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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.
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VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
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Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
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‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
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