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A German museum aimed to honor Jewish wit. The result is downright demeaning.
Kibbizter, kvetcher, nudnick, nebbish, nudzh, meshugener, alter kocker, pisher, plosher, platke-macher
These ten Yiddish/Yinglish insults are mounted on the cornice of the Haus der Kunst art museum in Munich, Germany. The installation, entitled The Joys of Yiddish (2021), is the final iteration of a work by the late conceptual artist Mel Bochner (1940–2025).
According to the Haus der Kunst’s website, this word chain is supposed to “convey a particular humor that survived the National Socialist regime, despite all odds.” The color scheme — yellow-on-black — is meant to evoke the stigmatizing patches of the same colors forced upon Jews under Nazi rule.
The installation was named for the 1968 book The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten — a collection of Yiddish words and phrases that made its way into English.
Unfortunately, the installation is an ill-conceived attempt to honor the Jewish humor of millions of Yiddish speakers murdered by the Nazis. It cheapens and reduces a nearly millennium-old language and culture to kitsch. Is this tired, old rehashing of Yiddish insults not itself a badge of stigmatization — a “yellow patch” if you will?
When Bochner’s The Joys of Yiddish debuted at the Spertus Institute in Chicago in 2006, it was meant as a statement on the Jewish immigrant experience in America. It dealt with linguistic barriers, between immigrants and their new country, and between immigrant parents and their children. (Bochner was raised by Yiddish-speaking parents but never learned the language himself.)
At the Haus der Kunst, however, the piece takes on a very different meaning. Originally called the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) when it opened in 1937, it was intended by its Nazi builders as a temple to “Aryan” art. Mounting Yiddish insults on that building is, at first glance, a defiant and transgressive act.
Yet the cutesy terms Bochner chose (a subset from the Chicago original) are wholly insufficient to the task. Instead of switching out a word here and there, he could have transgressed against the art-school reject Hitler (may his name be obliterated) on the façade of his would-be temple to Aryan art, with some stronger epithets. Perhaps yimakh-shmoynik, paskudnyak, or the well-known mamzer?
Of course, no words in any language can convey the evil of what Hitler’s Nazis did to the Jewish people, and to Jewish diasporic languages. But that’s no excuse for not trying. Was Bochner’s intent to jab the viewer, or merely to tickle?
Prof. Sunny S. Yudkoff, in a 2022 journal article, notes that Bochner’s oeuvre often deals with the failure of words to sufficiently convey a particular meaning, with language’s perceived transparency and its actual instability. Yet despite the “performative failures” (as Prof. Yudkoff puts it) of Bochner’s other works, the failures of The Joys of Yiddish seem to be a bug rather than a feature.
To convey the Yiddish humor that survived the Nazis, we might look to the Jews of Lublin. During the German occupation, an SS officer commanded a group of Jewish men, at gunpoint, to entertain him. According to testimony recorded by Moshe Prager, they sang a well-known Yiddish song, replacing the refrain lomir zikh iberbetn (let’s make up) for mir veln zey iberlebn (we will outlive them). Despite the similarity of Yiddish to German, the SS officer apparently didn’t understand the phrase, giving those Jews a good laugh at their oppressors’ expense.
This time around, Bochner unwittingly perpetuates a long American Jewish tradition of treating Yiddish as a punchline. To do so in Munich is to internationalize that tradition in a shamefully conspicuous way.
According to a 2021 conversation between the artist and curator Andrea Lissoni, Bochner’s parents “were not really interested in us kids learning Yiddish, because […] it was a secret language.” This dynamic is all too familiar. But instead of digging in and working with Yiddish on its own terms, the artist engaged with it only superficially, in what Prof. Jeffrey Shandler has termed the “post-vernacular” mode. Bochner simply picked some words out of Rosten’s book, several of which are Yinglish Americanisms, that he thought most American Jews of his generation would have heard and known.
To do so in Chicago or New York as a comment on cultural assimilation is a sad reflection on American Jews’ cultural impoverishment. To recycle the piece into a provocation toward German Holocaust memory, or a tribute to the humor of murdered European Jewry, is lazy and demeaning.
In fairness, the late Mr. Bochner isn’t here to defend his honor. Then again, neither are the millions of Yiddish-speakers murdered by the Nazis.
So what could the curators of the Haus der Kunst do instead to honor them? Maybe host an exhibition of works by Yiddish-speaking artists who survived or perished in the Holocaust. Or commission a new work inspired by Yiddish anti-Nazi jokes and folksongs. It shouldn’t be hard to improve on what’s there now.
The post A German museum aimed to honor Jewish wit. The result is downright demeaning. appeared first on The Forward.
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Ilhan Omar Poses for Photo With Swedish MP Wearing Garment Depicting Erasure of Israel
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) speaks at a press conference with activists calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in front of the Capitol in Washington, DC, Dec. 14, 2023. Photo: Annabelle Gordon / CNP/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MI) has come under fire after being spotted posing for a photo with Malcolm Jallow, a virulently anti-Israel member of the Swedish parliament.
The picture, which was posted on Jallow’s Instagram page on Sunday, showed the controversial Swedish politician posing alongside Omar and anti-Israel political pundit Medhi Hasan. Jallow draped a stole around his shoulders depicting the complete erasure of the state of Israel and its replacement by a Palestinian state.
“Spending these days with so many inspiring leaders from around the world — including two of the most inspiring and courageous voices of our time, Congresswoman @ilhanmn Omar and international journalist @mehdirhasan — has been like reigniting an inner flame. I feel recharged with energy, hope, and determination,” Jallow wrote on Instagram.
Jallow has an extensive history of attacking Israel and promoting antisemitic conspiracy tropes. For example, he has “liked” a comment on social media that accused Jewish organizations of participating in freemasonry, fueling a false conspiracy theory that claims a secret coalition of Jews and Freemasons is working to control the world.
The Gambian-born lawmaker also lambasted Sweden for its supposed complicitly in a “genocide” in Gaza and stated in another social media post that Europe “betrayed” the Palestinian enclave by “financing the bombs” and “legitimizing the apartheid & the occupation.” He further appeared to threaten Swedish civilians who support Israel, writing, “To every ordinary citizen who waved the flag of the oppressor & laughed while Gaza burned, We will not forget you. We know your names. We save your statements. We screenshot your posts.”
He also seemed to threaten legal action against Swedish citizens who publicly demonstrate support for Israel’s defensive military operations against Hanas.
“And one day, whether in courtrooms of law or the court of history, In this life or the hereafter, you will be held to account,” Jallow posted. “That is not a threat. That is a promise to the people of Gaza.”
“Why is the Swedish government complicit in Israel’s acts of genocide against the Palestinian people?” he added on Instagram.
Jallow has also criticized Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson for taking certain measures to combat antisemitism, arguing that such actions endanger the country’s Muslim population.
“The Swedish Prime Minister’s statement that antisemitism holds a ‘special status’ and is worse than anti-Muslim propaganda is deeply problematic and dangerous. It not only diminishes the severity of hatred against Muslims but also normalizes the growing Islamophobia in Sweden,” Jallow wrote in an official statement last year.
“Ranking hate and prioritizing one group’s suffering over another is not only ignorant and offensive — it undermines our collective struggle against all forms of intolerance and discrimination,” he continued.
Sweden has reported a notable increase in antisemitic incidents since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, prompting alarm within both the Jewish community and governmental bodies.
According to a report released by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRA) last year, hate crimes motivated by antisemitism in the country surged in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocities, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. The BRA found that police registered 110 complaints between the Hamas invasion and Dec. 31 in 2023, compared to just 24 incidents the prior year.
While Jews constitute a small fraction of Sweden’s population, they have represented a disproportionately high share of religious-hate-crime victims. In 2020, for example, antisemitic incidents made up about 27 percent of all religion-based hate crimes documented by police despite Jews making up only 0.1 percent of the population, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.
Omar for years has been one of the most vocal critics of Israel in the US Congress, calling on Washington to impose an arms embargo on the Jewish state.
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Groundbreaking analysis of Hitler’s DNA shows no Jewish ancestry — but finds a genetic disorder
Adolf Hitler had a sexual disorder that made it more likely for him to have a micro-penis, according to the first-ever analysis of his DNA. He also did not have the Jewish ancestors that some have claimed he had.
The analysis is being revealed in detail in “Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator,” a new documentary premiering Saturday night in the United Kingdom. The documentary looks at the researchers who decided to tackle the genetic makeup of one of history’s greatest villains, as well as what they learned — and cannot learn — from his DNA.
They found that he had Kallman syndrome, a genetic disorder characterized by incomplete puberty, according to an exclusive report published Wednesday in the Times of London. They also found that he had genes making him more likely to have autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, though they cautioned that the DNA alone is not sufficient to deliver a diagnosis.
Among those quoted in the documentary is the prominent British Jewish psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (father of actor Sacha). “Behavior is never 100% genetic,” he said in the Times report. “Associating Hitler’s extreme cruelty with people with these diagnoses risks stigmatizing them, especially when the vast majority of people with these diagnoses are neither violent nor cruel, and many are the opposite.”
The analysis, conducted by a team led by a prominent British geneticist, is more definitive on the subject of Hitler’s possible Jewish ancestry. Rumors about such a background were prevalent during Hitler’s rise: In one notable example, a newspaper aligned with the Austrian chancellor who the following year would be assassinated by Nazis in 1933 challenged German authorities to disprove his Jewish ties.
And the rumors have endured: In 2022, Russia’s foreign minister repeated the claim that Hitler had Jewish ancestry to rebuff criticism that Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine, that it needed to be “denazified,” was undermined by the fact that Ukraine’s president is Jewish.
But while previous analyses of the DNA of Hitler’s relatives suggested that he may have had some genetic links to groups that he sought to destroy, including Jews, the new analysis, on Hitler’s own DNA, shows only Austrian German ancestry.
The analysis is based on a swatch of fabric stained with blood that a U.S. soldier cut from the couch upon which Hitler shot himself. The researchers were able to confirm without a doubt that the blood came from Hitler by comparing the DNA found in it to DNA previously confirmed to have come from one of his relatives.
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The post Groundbreaking analysis of Hitler’s DNA shows no Jewish ancestry — but finds a genetic disorder appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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German Authorities Arrest Another Suspected Hamas Operative Amid Growing Terror Threat to Jews in Europe
Supporters of Hamas gather in Berlin. Photo: Reuters/M. Golejewski
As concern mounts over a potential surge in Hamas-linked attacks in Europe, German authorities have arrested another suspected member of the Palestinian terrorist group accused of acquiring firearms and ammunition to target Jewish communities.
On Tuesday, local police arrested Lebanese-born Borhan El-K, a suspected Hamas operative, after he crossed into Germany from the Czech Republic — part of an ongoing probe into the Islamist group’s network and operations across the continent.
The German federal prosecutor’s office confirmed the suspect obtained an automatic rifle, eight Glock pistols, and more than 600 rounds of ammunition in the country before handing the weapons to Wael FM, another suspected member of the terrorist group, in Berlin.
Local law enforcement arrested Lebanese-born Wael FM last month, along with two other German citizens, Adeb Al G and Ahmad I.
Prosecutors believe the three men acted as foreign operatives for Hamas and procured firearms and ammunition intended for attacks on Israeli and Jewish institutions in Germany.
Hamas, long supported by the Iranian regime as well as Qatar and Turkey, is designated as a terrorist organization by the European Union and several other Western countries, including the United States.
Earlier this month, Mohammed A, another alleged member of the Palestinian terrorist group, was arrested in London at the request of German police. He is accused of taking five handguns and ammunition from Abed Al G before moving them to Vienna for storage.
Last week, Vienna authorities uncovered a hidden arsenal linked to Hamas, reportedly intended for “potential terrorist attacks in Europe” targeting Jewish communities.
The Austrian government confirmed that the Directorate for State Security and Intelligence Service (DSN) has been conducting an internationally coordinated investigation into a global terrorist network with ties to the Islamist group.
During the investigation, Austrian authorities uncovered evidence suggesting that this group had brought weapons into the country for potential terrorist attacks in Europe.
For its part, Hamas issued a statement denying any connection to the criminal network, calling the allegations of its involvement “baseless.”
However, experts have warned that Hamas has expanded its terrorist operations beyond the Middle East, exploiting a well-established network of weapons caches, criminal alliances, and covert infrastructure quietly built across Europe over the years.
Last month, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center released a study detailing how Hamas leaders in Lebanon have been directing operatives to establish “foreign operator” cells across Europe, collaborating with organized crime networks to acquire weapons and target Jewish communities abroad.
In February, four Hamas members suspected of plotting attacks on Jewish institutions in Europe went on trial in Berlin, in what prosecutors described as the first court case against terrorists of the Islamist group in Germany.