Uncategorized
A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Tucked in the far corner of a large, brightly-lit exhibition hall on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, there is a delicate-looking piece of art with a strong political message.
At first glance, it appears to be three circular vases with flowers in them. The ceramic vases sit on shelves attached to the wall, and colorful collages hang above them. On closer inspection, visitors will notice that the flowers are made out of paper and that affixed to each vase is an image of the Palestinian flag printed on foam board.
A nearby label written by the curators of the exhibit, titled “Tikkun: For the Cosmos, the Community, and Ourselves,” explains that the piece was inspired by a conversation the artist, Tosha Stimage of Berkeley, had with a Palestinian man. He told Stimage about the plants that are native to Palestine — “a place which he can no longer access due to the ongoing conflict in the region,” the curators write.
The label also includes a note about the flag: “Some may find its presence at The CJM troubling or confusing, while others may find it appropriate and forthright. Stimage recognizes the potential for these divergent responses and hopes to use them as a means of generating dialogue.”
On a Sunday afternoon in October, Maury Ostroff read the label and walked away without inspecting the artwork.
Visitors to the “Tikkun” exhibit are encouraged to share their responses to the artwork via comment cards. (Andrew Esensten)
Asked how the presence of the flag made him feel, Ostroff, who is Jewish and lives in Muir Beach, in Marin County, replied, “Unhappy.”
Why?
“It’s not offensive to me in the same way that a swastika is. My skin is a little bit thicker than that. But I wish it weren’t here.”
He added, “What’s so Jewish about this? What’s so ‘tikkun olam’ about all of this?”
For the “Tikkun” exhibit, which opened Feb. 17 and runs through Jan. 8, the CJM invited both Jewish and non-Jewish Bay Area artists to contribute new works on the theme of repair, however they chose to interpret it. “No one is listening to us,” the piece by Stimage, who is not Jewish, is the first work of art featuring the Palestinian flag to be shown at CJM in recent memory; the museum could not say when or if the flag has been displayed on its walls before.
The piece prompted several internal conversations among CJM staff when it was first submitted and, since it has been on display, has generated a variety of responses from museumgoers who have left comments in a box at the entrance to the exhibit. Intentionally or not, Stimage has raised numerous questions with the artwork, including: Does a work of art that is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle for statehood belong in a Jewish museum? And what is the role of a contemporary Jewish museum, anyway?
“To truly be a contemporary art museum, meaning embedded in the contemporary issues of our day, our job is to provide a platform for dialogue and to share a diversity of perspectives on our walls,” said Chad Coerver, CJM’s executive director since September 2021. “If any institution [like ours] took the path of withholding artwork that troubled our staff, our board or our community, it would be very difficult to mount exhibitions.”
CJM is a member of the Council of American Jewish Museums, a network of 76 museums across the country. CAJM does not have guidelines about the kind of art its member museums can and cannot display, according to Executive Director Melissa Yaverbaum.
J. reached out to several CAJM member museums in New York, Los Angeles and other places by email to ask if they had ever shown artwork with Palestinian iconography or works by Palestinian artists. The museums declined to answer or did not respond.
In recent years, two Jewish museums have been embroiled in controversy over issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago staged an exhibit in 2008 on Israeli and Palestinian concepts of homeland that included maps and portraits of Palestinians. Following outcry from members of the local Jewish community who felt the exhibit presented Israel in a negative light, the museum decided to close the exhibit after only a few weeks. And in 2019, the director of the Jewish Museum Berlin resigned after the museum tweeted a link to a pro-BDS article in a German newspaper. (The museum previously came under fire for welcoming anti-Zionist scholar Judith Butler and representatives of Iran.)
In a joint interview with J., two CJM staffers who worked on “Tikkun” — co-curator Qianjin Montoya, who is not Jewish, and a Jewish senior curator who served in an advisory role, Heidi Rabben — shared the story of how Stimage’s piece came to be in the exhibit. (Montoya’s co-curator for the exhibit, Arianne Gelardin, no longer works at the museum.)
Since 2009, CJM has invited local artists from different backgrounds to create new work as part of the museum’s annual Dorothy Saxe Invitational. The idea for “Tikkun” was hatched before the pandemic put the planning process on hold. Once the CJM and Saxe — a local philanthropist and art collector — agreed on the theme, the co-curators invited artists “already engaged in healing through their relationship to community or in their practice of daily life,” Gelardin told J. last February.
The 30 artists who accepted the museum’s invitation were given only four months to conceive of and submit new works. That was likely the shortest timeline in the history of the invitational, which has been held 11 previous times, according to the museum. Each artist received a packet of materials compiled by CJM staff, with input from the Shalom Hartman Institute, a non-degree granting Jewish education center, to guide their thinking on “tikkun.”
Stimage was invited to participate because she is “very active” in the Bay Area and because “her work reflects ideas of community and connection,” Montoya said.
The curators said Stimage’s inclusion of the Palestinian flag in her submitted piece came as a surprise and prompted challenging conversations. However, they noted that they found the content of some of the other artists’ work surprising, too, and that it’s not unusual for contemporary artists to push the envelope in their work.
“I wouldn’t say we expected to receive a piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we weren’t steering anyone away from that, either,” Rabben told J., adding that the submission guidelines did not place any topic off limits. “That’s a commitment from the museum to authentically represent the creative spirit of the artists that we’re working with,” she said.
Still, the curators said they engaged in a dialogue with Stimage in order to better understand each aspect of her piece and her overall intentions. Through those conversations, the curators learned that Stimage wanted to explore a moment of “rupture,” and that through her piece she hoped to communicate “that before healing or repair might happen, you have to first acknowledge that rupture,” Rabben said.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco is showing “Tikkun,” an exhibit of works by Jewish and non-Jewish artists on the theme of repair. (Andrew Esensten)
Coerver, who was involved in some of the conversations, stressed that “careful consideration” was given to including the piece in the exhibit. “We felt an artwork addressing the plight of the Palestinians was appropriate in an exhibition on healing and repair,” he said. (No work submitted as part of the Dorothy Saxe Invitational has ever been outright rejected, the museum said.)
Stimage did not respond to interview requests from J. According to a CV on her website, she was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2016. She is a past fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and was an artist-in-residence at Facebook in 2018. She also owns a floral gift shop in Oakland called Saint Flora.
Her work often touches on Black identity; she created a piece honoring Sandra Bland, an African-American woman whose 2015 arrest and death in a Texas jail cell sparked protests, and contributed to a 2019 San Francisco Art Institute exhibit on the Black Panther Party.
“I have a responsibility to create things that will, to the best of my present knowledge, do more good than harm, heal, inspire and uplift other humans,” she told the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper in 2015.
Stimage’s precise views on Israel are unknown. CJM referred J. to her artist statement for “No one is listening to us,” which reads: “Olive, sage, and sumac are flowering plants native to the Mediterranean (including regions of Gaza and the West Bank) that have a direct relationship to contested ancestral land and affect the livelihood of so many Palestinian farmers and families caught in the conflict. They are positioned in the space of The Contemporary Jewish Museum as a metaphor for the ongoing conflict over land rights and the desperate need for restoration and healing of an age-old wound.”
The curators told J. that during their conversations with Stimage about her piece, they asked her why including images of the Palestinian flag was important to her but did not request that she remove them.
“We determined that none of [the piece’s] components in and of themselves signified something problematic or concerning,” Rabben said. “Of course, we had the awareness that the symbol [of the flag] will be read in a variety of ways by a variety of people.”
(Rabben pointed out that the exhibit includes other works with national symbols rendered in provocative ways, such as a black-and-white photograph of an American flag that was torn apart and partially reassembled by Mexican-American artist Jose Arias.)
The Palestinian flag — which contains the Pan-Arab colors of black, white, green and red — was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. Since then, it has been the primary symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
For decades, the PLO was considered an enemy organization by Israel, and anything associated with it “had no place in Israeli public life,” said Eran Kaplan, an Israeli-born professor of Israel studies at San Francisco State University. Israel never went so far as to ban the flag. However, during the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, Israeli soldiers sometimes followed orders to confiscate the flag from protesters in the West Bank and Gaza.
With the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993, Israel and the PLO recognized each other as negotiating partners. Yet the Palestinian flag remains a contentious symbol in Israel today. Kaplan noted that it recently served as a flashpoint during the funeral procession of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American broadcaster who was killed in the West Bank in May. (The IDF conducted a review and admitted that the Israeli soldier who shot her had most likely misidentified her as an armed militant.) After warning Abu Akleh’s family not to display the flag, Israeli police attacked mourners in East Jerusalem, ripping flags out of their hands and off of the vehicle carrying her casket.
Today, the flag holds different meanings for Israelis and American Jews from different generations and political persuasions.
“There are large segments in Israeli society who view any form of Palestinian national identity as a threat to the existence of Israel,” Kaplan said. “There are others who view the PLO as legitimate partners in any form of negotiations [over the creation of a Palestinian state], but there’s an absolute split over those questions.”
Given the sensitive nature of Stimage’s work and others in the exhibit, the curators decided to solicit feedback from visitors via comment cards available at the entrance to the hall. Rabben said the museum has received a number of comments specifically about “No one is listening to us,” most of which were positive. “The majority of those comments were ‘Thank you for offering space for this topic at the museum,’” she said.
Last month, a security guard sitting in the “Tikkun” exhibition hall told a reporter that he had not witnessed any expressions of outrage or protest through the first nine months of the exhibit. “When we opened we were afraid of negative reactions, but they’re not stressed about it,” he said of visitors. “We have shown worse things here.” The guard, who has worked at the museum since it opened in 2008, mentioned a 2010 exhibit, “Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf,” which included a copy of Hitler’s autobiography. “Some people were cussing us out” for displaying the book, he recalled.
Meanwhile, on the same floor as “Tikkun,” there is another, smaller exhibit containing potentially offensive art. A sign outside of the room warns visitors that inside is a Hitler marionette created by the parents of puppeteer Frank Oz. “Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today,” the sign says.
Coerver, CJM’s executive director, said he was proud that the museum’s three current exhibits — “Tikkun,” “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History” and “Gillian Laub: Family Matters,” which includes photographs that Laub took of her Trump-supporting relatives — are raising “challenging questions” and providing opportunities for both visitors and museum staff to “expand our horizons.”
“We’ve been wading into some issues that I think are a little thicker than maybe we’ve been confronting in the past,” he said, “and I hope that continues.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
—
The post A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Rock legend Steven Van Zandt’s new gig: Holocaust education
(JTA) — Steven Van Zandt is worried about the Jews.
“There is that pre-Holocaust vibe,” the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently about what he sees on social media, where he is a prolific user. “They spread lies around year after year after year, and if you say something often enough, people start to believe it.
“And that’s what happened that led to the Holocaust in the first place, and that’s what’s going on now.”
For a man equally beloved for his longtime work with Bruce Springsteen in the E Street Band and his role as Silvio on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” such a detour might seem unusual. But Van Zandt is looking to make his own mark in the world of Holocaust education, via his education initiative TeachRock, which since 2013 has provided K-12 lesson plans on a range of subjects built around popular music.
Titled “Jewish Heritage and the Holocaust: Exploring an Enduring Culture Through Music,” the initiative’s four-day lesson plan, launched this week, includes the onset of antisemitism in prewar Europe, survivor testimony and Jewish values. Anchoring the lessons are rock songs from the likes of KISS, the half-Jewish glam metal band, beloved Jewish folk singer Leonard Cohen and contemporary New York pop band Lawrence, which is fronted by two Jewish siblings.
It’s a departure from the somber tone of most Holocaust education programs, a space that the Jewish community has heavily invested in despite mounting questions about the effectiveness of such lessons in curbing antisemitism. Other contemporary Holocaust learning initiatives have employed video games, artificial intelligence and similarly novel approaches as educators struggle to adapt to a near future without living survivors to share their testimonies.
For Van Zandt, the lessons aren’t just teaching about the Holocaust, but also about highlighting positive Jewish influence in the world of popular culture. He rattled off a list of Jewish artists he admires, including Bob Dylan and the pop songwriting team Lieber and Stoller.
“I have a lot of gratitude for what they have contributed to my life, just in terms of enjoyment,” he said. “Show business doesn’t exist without the Jewish contributions.”
The guitarist founded TeachRock in 2013 alongside other big names from the world of music and the arts, including Springsteen, U2 frontman Bono, Jackson Browne and the director Martin Scorsese. On Thursday, the organization piloted its new Holocaust education lesson plan to 50 high school students at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, timed to the state’s Holocaust Education Week. Florida’s Holocaust education task force is promoting the material to districts across the state.
“We always want to be educating in a way that feels like you’re not being taught. And I think this captures that,” Michael Igel, a contributing author on the TeachRock lesson plan who also chairs the statewide task force, told JTA.
For Igel, a descendant of survivors, the project fits neatly into his own efforts to bring Holocaust education into unconventional spaces. He’s planning future courses that incorporate food and theater.
“It’s still standards-based Holocaust education. But it’s being delivered to students in these different portals,” he said.
It was through Igel’s promotion of such nontraditional methods that he was approached by a member of TeachRock’s leadership council a year ago. TeachRock had recently been looking to offer lessons on Jewish heritage, and saw an opportunity to broach the subject of the Holocaust through Igel.
A huge E Street Band fan, Igel laughed as he recalled how the council member asked him if he had ever heard of Van Zandt.
The first of the curriculum’s four days opens with students listening to “Rock and Roll All Nite,” the 1975 hit by rock band KISS, before segueing into Jewish life in prewar Europe and the rise of antisemitism.
Igel noted the unique nature of the lesson. “When Gene Simmons with his tongue out is the first thing you see, you’re wondering, ‘What the heck happened to Holocaust education?’” he said.
Gradually the link becomes clear: The lesson explains that KISS frontman Gene Simmons is the son of a Holocaust survivor. Much of the curriculum is built around similar ideas of Jewish survival and resilience, as students are asked to contemplate how Simmons’ family background may have informed his outré stage persona. (Co-founder Paul Stanley is also Jewish.)
Such concepts, he said, help expand the idea of a Holocaust lesson beyond Jews as “victims in a snapshot of time.” In teacher training sessions, educators have responded well to the musical framing and excitedly discussed which songs they would want to pass down to future generations — a positive sign for Igel, who hopes to convince teachers to use the curriculum even outside of the state-mandated Holocaust Education Week lessons.
While Van Zandt, who is not Jewish, doesn’t craft the curriculum himself, he is friends with Simmons and the two have spoken before about wanting to use music to teach Jewish history. Max Weinberg, the E Street Band’s longtime drummer, is also Jewish.
The initiative comes at a moment when the world of popular music, like many other cultural sectors, has become engulfed in controversy over Israel. A recent dustup involved Ed Sheeran and Macklemore, in which Jewish venue owner Robert Kraft pressured Sheeran to drop the rapper from his tour over his onstage pro-Palestinian activism. That prompted many artists to support Macklemore, including Jewish actor Ilana Glazer, who spoke at one of his “Free Palestine” tour stops. Several leading musicians, including Lorde, Paramore and Björk, have also signed pledges to boycott Israel over its conduct in Gaza, while others including Pink and Boy George have taken opposite tracks.
All of this discourages Van Zandt, who famously led an international artist boycott of the South African resort venue Sun City in 1985 to protest Apartheid. The artists now backing the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions movement targeting Israel have cited the Sun City protests as a direct inspiration. (Sun City itself was founded by Sol Kerzner, the son of Jewish Russian immigrants.)
But Van Zandt says the two causes are different.
“Yes, I am known as the boycott king of the world,” he said. “It’s not the same situation. Trying to deny weapons for Israel to defend itself is obscene. It’s ridiculous. It’s terrible.”
He has feuded with Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd co-founder and outspoken pro-Palestinian activist, over BDS.
“I wrote him a very nice, detailed letter saying that it was misconceived, it’s a mistake, it’s not going to accomplish anything,” Van Zandt recalled. “I was very nice to him. Very diplomatic, very respectful. And then he starts just calling me names in the press.” (Waters has directed expletives at Van Zandt and other contemporaries who disagree with him about Israel in interviews.)
Igel, too, is thinking about how TeachRock’s lessons can address contemporary discourse over Israel, a subject that many Holocaust educators often are reluctant to bring up in the classroom even when students press the topic. His curriculum defines what a genocide is — “for a generation that needs to know what that word means, and what it doesn’t mean,” he said.
Following this week’s pilot program, both Igel and Van Zandt hope states beyond Florida will take an interest in their lessons. The rock star has ambitious goals for the initiative: to try to change the national conversation around Jews and Israel that has filled his social media feeds, which he describes as “lies on top of lies.”
“Eventually there’s got to be a national public conversation about this, which is not taking place,” he said. “So eventually it’s going to have to be. At that point, all bets are off.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Rock legend Steven Van Zandt’s new gig: Holocaust education appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Were Leopold and Loeb inspired by Nietzsche, or Jewish self-loathing?
Any production of Patrick Hamilton’s popular thriller Rope, like any game of Clue, can be reduced to props, setting and culprits.
The central prop is a large chest, containing a freshly-murdered body. The setting can vary: Mayfair in Hamilton’s 1929 original, Manhattan in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 screen adaptation starring Jimmy Stewart. The names of the players are sometimes different, but there are always two students in their finely-appointed apartment with the titular murder weapon.
Gordon Greenberg’s new adaptation, now playing off-Broadway at the New Group’s space at St. Clement’s, presents a novel clue as to what prompted the crime: a Christmas tree upstage right. In his take on this “well-made play,” which Greenberg believes has its deficiencies, the central characters, inspired by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, are once again Jewish, but doing their best to conceal that fact.
Hamilton, who wrote his play shortly after Leopold and Loeb’s conviction, was struck by the men’s alleged lack of motive, beyond a desire to pull off the perfect crime based on their nihilistic misreading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Greenberg doesn’t buy that the killing was dispassionate, and believes a crisis of identity was at play.
“What drew me to it was thinking about what the factors might have been that went into this murder that I personally find hard to believe was just theoretical,” said Greenberg, a director and playwright, who recently revived Joseph Stein and Stephen Schwartz’s The Baker’s Wife off-Broadway. “I don’t think anyone does anything for purely theoretical reasons. We can extrapolate them later, but in the moment we are going on gut impulses and human needs and sexuality and jealousy and all of these fiery emotional poles that make us human.”
Greenberg, who is gay and Jewish, had long been fascinated by the Leopold and Loeb case, wondering what led two well-bred, cerebral Jews to commit a supposedly “motiveless” murder. (In the real crime, notably fictionalized in Meyer Levin’s Compulsion, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb killed a 14-year-old boy, Robert Franks; in Rope, they kill a wealthy classmate.)
Hamilton’s play, which Greenberg found to be “antiseptic,” de-Judaized and stripped of queerness, is not concerned with the “why” of the killing.
His murderers, Brandon, described as “tall, finely and athletically built, and blonde” and Granillo, “a Spaniard” with the “shrug of the shoulders characteristic of his race,” are in it for the thrill. They convene a dinner party and serve the meal on the chest containing their victim, certain they won’t be caught.
In Greenberg’s version, set in 1957 Manhattan, Brandon is Garret Stern (Cameron Monahan), a working-class striver who declaims, in a break of the fourth wall, that he “wants to be mistaken for the son of assimilated German Jews, not the shtetl Jews with bent vowels and calloused hands from whom he actually descends.” (As part of the ruse, he’s abandoned his given name of Gary.)
Granillo is now Nate Singer (Corey Fogelmanis), the Yekke scion of a garment district macher who, to his upwardly-mobile mother’s delight, “can almost pass for gentile.” Both are students at Princeton and plan to drop the body back in Jersey after their macabre dinner party.
Like the real Leopold and Loeb, they are also involved sexually and sadomasochistically. Greenberg says he was partially inspired by Tom Kalin’s 1992 film Swoon, which revisited the killers through a queer lens.
Nate’s instilled self-hatred likely feeds into his desire to be dominated by Garret, whose rough upbringing as a Jew in postwar Skokie taught him the utility of violence. (His school principal praised him for breaking a boy’s nose, saying “your people aren’t exactly known for defending themselves.”)
Greenberg, who said that, as an actor he played “every Herb Gardner and Neil Simon play around,” chose to move the action up to the era Lavender Scare and a resurgence of casual, clubby antisemitism following the “chemotherapy of World War II” that briefly put it into remission.
Nate and Garret’s guests, for their post-Christmas shindig, whose centerpiece is a chest containing a corpse, include a polished, pedigreed classmate; a droll Sarah Lawrence student; their closeted professor, who will catch them in the lie; and a Mayflower-descendant judge who happens to be the father of Ronald Kentley, the deceased.
Driving the boys’ motive and cue for passion is Nate’s tormented attraction to Ronald, who he fears might out him and land him on McCarthy’s list. Garret is jealous, but sees an opportunity: In bumping Ronald off, he hopes to take his place as the judge’s surrogate son, gaining entry to the patrician world to which he aspires.
But their guests’ routine macroaggressions show the futility of trying to overcome their backgrounds. The Christmas tree is fooling no one. Greenberg is similarly unconvinced that Leopold and Loeb’s murder was merely a Nietzschean performance, undertaken to prove that morality need not apply to superior intellects.
“No one really knows what was going through their mind, and no one ever will,” Greenberg said of Leopold and Loeb’s crime. “But taking one of these fascinating true crime stories and positing what the humanity is behind it, what’s all the flesh on the bone, is to me the fascination and the fun exercise.”
The post Were Leopold and Loeb inspired by Nietzsche, or Jewish self-loathing? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Documentary reveals composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s empathy for the Jews
אין רוסלאַנד איז לעצטנס אַרויס אַ דאָקומענטאַר רעזשיסירט פֿון גריגאָרי אילוגדין, מיטן נאָמען „DSCH: סימפֿאָניע נומער 13‟, וועגן דעם וועלט־באַרימטן קאָמפּאָזיטאָר דמיטרי שאָסטאַקאָוויטש און די ייִדן. כאָטש ער איז נישט געווען קיין ייִד, האָט ער געשאַפֿן מוזיק פֿאַר ייִדישע לידער און געווידמעט זײַן 13טער סימפֿאָניע דעם חורבן פֿון די ייִדן.
מיט דער אַברעוויאַטור DSCH, וואָס פֿיגורירט אינעם טיטל פֿונעם דאָקומענטאַר, פֿלעגט שאָסטאַקאָוויטש אונטערשרײַבן זײַנע נאָטן. מיינען מיינט עס D. Schostakowitsch. דאָס ווייסן, מסתּמא, אַלע מוזיקער, וועלכע שפּילן זײַנע ווערק. ווייניקער איז אָבער באַקאַנט דעם קאָמפּאָזיטאָרס שײַכות נישט בלויז צו ייִדישע טעמעס אין אַלגעמיין, נאָר דווקא צו ייִדיש. געוויינטלעך זינגט מען אויס זײַנע ייִדישע לידער בלויז אין דער רוסישער איבערזעצונג; אויף דער וועבזײַט „ייִדיש־קולטור‟ קענט איר זיי אויסהערן אויף ייִדיש.
אין פּעטערבורג איז די פּרעמיערע פֿונעם פֿילם פֿאָרגעקומען אינעם קינאָ־טעאַטער „אַווראָראַ‟, וווּ שאָסטאַקאָוויטש האָט אין די 1920ער יאָרן אָנגעהויבן זײַן מוזיקאַלישע קאַריערע ווי אַ יונגער פּיאַניסט, וועלכער האָט אַקאָמפּאָנירט שטומע פֿילמען. דער אַלטער קינאָ־טעאַטער, געעפֿנט אין 1913, האָט דעמאָלט געהייסן „פּיקאַדילי‟.
אין 1961 האָט דער רוסישער דיכטער יעווגעני יעווטושענקאָ אָנגעשריבן זײַן קורצע פּאָעמע „באַבי־יאַר‟ וועגן דעם טרויעריק־באַקאַנטן אָרט אין קיִעוו, וווּ די נאַציס האָבן אומגעבראַכט איבער 100 טויזנט מענטשן, אַרײַנגערעכנט צום ווייניקסטן 33,771 ייִדן. די פּאָעמע הייבט זיך אָן מיט די ווערטער „אויף באַבי־יאָר זײַנען קיין דענקמעלער נישטאָ‟. דאָ ציטיר איך יוסף רובינשטיינס ייִדישע איבערזעצונג, וועלכע איז דערשינען דעם 8טן אָקטאָבער, 1961, אינעם פֿאָרווערטס.
שאָסטאַקאָוויטש, דעמאָלט שוין וועלט־באַרימט, האָט באַשלאָסן צו שאַפֿן אַ סימפֿאָניע מיט אַ באַס־זינגער, אַ באַסן־כאָר און אַן אָרקעסטער, וווּ עס ווערט אויסגעזונגען די דאָזיקע פּאָעמע, און האָט עס פֿאַרענדיקט אין 1962. יעווטושענקאָ האָט ספּעציעל פֿאַר דער סימפֿאָניע אָנגעשריבן נאָך אַ ליד מיטן נאָמען „פּחדים‟. אין דעצעמבער 1962 האָט מען צום ערשטן מאָל אויסגעשפּילט שאָסטאַקאָוויטשעס 13טע סימפֿאָניע אין מאָסקווע, און אין מאַרץ 1963 אין מינסק.
דער פֿילם דערציילט, פֿאַר וואָס שאָסטאַקאָוויטש האָט זיך בײַם אָנהייב אָנגעטראָפֿן אויף גרויסע שוועריקייטן מיט אָט דעם ווערק. לויט דער סאָוועטישער שיטה איז געווען פּאָליטיש אומקאָרעקט צו דערמאָנען די טראַגעדיע פֿון באַבי־יאַר אין שײַכות באַזונדערס צו ייִדן, ווײַל דאָרטן זענען דערמאָרדעט געוואָרן – און, קוואַנטיטאַוו גערעכנט, מער ווי ייִדן – אויך סאָוועטישע געפֿאַנגענע און אַנדערע מענטשן. דערצו, האָט מען פֿאַרשוויגן די ראָלע פֿון די אוקראַיִנישע קאָלאַבאָראַנטן אין דער מאַסן־שחיטה.
די טעמע פֿונעם ייִדן־חורבן האָט מען בכלל אויסגעמיטן, ווײַל מצד דעם אָפֿיציעלן קוקווינקל זענען ייִדן געווען אַ רעלאַטיוו קליינער טייל צווישן די 26 מיליאָן אומגעקומענע סאָוועטישע בירגער. קיין דענקמעלער זענען אין באַבי־יאַר טאַקע נישט געווען ביז 1976, ווען מע האָט אויפֿגעשטעלט אַ מאָנומענט לזכּרון די דערמאָרדעטע „בירגער פֿון דער שטאָט קיִעוו און קריגס־געפֿאַנגענע‟. ערשט אין 1991 האָט זיך דאָרט באַוויזן אַ באַזונדערער ייִדישער דענקמאָל, און נאָך שפּעטער, אין 2016, אַ ציגײַנערישער.
אינעם דאָקומענטאַר ווערט דערמאָנט שאָסטאַקאָוויטשעס שײַכות צו דער ייִדישער שפּראַך. אין 1948, ווען אין סטאַלינס צײַטן האָבן אַ סך ייִדן געליטן פֿון רדיפֿות כּלומרשט צוליב זייער נאַציאָנאַליזם, האָט שאָסטאַקאָוויטש געשאַפֿן זײַן לידער־ציקל (אָפּוס נומער 79) „פֿון דער ייִדישער פֿאָלקס־פּאָעזיע‟, באַגרינדעט אויף יחזקאל דאָברושינס און אַבֿרהם יודיצקיס זאַמלונג „ייִדישע פֿאָלקס־לידער‟ (פֿאַרעפֿנטלעכט אינעם יאָר 1940 אין מאָסקווע).
איר קאָנט זיך באַקענען פּרטימדיק מיטן דאָזיקן ציקל פֿון שאָסטאַקאָוויטשן אויף ייִדיש און ענגליש אויף דער וועבזײַט „ייִדיש־קולטור‟, וועלכע האָט, ווי פֿריִער געזאָגט, אַ געוויסע שײַכות צום נײַעם דאָקומענטאַר. דער גרינדער פֿון דער דאָזיקער וועבזײַט, ד״ר מאַרק זילבערקוויט, איז אויך דער פּראָדוסער פֿונעם פֿילם. אילוגדין, דער רעזשיסאָר, האָט מיך פּערזענלעך פֿאַרבעטן אויף דער פּעטערבורגער פּרעמיערע פֿונעם נײַעם דאָקומענטאַר ווי אַ ייִדיש־שפּראַכיקן זשורנאַליסט. ער האָט מיר איבערגעגעבן, אַז ייִדיש שפּילט פֿאַר אים אויך אַ גרויסע ראָלע און ער האָפֿט ווײַטער צו פּאָפּולאַריזירן ר די שפּראַך.
וואָס שייך דער קאָמפּליצירטער באַציִונג פֿונעם ראַטן־פֿאַרבאַנד צו ייִדישע טעמעס איז כּדאַי צוצוגעבן, אַז אין 1961, דאָס זעלבע יאָר וואָס יעווטושענקאָ האָט אָנגעשריבן „באַבי־יאַר‟, האָט זיך אין מאָסקווע געעפֿנט דער ייִדישער ליטעראַרישער זשורנאַל „סאָוועטיש היימלאַנד‟. דאָרט און אין דער סאָוועטיש־ייִדישער ליטעראַטור בכלל האָט מען יאָ באַהאַנדלט דעם ייִדן־חורבן.
איין וויכטיקע זאַך ווערט נישט דערמאָנט אינעם פֿילם: ווען שאָסטאַקאָוויטש האָט געשריבן זײַן 13טע סימפֿאָניע, מיט וועלכע ייִדישע שרײַבער און דיכטער האָט ער זיך געחבֿרט? דער ענטפֿער וואָלט טאַקע געווען גוט צו וויסן.
The post Documentary reveals composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s empathy for the Jews appeared first on The Forward.
