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A moving tribute to Soviet Jewry, with uncomfortable contemporary echoes
The first Yiddish Glory album, the Grammy-nominated Lost Songs of WWII, was, give or take, 70 years in the making.
The idea of preserving Soviet-Jewish culture by way of an anthology of Yiddish folk originally belonged to Moyshe Beregovsky, a Ukrainian-Jewish ethnomusicologist in the Cabinet for Jewish Culture. But Beregovsky was arrested by Stalin’s government on suspicion of so-called Jewish nationalism in 1947. The sizable archive that he and his colleagues had amassed during and immediately after the Shoah — 263 original songs in all, constituting a record of a culture on the brink of oblivion — languished in the basement of a Kyiv library until it was discovered by chance in 1990.
Two or so decades later, a group of archivists, academics and musicians — led by Anna Shternshis, professor of Yiddish studies at the University of Toronto — took up Beregovsky’s task, and out of the jumbled archive they pieced together an album of Yiddish songs. The majority of the archive consisted of just lyrics (that is, without sheet music) so Shternshis teamed up with Russian songwriter Psoy Korolenko to compose new melodies, taking care to match the music to the lyrics’ subject, period and geographic origin. The resulting album, released in 2019, was hailed as a spectacular insight into the experiences of Holocaust-era Soviet Jewry.
Now, seven years later, Shternshis and her collaborators are back with their sophomore effort, The Silenced Songs of WWII. And though it builds upon the achievements of its predecessor, giving poignant expression once more to the sorrow and bravery of Soviet Jewry during the Shoah, it also has another object: confronting the historiographical status quo.
“Every song on this album is there because it challenges the way we understand the history of the Holocaust,” Shternshis told me over a video call.
In “A Priest Murdered in Kalisz,” the singer, Leyb Diament, recounts the 1939 murder of a Catholic priest in a central square in the titular town in Poland, describing how German forces had dragged the priest from his home and forced four Jewish boys to publicly shoot him before burying him in a Jewish cemetery.
Diament then wonders aloud whether the Germans had hoped this final humiliation would provoke a backlash from the local Polish population. No such reprisal ever occurred. “The Poles saw all of this, but no pogrom happened,” he writes in the song. “Afterwards, the Germans captured everyone; they shot some and hanged others.”
“I would say that this is the first Yiddish song of the Holocaust,” Shternshis said. “And how interesting is it that it doesn’t talk about murders of Jews, but about a murder of the Catholic priest, and of Polish solidarity with Jews in the face of Nazi invasion.”
“The Sad Camp,” a plaintive song about Soviet Jewry’s annihilation, was written by Bershad ghetto survivor Isaac Semidubosky, who, after being liberated from the ghetto in late 1944, was drafted into the Red Army and ultimately ended up in Berlin — thought not before he helped liberate Auschwitz. Yet the song also calls into question the scholarly categories that have often governed histories of Soviet Jewry.
“During the war Soviet Jews were either killed or put in a ghetto, served in the Red Army, or were refugees that ended up in Central Asia or Siberia,” Shternshis said. “These three groups are studied separately, but when you look at this song and the story of the person who wrote it, you realize that doesn’t make too much sense.”
Silenced Songs is more than just anguish, though; there’s uplift, too, the same injections of hope, levity and defiance that made the first instalment of Yiddish Glory so memorable.
“I am a Typhus Louse,” written by a teacher at an orphanage in the Mogilev-Podolsky ghetto, in the Transnistria region —which today is Moldova — imagines the war from the perspective of an anti-fascist louse. “Me, I am a Typhus louse; I go from house to house; la-la-la-la-la,” the louse declares, before singing that it, too, is afraid of the German doctors who kill lice.
The anonymously written “Yom Kippur Without Fascists,” meanwhile, looks ahead to a holy day without Hitler. “On Yom Kippur he’ll be our sacrificial rooster,” the lyrics go. “And on Simkhes-Toyrehe he’ll burn like a candle at the pole.”
And while “Transnistrian Lullaby” offers a dark account of refugee life, it still concludes almost wistfully. “A storm doesn’t last forever; the war will end,” writes the again anonymous author. “Again the sun will shine for us.”
The song “In Pechera Camp” is particularly notable for addressing, head-on, the question of Soviet complicity in the Holocaust, long a sore subject for Soviet authorities. (Among the reasons for Beregovsky’s arrest was that the archive revealed instances of Soviet collaboration with the Nazis.) The song describes the brutality of the Russian guards at the Pechera camp, an enclosure designed to kill inmates through starvation in the Vinnytsia region of Ukraine. The Soviet Union never formally acknowledged the camp’s existence.
One guard, Lukyan Smetanski, is singled out in the lyrics as especially merciless: “Smetanski came out with a big rifle, oy, oy, oy; two innocent Jews approached, and he shot them for no reason at all.” Smetanski, according to legend, was killed on the spot by a Jewish officer soon after the Red Army liberated Pechera.
History doesn’t repeat — but it rhymes
Maybe the most important decision Shternshis took as curator, though, was to scrub references to warmongering — both Russian and Jewish — that in view of the ongoing conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Mideast would likely have been poorly received.
For where the first Yiddish Glory album was understood principally as an invaluable window onto a bygone era, the follow-up has acquired rather a lot of contemporary importance. Since 2019, Russia has invaded Ukraine, Israel has destroyed much of Gaza, antisemitism is on the rise and Holocaust literacy has never been lower.
Beregovsky’s archive contains more than a few admiring references to the Red Army, several of which were included in the new album’s initial cut; one even name-checked various cities that the Soviets liberated. Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, however, meant they were omitted.
“A lot of our songs glorify the Red Army and the Soviet Army, they glorify Stalin and they glorify victory,” Shternshis said. “In 2019, we were thinking about this archive as an interesting historical curiosity. Now, it’s like are we really going to glorify the Red Army? It’s a whole different consideration.”
The same rationale drove the decision to exclude songs that gestured at another thorny topic: Jewish militarism. “There are a lot of songs in the archive that praise Jewish soldiers for being violent and cruel towards their enemies,” Shternshis said. “They’re also not on the album.”
Still, Shternshis is optimistic that any parallels between the present turmoil and the album will amplify what she sees as Yiddish Glory’s abiding message. “This album is focused on the most vulnerable victims of the war,” she said. “This is what happens when civilians are caught in that really horrible violence. That message certainly hasn’t lost its significance.”
The post A moving tribute to Soviet Jewry, with uncomfortable contemporary echoes appeared first on The Forward.
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With a Kennedy Center honor under Trump, David Mamet enters his final, tragic act
There was a time when David Mamet being honored at the Kennedy Center wouldn’t have raised eyebrows.
His contributions to American theater and film transcend an affinity for four letter words (let’s call them “the F— Variations”). His tough-talking, desperate men gave splenetic voice to the indignities of a capitalist system in Glengarry Glen Ross, evolving sexual mores in Sexual Perversity in Chicago and, in a movie like The Verdict, the justice system.
Cut to 2026 and Mamet’s scripts are but an afterthought to his grievance. When he makes headlines now, it’s for his reactionary conservative streak and his role as a partisan in the culture war. Together with a run of flops, numbering a Harvey Weinstein #MeToo comedy and a Broadway show not even Al Pacino could save, his esteem has cratered among the liberal circles that once embraced him, and to which he once belonged but now prefers to eviscerate.
He has made the transition from dramatist to pundit, first at HuffPost, lately at The Free Press. Reading too much into Oleanna, perhaps, he has called teachers pedophiles on Fox News, written screeds on cancel culture and, a prerequisite for the Kennedys at this moment, praised President Donald Trump.
In the honor, there is a strain of tragedy. Mamet has strayed so far from where he started — what he called his “brain-dead liberal” era — that he makes perfect sense for this appointment, under a regime that tried to slap its leader’s name onto a tribute to a slain president meant as a bipartisan shrine to art. (Due to the Center’s closure amid turmoil and legal battles, the ceremonies will take place at the Capital One Arena, which is only too perfectly bleak.)
A younger Mamet would have looked askance at such a figure as our current Commander-in-Chief, a character who is on the make with all sorts of half-baked schemes. The Iran War may be his latest play on a Buffalo nickel.
It’s enough to make one wonder if we’ve been misreading Mamet all along. Are the men breaking-and entering to steal the Glengarry leads meant to be admired? Are the Hollywood sleazes in Speed-the-Plow aspirational? Is Al Capone the real hero of The Untouchables?
Perhaps the evening, which tends to include career retrospectives, will elucidate. But if the Kennedy Honors could once be said to be for closers, it may now be only for a particular kind of sellout.
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Why is Britney Spears studying Hebrew?
It’s Britney, Yitz!
Continuing a curious social media trend that has previously seen appreciation for the beards of chess-playing Chabadniks and the Zohar hidden among baby clothes, Britney Spears took to Instagram Sunday to post a Hebrew Book of Psalms and the Lekutei Amaraim, or Tanya, a Hasidic book of sayings.
The caption reads: “I’m extremely bored !!! Learning Hebrew reading right to left !!! Beautiful language !!!” (A previous caption, posted Sunday, was more cryptic, concluding “God speed little man !!! I love u !!!,” perhaps indicating the presence of a havruta or someone in her life who keeps his mitzvot.)
What exactly is happening here? Is Spears, like Marilyn before her and Sydney Sweeney now, about to dip her toe into the mikveh?
The best clue we have isn’t from Spears’ page, but from Israeli model Natalie Dadon, who tagged the “Hit Me Baby One More Time” singer in a selfie with the Tanya. “Finally, it’s possible to tell,” Dadon posted, in a gallery with Hebrew language news coverage of the posts. Dadon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Dadon’s social media presence involves Tanya study, which itself is a cornerstone to Lubavitch philosophy (so perhaps is connected to the Chabad chess players whose beards Spears so admired) and adjacent to Kabbalah.
Spears is no stranger to Jewish subjects. Around the time she locked lips with Madonna at the 2003 VMAs, she started, like so many others, to look into Kabbalah, as this handy timeline from Hey Alma notes. She has a Hebrew tattoo of letters that signify healing in kabbalistic texts and was apparently once attached to star in a Holocaust-time-travel-romance film called The Yellow Star of Sophia and Eton, which now that I’ve heard of it I will never shut up about.
She has credited Kabbalah with helping her through a difficult time in her life and has been spotted wearing a star of David.
But we should approach Spears’ dalliance with Judaism, now sandwiched on her Insta page between a call-out of her sister Jamie Lynn and a NSFW video of her dancing with a rose Emoji as a fig leaf, with some healthy skepticism.
Her Instagram bio currently reads “Pray Every Day” with a prayer hands emoji next to a Bible emoji with a cross. She’d still appear to be Christian — or, at the very least, waiting for the new iOS update with the Tanya emoji.
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Haley Stevens cheered at Jewish day school after endorsing GOP Senate candidate
(JTA) — Democratic Michigan U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens was given an extended ovation at a fundraising gala for a Detroit-area Jewish day school Sunday, hours after her endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers for Senate.
Stevens, a longtime pro-Israel stalwart, was celebrated at the Yeshiva Beth Yehudah annual dinner as many members of her party across the country spoke out against her decision to break with Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed.
Video of Stevens’ minute-long standing ovation was shared on social media by representatives of Agudath Israel of America, a major Orthodox advocacy group. Strongly pro-Israel Jews have largely lauded her move to Rogers, which she said came about in part because of her objections to El-Sayed’s past relationship with anti-Israel streamer Hasan Piker.
Also on Sunday evening, Stevens struggled to explain the timing of her decision in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. One consistency in her response was her belief that she was helping Democrats beat back antisemitism within their own party.
“I’m trying to help the Democratic Party. I felt the same way about Graham Platner and his Nazi tattoo,” Stevens said, referencing the Maine Senate candidate who ultimately stepped down from the nomination. Asked if she believed El-Sayed is antisemitic, she responded, “I think some of the actions have certainly been antisemitic, Anderson, but I’m just sick of who he stands with.”
She named Piker and “the uncle,” referring to Piker’s uncle Cenk Uygur, whose PAC produced an ad supporting El-Sayed that blamed Israel for the price of groceries. After Stevens publicly pressured El-Sayed to condemn the ad’s contents, the candidate appeared to do so on Saturday night, which Stevens celebrated in a statement — hours before endorsing Rogers.
To Cooper, Stevens suggested that many other Democrats felt the way she did.
“I’ve been hearing from a ton of Dems, Anderson, who have said, ‘Thank you. This is how we felt.’ They haven’t liked this campaign. It’s painful,” she said. A growing number of Michigan Jewish Democrats have pledged to vote for Rogers, though more than 1,000 have also signed a letter pledging to vote for El-Sayed.
Yeshiva Beth Yehudah is spread across multiple suburban Detroit campuses and is the largest Jewish day school in the state. Its annual fundraising dinner, “An Evening of Unity,” is known for drawing big national names in politics and the media, usually from both major parties.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, was the evening’s keynote speaker, and the gala program also featured personal letters from President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
But it was Stevens, a regular supporter of the school, who turned the most heads. She was also presented with what the emcee called “a specially designed, illuminated book of the five scrolls of our prophets, which remind you all of our heartfelt esteem and appreciation for who you are.”
The yeshiva’s leadership also extended warm wishes to Stevens’ Jewish fiancé, Democratic megadonor Jason Turkish, whom the yeshiva’s emcee described as “our dear friend.” Turkish’s own endorsement of Rogers came days before the congresswoman’s.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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