending weeks of speculation.
Iran immediately retaliated by launching missiles toward Israel and U.S. positions in the Middle East, sending Israelis across the country to bomb shelters for the first time since last June.
Both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated in video addresses that their goal was to topple the Islamic Republic regime that has been in place for nearly 50 years.
“Our joint operation will create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their fate into their own hands,” Netanyahu said.
“To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere,” Trump said. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take this will be probably your only chance for generations.”
Trump cited the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas as one in a series of attacks staged or supported by Iran over decades justifying the campaign, in which he warned U.S. service members could die.
One person was reported injured in a first wave of retaliatory attacks in Israel. Most missiles appeared to have been shot down, with the sounds of explosions resounding in parts of the country. A second wave was reported to be on its way several hours later.
Last year, nearly 30 people in Israel were killed by Iranian missiles during a 12-day war that included a U.S. strike on Iranian targets. Trump said again during his address that the attack had “obliterated the regime’s nuclear program” but said the country “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions” since.
U.S. and Iranian negotiators most recently met on Thursday in Geneva. On Friday, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told embassy staff that they could leave Israel, urging them to do so “TODAY” if they chose to depart, signaling that the massive troop buildup in the Middle East could soon be deployed against Iran.
In Israel, Ben Gurion Airport has closed; hospitals relocated essential operations underground; and synagogues that had been hosting Shabbat services reconvened in parking decks. The country is set to celebrate Purim, a holiday celebrating the defeat of a Persian ruler who had tried to kill the Jews, starting Monday night.
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