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A new book made me appreciate Jewish Sunday schools — and the volunteer women who have powered them
(JTA) — As a kid I went to Sunday school at our Reform synagogue. I didn’t hate it as much as my peers did, but let’s just say there were literally dozens of other things I would have preferred to do on a weekend morning.
As a Jewish adult, I had a vague understanding that Sunday school was a post-World War II invention, part of the assimilation and suburbanization of American Jews (my synagogue was actually called Suburban Temple). With our parents committed to public schools and having moved away from the dense urban enclaves where they were raised, our Jewish education was relegated to Sunday mornings and perhaps a weekday afternoon. The Protestant and Catholic kids went to their own religious supplementary schools, and we Jewish kids went to ours.
In her new book “Jewish Sunday Schools,” Laura Yares backdates this story by over a century. Subtitled “Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” the book describes how Sunday schools were the invention of pioneering educators such as Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children in Philadelphia in 1838. As such, they were responses by a tiny minority to distinctly 19th-century challenges — namely, how to raise their children to be Jews in a country dominated by a Protestant majority, and how to express their Judaism in a way compatible with America’s idea of religious freedom.
Although Sunday schools would become the “principal educational organization” of the Reform movement, Yares shows that the model was adopted by traditionalists as well. And she also argues that 20th-century historians, in focusing on the failures of Sunday schools to promote Jewish “continuity,” discounted the contributions of the mostly volunteer corps of women educators who made them run. Meanwhile, the supplementary school remains the dominant model for Jewish education among non-Orthodox American Jews, despite recent research showing its precipitous decline.
I picked up “Jewish Sunday Schools” hoping to find out who gets the blame for ruining my Sunday mornings. I came away with a new appreciation for the women whose “important and influential work,” Yares writes, “extended far beyond the classrooms in which they worked.”
Yares is assistant professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in the MSU Program for Jewish Studies. Raised in Birmingham, England, she has degrees from Oxford University and a doctorate from Georgetown University.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Tell me how your book came to be about the 19th century as opposed to the common 20th-century story of suburbanization.
There’s a real gap in American Jewish history when it comes to the 19th century, chiefly because so many American Jews today trace their origins back to the generation who arrived between 1881 and 1924, the mass migration of Jews from from Eastern Europe. So there’s a sense that that’s when American Jewish history began. Of course, that’s not true at all.
The American Jewish community dates back to the 17th century and there was much innovation that laid the foundations for what would become institutionalized in the 20th century.
Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism. If they’ve treated it at all, they tend to be dismissive — you know, there was no substance, they just taught kids the 10 Commandments, it was run by these unprofessional volunteer female teachers, so it was feminized and feminine.
But there’s also a lot of celebration of Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children.
That’s the first indication I had that there might be more of a story here. Rebecca Gratz is lionized as being such a visionary and being so inventive in developing this incredible volunteer model for Jewish education for an immigrant generation that was mostly from Western Europe. And yet, by the beginning of the 20th century, [Jewish historians] say it has no value. So what’s the story there?
Two other things led me on the path to thinking that there was more of a story in this 19th-century moment. I did my Ph.D in Washington, D.C. And as I was searching through the holdings of the Library of Congress, there were tons and tons of Jewish catechisms.
“Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism,” says Dr. Laura Yares, author of the new book, “Jewish Sunday Schools.” (Courtesy of the author)
A catechism is a kind of creed, right? It’s a statement of religious beliefs. “These are things we believe as Jews.”
So Jewish catechisms had that, but they were also philosophical meditations in many ways. Typically, the first question of the catechism was, what is religion? And then the second question is, what is Jewish religion?
And then I started reading them. They were question-and-answer summaries of the whole of Judaism: belief, practices, holidays, Bible, you name it, that the children were expected to memorize. This idea that you’ve got to cram these kids with knowledge went against this historiographic dismissal of this period as being very thin and that kids were not really learning anything. The idea that children had a lot to learn is something that Sunday school educators actually really wrestle with during this period.
What was the other thing that led you to pursue this subject?
When I was beginning to research my dissertation, I was working as a Hebrew school teacher in a large Reform Hebrew school in Washington, D.C. And I remember very distinctively the rabbi coming in and addressing the teachers at the start of the school year. He said, “I don’t care if a student comes through this Hebrew school and they don’t remember anything that they learned. But I care that at the end of the year they feel like the temple is a place that they want to be, that they feel like they have relationships there and they have an (he didn’t use this word) ‘affective’ [emotional] connection.”
And so I’m sitting there by day at the Library of Congress, reading these catechisms that are saying, “Cram their heads with knowledge.” What is the relationship between Jewish education as a place where one is supposed to acquire knowledge and a place where one is supposed to feel something and to develop affective relationships? The swing between those two poles was happening as far back as the 19th century.
You write that owing to gaps in the archives, it was really hard to get an idea of the classroom experience. But to the degree that there’s a typical classroom experience in the 1860s, 1870s and you’re the daughter or grandchild of probably German-speaking Jewish immigrants, maybe working or lower middle class, what would Sunday school be like? I’m guessing the teacher would be a woman. Are you reading the Bible in English or Hebrew?
You are probably going for an hour or two on a Sunday morning. It’s a big room, and your particular class would have a corner of the room. It’s quite chaotic. Most of the teachers were female volunteers. They were either young and unmarried, or older women whose children had grown. Except for the students who are preparing for confirmation — the grand kind of graduation ritual for Sunday schools. Those classes were typically taught by the rabbi, if there was a rabbi associated with the school.
There would be a lot of reading out loud to the students with students being expected to repeat back what they had heard or write it down so they had a copy for themselves. Often the day would begin with prayers said in English, and often the reading of the Torah portion, typically in English, although in many Sunday schools, we do have children reporting they learned bits of Hebrew by rote memorization. Or they memorized the first chapters of the book of Genesis, for example, but I’m not sure that they quite understood what they memorized. “Ein Keloheinu” is a song that often children tell us [in archival materials] that they had memorized in Hebrew. They probably would have learned at least Hebrew script, and a little bit of Hebrew decoding. But it is fair to say that if they were reading the Bible, they were reading it mostly in English, because you have to remember that most of the women who were volunteering to teach in these schools came of age in a generation where Hebrew education wasn’t extended to women.
What’s the goal of these Sunday schools?
The Sunday school movement arose because there was a whole generation of immigrant children who did not have access to Jewish education, because their parents didn’t have either the economic capital or the social capital to become part of the established Jewish community. They couldn’t afford a seat in the synagogue, they couldn’t afford to send their children to congregational all-day or every-afternoon schools [which were among the few options for Jewish education when Gratz opened the Philadelphia Sunday school]. Sunday schools are really a very innovative solution to a problem of a lack of resources.
You also write that the founders of these supplementary schools want to defend children against “predatory evangelists.”
That was how Rebecca Gratz described her goal when she created the first Sunday school. She was very, very worried about the Jewish kids who were not receiving any kind of Hebrew school education. She talks about Protestant missionaries and teachers who would go out onto the street ringing the bell for Sunday school and offering various kinds of trinkets, and Jewish kids would get kind of swept into their Sunday schools. There was a very concrete need to give Jewish children somewhere else to go.
So Gratz and the people who created the first Hebrew Sunday school in Philadelphia looked at what the Protestants were doing and they saw that Protestant Sunday schools were providing very accessible places where kids could go and get a basic primer in their religious tradition.
The approach was to teach Judaism as a religion, as opposed to Judaism as a people or culture, to demonstrate that being Jewish was as compatible as Protestantism with being wholly American.
That is certainly part of it. It’s a demonstration that Judaism is compatible with American public life. But I think there’s actually a much bigger claim that the Sunday schools are making. The claim is not only that Judaism is as good as Protestantism, but that Judaism does religion better than Protestantism. These rabbis who were writing catechisms and teaching confirmation classes were saying that Judaism does liberal religion better than liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics and other kinds of liberal denominations. You see the same sentiment in the Pittsburgh Platform as well, which is the foundational platform of the Reform movement written in the 1880s. Sunday schools take that idea and bring it down to a grassroots level.
There are many, many fewer Jews in America in much of the 19th century, before the waves of Eastern European immigrants arrived beginning in the 1880s They didn’t really have strength in numbers, or the kind of self-confidence to have a system of day schools, yeshivas or heders, the elementary schools for all-day or every day Jewish instruction.
And this is also a community that has grown up at the same time as the birth of public education in America, independent of churches. That really emerged beginning on the East Coast in the 1840s.This generation of Americans really believes in the power of public education to craft an American public. It’s a project that 19th-century American Jews believe in and want to sustain. So Sunday schools don’t just become the preferred Jewish model because of lack of resources, but because American Jews really believe in the idea of public education.
What happens at the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Eastern Europeans with different models for Jewish education?
A new generation tries to reform Jewish education, led by a young educator from Palestine named Samson Benderly, who leads the new New York Bureau of Jewish Education. He tries to change American Jewish education to make it more professionalized, but to bring more traditionally inclined Jews on board he has to convince them that he doesn’t want to make more Sunday schools, because Sunday schools by the end of the 20th century had become very much associated with the Reform movement in a way that they weren’t when they were founded and for much of the 19th century.
A painting of Philadelphia philanthropist and Jewish education activist Rebecca Gratz by Thomas Sully. (The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia)
Benderly is surveying the scene of recent immigrants living in New York City [tenements] and other kinds of downtown environments, and his proposal is to create these community institutions for these dense communities, where children can be taught Hebrew in Hebrew. His disciples also created Jewish camps as a way to get children out of the inner cities and develop the muscular Zionist ideal of healthy bodies and a robust sense of Jewish collectivity.
You write that Benderly’s vision is a sort of masculine response to the “feminizing” perception of the Sunday schools.
These women teachers are recognizing that they’re being criticized for the kind of thinness of the Jewish education that they’re teaching in comparison to other models, but in periodicals like The American Jewess women are writing back and saying, “But you didn’t teach us Hebrew! I didn’t get that opportunity as a woman, so what do you expect?” It’s really important to note that the women did the best that they could in the time that they had available, and that they were the product of opportunities that were denied to them.
What lessons did you learn about Sunday school and Hebrew school education in the 20th century that relate to your research into the 19th century?
The move that is so decisive for shaping American Jewish education is suburbanization. Rather than having a large immigrant generation who are living in these tight ethnic enclaves, you have American Jewish children who are predominantly growing up in the suburbs, and socializing with children from all sorts of different backgrounds who are attending public schools. The place that you go to get your Jewish education is the synagogue supplemental school, which becomes the dominant model for American Jewish education up until today. Benderly might reflect that it looks a lot more like the Sunday school movement of the 19th century than his vision.
Today’s model is really a religious model. And by that I mean that students go to Hebrew school primarily to kind of check a religious box, to learn about the thing that makes them distinctive religiously, and to achieve a religious coming-of-age marker, which is the bar, bat or b mitzvah. Certainly the curriculum today is more diverse, embracing more aspects of traditional Judaism then you would have seen in a 19th-century Sunday school: more Hebrew, more of a sense of Jewish peoplehood, ethnic identity and Zionism of course. But the question that American Jews are increasingly asking themselves is, is this a model that they still want? So you may have seen that the Jewish Education Project published a report recently on supplemental schools, which saw that enrollment has really, really declined.
Sunday schools are based on a vision of Judaism as a set of a religious commitments that American Jews actualize through belonging to a synagogue and sending their children to a synagogue or a religious school, where they will learn primarily a set of religious skills: the ability to read from the Torah, the ability to decode Hebrew, the ability to navigate the siddur.
Is that still the vision that most American Jews have for what Judaism means to them? I think increasingly the answer seems to be no.
How else did experience in a Hebrew school classroom influence you? Did you access anything else when you were writing the book?
I think about the number of college kids and graduate students and empty nesters who are either volunteering or earning minimum wage, working at Hebrew schools, all over the country. That’s the labor force of American Judaism. These people also bring so much to the table. There are a lot of skills, dispositions and knowledge that don’t tend to get taken very seriously because this is a workforce that just gets kind of put into the category of “oh, they’re part time.” That made me look really closely in the historical archives to see if I could find anything out about the women who are volunteering to teach in Sunday schools. And what I found out was that [many] were public school teachers. And they brought a lot to the table. It was women in fact who were really pushing to make the Sunday school curriculum more experiential and to move away from rote memorization.
As a historian formed by feminist methods, I find it really important to recognize that these women were giving over what they had, as opposed to critiquing them for not teaching in a more traditional way. I think we need to pay attention when women are being scapegoated for problems that are described as problems of Jewish continuity. It blinds us to the role that women’s volunteerism has played in American Jewish life. This whole Sunday school movement was possible only because these women volunteered their time and largely were not paid.
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The post A new book made me appreciate Jewish Sunday schools — and the volunteer women who have powered them appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Is Lionel Messi a Zionist? The Argentine soccer star’s long history with Jewish and Israeli life, explained
(JTA) — Argentine soccer icon Lionel Messi, widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the sport, has built one of football’s most decorated careers.
Throughout his illustrious career, Messi has cultivated a measured public image, rarely commenting on politics or becoming involved in major public controversies. But the 39-year-old has occasionally made headlines for expressing support for Jewish causes and Israeli companies — and at times for being pulled into the tense geopolitical landscape of the Middle East by no doing of his own, including when a grandmother originally from Argentina credited him for saving her life when her Israeli kibbutz was attacked on Oct. 7, 2023.
Messi’s past has roared into public view during this year’s World Cup, in which Argentina plays Switzerland in the quarterfinals on Saturday. Some critics of Israel have surfaced his past activities and affiliations to make the case that opposing Argentina is the anti-Zionist choice. Many Israelis, meanwhile, favor the team.
Ahead of the game, here’s a look back at 10 moments from Messi’s career — presented chronologically — where he and his fame intersected with Jewish and Israeli culture through public appearances, peace initiatives, controversies and more.
1. In July 2013, Messi sent a message to the Argentine Maccabiah team, a greeting before the national delegation departed for the “Jewish Olympics” in Israel. It wasn’t the first time he demonstrated support for his country’s Jewish community — in 2011, he participated in a campaign for justice and memory of the victims of the 1994 AMIA Jewish center bombing that killed 85 people in Buenos Aires.
2. One month later, he visited the Western Wall on a “peace tour” with Barcelona F.C., the famed Spanish team with which Messi spent the majority of his career. The club hosted skills clinics for Israeli and Palestinian children and met Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
FC Barcelona player Lionel Messi controls a ball passed by Israeli President Shimon Peres during a training session on Aug. 4, 2013 in Tel Aviv. (Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)
3. In September 2014, Messi supported a “match for peace” in Rome organized by Pope Francis to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but he did not play due to an injury. Fellow Argentine great Diego Maradona and Israeli player Yossi Benayoun also participated, alongside stars from Russia, Cameroon, Italy, France and Brazil.
4. In 2016, Messi was slammed as “Jewish” and a “Zionist” by Egyptian officials after donating his soccer cleats to a charity in Egypt. Then-Egyptian Football Federation spokesman Azmi Mogahed phoned in to the show to criticize Messi: “I know he’s Jewish, he donated to Israel and visited the Wailing Wall and whatever. … We don’t need his shoes and Egypt’s poor don’t need help from someone with Jewish or Zionist citizenship.”
5. In June 2018, Argentina’s national team canceled a friendly match with Israel’s national team following pressure from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. A boycott campaign sponsored by BDS Argentina was launched using the motto “Argentina don’t go,” or #ArgentinaNoVayas. The Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires tweeted that the match was canceled due to “the threats against Messi that logically generated the solidarity of his teammates.”
Lionel Messi, then with FC Barcelona, puts a paper with wishes in a crack in the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, in Jerusalem during a team trip to Israel and the West Bank, Aug. 4, 2013. (Oliver Weiken/AFP via Getty Images)
6. Two months later, FIFA suspended the head of the Palestinian soccer body for threats against Messi. Jibril Rajoub, who had lobbied for action by FIFA against Israel, was suspended for a year after he urged supporters to burn photos and player jerseys if Messi or the Argentinian national team had shown up for the friendly match that was canceled.
7. In 2019, Argentina’s national soccer team announced it would play a friendly match against Uruguay in Tel Aviv that November, following the cancellation a year prior. The match was again targeted by the BDS movement, with protestors demonstrating outside a training camp in Barcelona and calling on Messi not to participate. Despite the opposition, the game went on as planned, with Messi scoring a goal in front of a sold out crowd of 29,000 fans — including Israeli President and soccer fan Reuven Rivlin — at Bloomfield Stadium. (Messi would return to Israel twice with Paris Saint-Germain in 2022, beating Maccabi Haifa in two Champions League matches.)
8. In 2020, Messi signed a three-year contract to become a brand ambassador for the Israeli company OrCam, which makes devices to help the visually impaired. It wasn’t his first time promoting an Israeli company: in December 2017, the Tel Aviv-based Sirin Labs hired him as its global ambassador.
90-year-old Ester Cunio says in a new Fuente Latino documentary that she bonded with a Hamas terrorist over the soccer star Lionel Messi on Oct. 7. (Screenshot)
9. On Oct. 7, 90-year-old Kibbutz Nir Oz resident Esther Cunio name-dropped Messi to a Hamas terrorist who had come to kidnap her, likely saving her life. During the attack, Cunio asked the assailant if he liked soccer before telling him, “I’m from where Messi is from.” Cunio then made an appeal to Messi to help rescue her grandson.
10. Last month, after Messi scored a hat trick in a 3-0 Argentina victory over Algeria in the World Cup, an Algerian broadcaster blamed the “Jewish lobby” for a controversial non-call on a potential penalty that could have penalized Messi. “Messi is protected by the Jewish lobby,” analyst Mustafa Mazzouzi said. “This lobby controls the world, they run it however they want as if they were the mafia. [FIFA President] Infantino doesn’t want us to do well.” He added, “We have political stances regarding Western Sahara and the Palestinian issue, and therefore they don’t want us to do well.” Elsewhere, a Palestinian TikTok content creator with over 350,000 followers suggested that Argentina deserved to lose the World Cup because of Messi’s numerous associations with Israel.
Messi wears No. 10 — typically reserved for the best player on a soccer club — but since there are 11 players on the pitch, we’ll add a bonus.
11. The World Zionist Organization used a play on words involving Messi in a 2020 Hebrew educational video, explaining that the Hebrew word “mesibah” means “party,” or “fiesta” in Spanish. In Spanish, it sounds like “Messi va,” or “Messi goes.” In other words, “if Messi goes, it’s a party.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Is Lionel Messi a Zionist? The Argentine soccer star’s long history with Jewish and Israeli life, explained appeared first on The Forward.
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I read George Eliot’s Zionist epic — the Jewish bits are the worst part
If I’m being honest, I did not enroll in a course on famed English novelist George Eliot’s final book, Daniel Deronda, out of any particular interest in the book. The last Victorian novel I read was Wuthering Heights, and that was for English class in high school. I’ve never attempted Middlemarch.
I just missed the classroom, the ability to dig into and discuss texts with a group. I was hungry to read something longer and harder than I might without some structure. The Daniel Deronda class, taught by comparative literature and Judaic studies scholar Danielle Drori at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, was simply the most reading-heavy course on offer in the month of June.
But Daniel Deronda, it turns out, introduced the idea of Zionism — or a sort of early version of it — to England, and to Europe. I had no idea that Eliot was so early to the idea of Zionism that she beat Theodor Herzl, the man hailed as the Father of Zionism, to the idea by two decades. Some of Israel’s early leaders loved the book so much they kept copies of it with them at all times. On the flip side, Palestinian scholar Edward Said was so frustrated by the novel’s depictions of a Jewish homeland as a noble aspiration that he wrote a lengthy aside on it in his own book, The Question of Palestine.
Daniel Deronda follows the story of the titular character, a young man raised as the ward of a member of the English gentry, who discovers his real parents were Jews. (I’ll apologize here for spoilers, but the book is 150 years old so I hope you’ll forgive me.) Except the novel is actually mostly about someone else altogether: a deeply flawed, self-centered and very compelling young English woman named Gwendolen Harleth who is grappling with the clash of her own desires against the boundaries and expectations of society, womanhood and marriage.
For the first half, I was confused about how this novel could possibly have anything Jewish to say. Gwendolen was fascinating, but Deronda gets far fewer pages and less emotional depth; his main character trait is being the Good Guy. Deronda is so famously flat and unconvincing that famed literary critic F.R. Leavis argued he should be excised from the novel and it should be republished as Gwendolen Harleth, freed from “the insufferably boring stretches” — those are the Jewish parts — that “loom so large.”
And then there are the other main Jewish characters. A beautiful damsel in distress named Mirah is very sweet and dainty but has no other personality to speak of — a manic pixie dream girl before her time. And the spiritually zealous Mordecai is so obsessed with the idea that Jews must return to Israel that he literally speaks of nothing else.
Most of the argument for Zionism, and Judaism more generally, is delivered via Mordecai’s didactic monologues in which he makes unconvincing grand statements like “Israel is the heart of mankind.” At the end, Daniel and Mirah wed and sail off to Jerusalem to save Judaism, and perhaps all of Europe. (How, exactly, one man who only recently discovered he was Jewish will affect such great change upon arriving in the Holy Land is so left so mystical and unclear that Henry James joked that for all anyone knew, Deronda and Mirah were simply having tea parties once they got to Israel.)
I’m not saying I agree about cutting out all the Jewish characters, as Leavis proposed. But I do think that they’re boring, unconvincing and didactic — as did my entire class. This is the case for Zionism that inspired Eliezer Ben Yehuda to resuscitate the Hebrew language? This is the novel Golda Meir kept on her bedside table?
Jews today are still writing about how her book helped inspire and affirm their own Zionism and Jewish identity. It’s true that some of her descriptions of Jewish history, and the yearning for a national identity, are moving. And Eliot painted an impressively prescient vision of the debate over Israel’s founding that would unfold over the next century.
Yet Eliot’s portrayal of Jews feels more than flat: It’s antisemitic. Of course, Eliot is a product of her era, so it’s unsurprising that some of her Jewish side characters are depicted as lowly and ugly, even as some of the other more minor Jews are human and well-rounded. But the real antisemitism is Eliot’s fetishization of Jews.
Her Jewish characters aren’t allowed to be real people; they’re figureheads. Eliot did her research — she was well-versed in biblical studies thanks to her evangelical education, and in Jewish mysticism thanks to her translation work. The book is peppered with references to Jewish sages like Ibn Ezra. But the Jewish characters speak far more of grand spiritual and political aims than they do of daily life, like prayer or keeping kosher. The Jewish characters serve as an instrument to inspire Gwendolen to live a more meaningful life. And Gwendolen stands in for England more generally — the message being, seemingly, that Jews will inspire Christian England to find its own grand national identity.
Reading Daniel Deronda, I was struck by its similarities not with founding Zionists of yore, but with today’s Christian Zionism. Eliot’s interest in Jews seems to stem from her worries about the vacuousness of English life, and her hope that Jews might somehow save Western society — Christian society, that is. She describes Judaism’s ancient roots as inherently noble, almost mystically powerful. But ultimately, it’s the same vibe as the preachers today who wrap themselves in Torahs or blow the shofar; they want to co-opt some mystery of Judaism to elevate their own beliefs and messages.
We’ve come a long way in social acceptance since Eliot’s time, yet this misconception is surprisingly sticky. Reading Daniel Deronda — or at least its Jewish parts — felt not dissimilar from watching the hit Christian TV show The Chosen, which mines Judaism for a sense of mysterious authenticity, or Amazon’s House of David, which gives Judaism an esoteric Game of Thrones-adjacent magnificence.
That exalted depiction might seem flattering on the surface, but Judaism isn’t mysterious or ancient; it’s very much alive. It’s the everyday practice and identity of millions of people who live in the U.S., and in Israel and in Europe. And as is so clear in Daniel Deronda, the more magical you make us, the less human we get to be.
The post I read George Eliot’s Zionist epic — the Jewish bits are the worst part appeared first on The Forward.
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What I learned from 180 pounds of Yiddish books, one ‘interesting and complicated’ Jewish man, and Jorge Luis Borges
I’ve never met Harris Saltzberg, but one day last summer, I went to his house to abduct 180 pounds of his Yiddish books. He lived in a sturdy brown-brick co-op in Chelsea. In the lobby, there was Roz Chastian aroma of long-simmered onions and mothballs, with a subtle undertone of feet.
I took the elevator to the eleventh floor. Once I’d infiltrated Harris’ apartment, I began to get a sense of his personality. From the posters on the kitchen walls, I deduced that Harris liked Van Gogh and Martha Graham. From his box of cassette tapes, I got a taste of his cultured, klezmer-forward musical palate: Puccini Famous Arias sat next to Miriam Kressyn’s Yiddish Folk Songs. Pavarotti and Marilyn Horne kept company with Sidor Belarsky and Jennie Goldstein.
Before I go further, I should clarify: I did not burglarize Harris’ house. I was there as a “zamlerin,” a volunteer collector and schlepper of Yiddish books for the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. I joined the international legion, some 160-zamlers-strong, at the end of a summer internship at the Center two years ago. Since then, every few months or so, I get a call or an email from an older Jew. Some Yiddish books have fallen into their hands, or maybe the books have been in the family for a long time. We tend to meet at their houses. (Once, though, I met a guy at his synagogue and sat through a full service for the first time in Hashem-knows-how-long.)
Wherever we meet, the pass-off process always feels ceremonial, more like the adoption of a child than the transfer of objects. We schmooze a bisl in Yiddish, a bisl in English while we load up the books, stacking them inside cardboard boxes like a game of 3D tetris. Sometimes, like a Yiddish-speaking Neanderthal, I’ll sound out the title of a book, and my host will light up like an electric menorah, turn the book over, rub its spine up and down, and tell me all about it. This? Oh, that’s Di Yeshiva. See, you can even see Chaim Grade’s autograph on the inside flap. That? Oh, that’s the Yiddish Kalevala. Naturally.
But zamling for Harris was different from zamling for other people, because for one thing, Harris was dead. His niece told me that Harris’ close friend, Andy, would be there to help me pack up the books. Andy was waiting in the lobby when I got there. He was a tall and weathered man of Irish extraction, about 75. His hooded blue eyes and the smoke on his deep, gravelly voice gave me the impression that he’d seen a lot in his time, like a hardbitten reporter in a noir novel. Except, Andy clarified, he was actually in publishing.
He didn’t say much after that.
Harris’ Yiddish bookshelf was right by the front door, so while I did a preliminary inventory, ooing and cooing in a way that would have annoyed me if another person were doing it, Andy shuffled through Harris’ living room and kitchen, shifting his chairs, stacking his dishware, emptying his cabinets. Even with Harris gone for months, the apartment hadn’t lost the ascetic spareness that only monks and longtime bachelors seem capable of cultivating. Dust had already settled over the few wooden tables and shelves. The rugs looked frayed, and a thin white light seeped into the room from in between the vertical blinds. There was a bottle of Cinzano Rosso sitting on the kitchen counter, forever half-finished. It seemed like a place Bernard Malamud might have cooked up for a story about an erudite bachelor character.
But what sort of erudite bachelor, exactly? Before I’d come over, I’d found a few clues on the internet. A Facebook obituary from Camp Kinderland described Harris as “an interesting and complicated person,” adding that he was “often very funny, often thoughtful and generous and warm.” He sounded prickly-sweet, not unlike a jackfruit. I’d also found a LinkedIn profile for one Harris Saltzberg who described his job as “Observer of aging,” employed at “Life.” That sounded about right.
But it was the books that brought Harris into focus. On the shelf, I found at least three Yiddish textbooks. “Harris was insecure about his Yiddish,” Andy told me later, when we were lugging boxes to the lobby. But from the looks of it, he shouldn’t have been. He had the big names on his shelf — Y.L. Peretz, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem (who, by the way, is so abundant at the Yiddish Book Center that you can sometimes get a copy of his collected works for free). But Harris was hardcore. He was a proper Yiddish junkie; he’d bought books that would have been challenging to get through even in English, like Klassenkamfn in Altertum, Class Struggles in Antiquity, by a man named Kalman Marmor. He’d collected landsmanshaft periodicals from tiny Besarabbian shtetls, school almanacs from 1929, an instructional book on Yiddish stenography, song books, and one baffling, proto-woke rhyming tale about a white thug with notably sharp elbows (“sharfn elboygn”) who torments a Black boy with sad eyes (“troyerike oygen”).
Sometimes, I would find signs of a bygone reader— maybe Harris, maybe somebody else —scrawled on a book’s inside cover, or tucked away on a scrap of paper. “To Rivke with Love — May you two get well acquainted!” wrote Manya on Jan. 30, 1959. I found grocery lists, and one detailed pencil sketch of a dog. I found a scrap of paper where Harris had scrawled in cursive ciphers, “Tammy Baker,” “Uniforms,” and something that might have been “human want,” or maybe “human meat.”
I had never met Harris and never would. But even as I stuffed the boxes to busting, I felt reluctant to throw anything out. When somebody is alive, odd bobs like scratch paper are replaceable junk. But when somebody is gone, everything becomes evidence that they lived. Maybe that is why Harris saved all those periodicals from towns that could no longer be found on any map, advertisements for pamphlets of essays and satire by long-dead Jews in the Bronx, stenography manuals, children’s books. So long as even one witness to a fading world remained, that world wouldn’t truly be gone.
There is a story by Jorge Luis Borges called “The Witness,” or “El Testigo” that I have thought about several times since visiting Harris’ apartment. It is about the last pagan in England. As church bells ring, he lies dying in a stable in the shadow of a new stone church. This man is the last living person to remember worshipping the wooden idol of the pagan god Woden. “Before dawn he would be dead and with him would die, never to return, the last firsthand images of the pagan rites,” Borges writes. “The world would be poorer when this Saxon was no more.”
In the moment, though, I was not thinking much about books beyond how many of them I could cram into one box. As Andy and I hauled the book boxes down to an extremely patient Uber driver — six boxes total, around 30 pounds each — he told me how Harris had loved opera. He talked about his own two brothers, and about his upcoming trip to the motherland, Donegal, which he taught me to pronounce “Don-ee-GAL.” In the car to the UPS store, we kvetched about how hungry we were. At the curb, he helped me unload the boxes. Then he bent down and hugged me goodbye. I was sorry to see him go. I wondered if we would ever see each other again.
It’s been over a year since that day. Harris’ apartment probably belongs to someone else now, and as for the books, they are living a literally chilled-out retirement in the temperature-controlled vaults of the Yiddish Book Center. I wonder whose fingers will touch those pages next. And whose will be the last. After all, Borges muses, there is a last for everything. There was a day when the last eyes to see Christ closed forever. When the last man to have loved Helen of Troy died. When the last person to remember the Battle of Junín was buried. “Something, or an infinite number of things, dies in each death,” he writes. “What will die with me when I die?”
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