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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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Mayor Mamdani, please step back from the brink
For much of the last year, I’ve defended Mayor Zohran Mamdani against critics who have accused him of antisemitism. And I continue to do so now: Mamdani is not antisemitic, and he has done great things for New York City, inspiring younger voters, improving the quality of life in the city with progressive polities, and being the most accessible mayor in at least a generation.
But when it comes to Israel/Palestine, Mamdani has acted recklessly, wrongheadedly and irresponsibly. It is one thing to make strident, inaccurate and extreme statements as a progressive activist; indeed, nothing about Mamdani’s recent comments about Israel and its prime minister are new to me. I have heard the same things over and over in progressive spaces. But it is another to do so as the mayor of a city with 960,000 Jews living in it, at least a quarter of whom support its current government.
As someone who has been sharply, publicly critical both of the Netanyahu government and of the “anti-antisemitism” industry, I urge the mayor to step back from the brink, reflect on the office he now holds, and consider the responsibilities that come with it.
It is too soon to say whether Mamdani’s recent comments inspired the apparent hate crime that took place on the Upper West Side last week, in which a Jewish person and an Asian person were stabbed by someone who allegedly shouted “Allahu Akbar.” Personally, I doubt that they did — hate crimes are rarely quid pro quo — but time will tell. But can you blame Jewish New Yorkers for connecting the dots?
Whatever their relationship to the attack, Mayor Mamdani’s recent comments were wrongheaded in at least four ways.
First, they were reckless. Yes, Mamdani has condemned antisemitism and all other forms of bigotry. Yes, his comments were about a “nation-state,” in his words, not a people. But do we really expect would-be criminals and terrorists to parse the difference between extremely harsh criticisms of the Jewish state and the Jewish people who support it? When the mayor says the Jewish state has committed genocide, and that everyone with eyes can see this is true, it is entirely foreseeable that a bigot will take it out on Jewish people.
Zohran Mamdani is no longer a young DSA activist preaching to the left-wing choir in the basement of a community center in Brooklyn. He is the mayor of New York City, a kingmaker, and a rising star in the Democratic Party. And with that power comes increased responsibility. Even if his criticisms are justified, it is reckless for a mayor to present them the way he did. Indeed, if this happened on the Right, we would call it “stochastic terrorism.”
Second, Mamdani’s comments were careless with the facts. His statement was a cri de coeur, full of far-left platitudes but rife with factual errors.
“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,” said the mayor of New York City on July 21. Is that accurate? It is not. Yes, Netanyahu has been charged with war crimes, and there is indeed an ICC warrant for his arrest — but he has not been convicted. He is not (yet) a war criminal. Is he the architect of a genocide? Maybe, or maybe not; that, too, has not yet been established by any legal authority.
But Mamdani isn’t resting on legal authority; his case is based solely on outrage. In his words: “Anyone, with their eyes, with their heart, with their conscience, should recognize the devastation he has wrought, and understand that he belongs before a court of law.” So that is the standard of review? What my eyes, heart and conscience say?
Tell me, Mr. Mayor, how do my eyes discern the intent to destroy an entire people, which is a necessary part of the legal crime of genocide? Does my heart know the heart of a leader halfway around the world? In the absence of the documentary evidence that underlies every genocide conviction of the last 70 years, is my conscience proof enough?
This isn’t lawfulness — it is demagoguery, and I find it frightening.
Now, while it is fashionable in this decade to take an extreme position and double down on it, I am taking no position on these questions. It does seem to me that the State of Israel committed war crimes in Gaza, and the nature of the destruction of Gaza was absolutely horrible, clearly out of proportion to military necessity. And if there is evidence that Israel’s decisionmakers shared the intentions of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who have called for Palestinians to be ejected from Gaza, then, tragically, the state did in fact commit genocide.
But we can’t know this by our eyes, heart, and conscience; for that, we need investigations, a trial and a legal process. It is lawless to assume the conclusion of such a process before it has even begun.
Third, Mamdani’s comments betray his responsibility as mayor.
Of the 960,000 Jews in New York City, at least a third (but probably more) identify as Zionist, and a quarter basically support Israel’s actions in Gaza, or at least understand them in the context of the mass murders and rapes of Oct. 7 and the intransigence of Hamas in the months thereafter. After all, when the hostages were finally released, the bombs (mostly) stopped dropping. Had Hamas surrendered sooner, this position says, fewer Gazans would have been killed.
This is not my view, as I have said. But it is the view of at least 250,000 New Yorkers. How, Mr. Mayor, are they now supposed to regard themselves as citizens of New York? Their own mayor has said that they support genocide and war crimes, as anyone with eyes, a heart and a conscience can see. There is no reasonable disagreement here, no dickering over the Genocide Convention or the ratio of civilian deaths in urban warfare. There is only one truth, and those 250,000 New Yorkers are — well, what other word is there — evil.
Has any mayor ever said such a thing about his own constituents?
Sure, mayors take political stances, including about Israel/Palestine. Eric Adams took several controversial, and to my mind misguided, ones. But I cannot find an example in recent history of a mayor saying that a quarter million of his own constituents are either evil or blind or both.
And then to be shocked that a bigot might be inspired by them?
To repeat, I am not saying many things here. I am not saying the mayor is antisemitic; he is not. I am not saying the destruction of Gaza didn’t happen, or was justified, or was entirely Hamas’ fault; it was not. I am not saying that Israel didn’t commit genocide or war crimes; perhaps it did. I am only saying that a mayor should not make conclusory, incendiary statements that directly impugn the morality — even the humanity — of a quarter of a million of his constituents.
Perhaps worst of all, though, is how Mamdani’s rash comments have set back the cause of peace and emboldened the opponents of coexistence.
First, he has strengthened the ADL, AIPAC, and Netanyahu himself, all of whom have gleefully chanted versions of “we told you so.” He has validated both the fears of Jewish New Yorkers and the calumnies of the anti-antisemitism crowd, while making his liberal-but-not-radical supporters look like idiots. He has played directly into the hands of Israel’s staunchest defenders.
And in so doing, he hasn’t advanced the cause of justice, safety, and dignity for five million Palestinians who live in Palestine itself. On the contrary, by so greatly strengthening the hand of their enemies, I would argue he has done the opposite.
The post Mayor Mamdani, please step back from the brink appeared first on The Forward.
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Experimenting with translation on today’s Yiddish stage
„פֿרײַנד און פֿײַנט, ברוכים הבאים! זײַט באַגריסט צו דער װעלט־באַרימטער װעלט־מײַסטערשאַפֿט פֿון ייִדישע קללות!“
אַזוי רעוועט אויף דער בינע אַן אָנזאָגערין (געשפּילט פֿון װיװי לאַקס) אױף ייִדיש, אײדער אַ צווייטער אָנזאָגער (פּאָל קענדלער) זעצט איבער דעם זאַץ אױף ענגליש, אָנהייבנדיק מיט דער פֿראַזע !Friends and foes.
שטייענדיק אין אַ מיזרח־לאָנדאָנער טעאַטער האָט קענדלער מיט אַ געדאַכטן שופֿר פֿאַרבעטן די צװײ קאָמאַנדעס פֿון „קללה־קעמפֿערס“ אויפֿצוטרעטן. די זיבן „שדים פֿון חילול־הכּבֿוד“, אױף בינע־לינקס, האָבן בײז געקוקט אױף די פֿינף קעמפֿערס פֿון „גולם פֿונעם עולם“, אױף בינע־רעכטס. די ריכטערין — אַן איבערגעבױגענע, 3,000-יאָר־אַלטע „דבֿורה פֿון דער תּורה“ — איז געזעסן אױפֿן שופֿט־בענקל. צװײ ספּאָרט־קאָמענטאַטאָרן אױף דער הינטערבינע האָבן אַנאַליזירנט דעם גאַנצן פֿאַרמעסט.
די קעמפֿערס האָבן גענומען שעלטן זײערע קעגנערס, קודם־כּל מיט מילדע זידלװערטער און שפּעטער מיט שװערע װייטיקן, קרענק און טױטקאָמישן שלימזל׃ „זאָל די לעבער דיר שטיקלעכװײַז אַרױספֿליִען דורך דער נאָז“!
אױף יעדער קללה האָבן די קעמפֿערס רעאַגירט אויף אַן איבערגעטריבענעם אופֿן, אַזױ װי מע וואָלט זיי געשלאָגן מיט אַ גװאַלדיקן זעץ. פֿאַר ווייטיק האָבן די אַקטיאָרן זיך געהאַלטן בײַ די זײַטן, אומגעפֿאַלן — ווידער אויפֿגעשטאַנען און דערלאַנגט צוריק. בשעת־מעשׂה האָבן די קאָמענטאַטאָרן איבערגעזעצט אַלע קללות אױף ענגליש — אָבער אױך אַרײַנגעװאָרפֿן אײגענע װיציקע באַמערקונגען. „ממש אַ פּאַטש אינעם דורכגאָס פֿון האָרמוז!“ האָט איינער אויסגערופֿן.
אַזוי ווי עס טרעפֿט אָפֿט הײַנט בײַ ייִדישע פֿאָרשטעלונגען וווּ ס׳רובֿ צוקוקער קענען נישט קיין ייִדיש, האָט מען נאָך יעדן וויץ געהערט צװײ כװאַליעס געלעכטער: אײן רעאַקציע אױף דער ייִדישער קללה גופֿא און אַ צװײטע — אַ העכערע רעאַקציע אױף דער איבערזעצונג.
שפּראַך־עקספּערימענטן אױף דער בינע
דער קללה־פֿאַרמעסט איז געװען בלױז אײנער פֿון פֿערצן קורצע אַקטן אין דער ערשטער אָװנט־פּראָגראַם פֿון די „לאָנדאָנער ייִדיש־שפּילערס“ אין יוני. די נײַע טרופּע איז אָנגעפֿירט דורך פֿינף באַקאַנטע טוערס אין דער אָרטיקער ייִדיש־סבֿיבֿה׃ סאָניאַ גאָלאַנס, װיװי לאַקס, תּמרה מיצנער, שמואל־לײבל אָגין און דוד שנײַדער (נישט קײן קרובֿ מײַנער).
כּמעט יעדע סצענע האָט אײַנגעגלידערט די ענגלישע שפּראַך אױף אַן אוניקאַלן אופֿן.
פֿאַר די צװײ קאָמעדיע־פּיעסקעלעך פֿון שלום־עליכמען און די װײניק באַקאַנטע מעלאָדראַמע פֿון ש. אַן־סקין האָט מען פּראָיעקטירט ענגלישע איבערקעפּלעך הינטער דער בינע. אין רובֿ פֿאַלן, אָבער, האָבן די שפּילערס גערעדט אָדער געזונגען אַ געמיש. אין אַן אױסצוג פֿון „דער דיבוק“, למשל, האָבן געװיסע אַקטיאָרן איבערגעזעצט וואָס אַנדערע אױף דער בינע האָבן געזאָגט. אין אַ סצענע פֿון שנײַדערס אָריגינעלער דראַמע, „לאָזן סטאַלינען לאַכן“, רעדן די ייִדישע פּאַרשױנים ייִדיש, בעת די קאָמוניסטישע פֿונקציאָנאַרן רעדן ענגליש.
אין אײן סצענע האָט מען בכלל נישט צוגעשטעלט קײן איבערזעצונגען׃ אַ נײַע ייִדיש־אַדאַפּטאַציע פֿונעם קאַנאַדער קינדערביכל „מױרעס געבורטסטאָג“ פֿון ראָבערט מונש. תּמרה מיצנער האָט נישט נאָר פֿאַרטײַטשט, פֿאַרבעסערט, דראַמאַטיזירט און רעזשיסירט די מעשׂה, נאָר אױך געשפּילט די הויפּטראָלע.
די סופֿליאָרשע תּמרה גליסאָן־פֿרידבערג האָט אַרײַנגעפֿירט די סצענע מיט אַ קורצער ענגלישער הקדמה און איז פּלוצלינג נעלם געװאָרן, צוזאַמען מיט דער ענגלישער שפּראַך.
דער סיפּור־המעשׂה פֿון „מױרעס געבורטסטאָג“ איז אַ פּשוטער. מױרע פֿאַרבעט אַלע קינדער פֿון איר גאַנצער עלעמענטאַר־שול אױף אַ שׂימחה בײַ זיך אין דער הײם. אַזאַ סך הונגעריקע קינדערלעך! װאָס טוט מען — און װאָס עסט מען?
אויף דער בינע האָט מען געשפּילט די קאָמעדיע זײער „פֿיזיש“. במשך פֿון דער סצענע האָט מיצנער איבערגעחזרט אַלע קלאַסן וואָס זי האָט פֿאַרבעטן אויף איר געבוירן־טאָג שׂימחה (קלאַס א׳, קלאַס ב׳…) און יעדעס מאָל האָט זי געניצט די זעלבע איבערגעטריבענע אָרעם־באַװעגונגען — אַ פֿיזישער פֿאָרם פֿון טעאַטער מחוץ ווערטער.
איך אַליין האָב קױם באַמערקט אַז עס פֿעלן די איבערזעצונגען. נאָר מײַן זיץ־שכנטע האָט דאָס יאָ באַמערקט. „װאָס איז געװאָרן פֿון די איבערקעפּלעך?“ האָט זי מיר געשעפּטשעט. „עפּעס אַ טעכנישער פֿעלער?“
ווי עס ווײַזט זיך אַרויס, איז דאָס בפֿירוש נישט געווען קיין טעות.
דער עולם איז דאָך נישט קײן גולם
סאָפֿי אַבלעט, אַן אַקטריסע פֿון דער טרופּע, האָט דערצײלט אַז איר יאַפּאַנישער חבֿר אין עולם, נישט קײן ייִדיש־רעדער, האָט פֿאַרשטאַנען „מױרעס געבורטסטאָג“ אױף אַן אַנדער מדרגה מחוץ דער שפּראַך. הגם ער האָט נישט געכאַפּט דעם גאַנצן סוזשעט, האָט ער אָפּגעשאַצט די קינדערשע פּאַרשױנים, זײער באַשײַמפּערלעכע פֿרײד און דערקװיקונג.
אַבלעט האַלט אַז מע דאַרף מוטיקן דעם עולם „זיך מער אומצוקוקן“ אויף דער סצענע, װײַל אַנישט װעט מען בעיקר לײענען די אייבערקעפּלעך און „פֿאַרפֿעלן די װיזועלע דערפֿאַרונג“. די איבערזעצונגען, פֿון אַבי װאָסער פֿאָרמאַט, שטעלן מיט זיך פֿאָר קאָמפּראָמיסן. בקיצור׃ נישטאָ קײן אוניװערסאַלע לײזונג.
דער הױפּט־רעזשיסאָר דוד שנײַדער האָט מיר באַשריבן די גאַנצע פּראָגראַם — װאָס הײסט אױף ענגליש „Yiddish Theatre Reboot“ — װי אַ רײ עקספּערימענטן: „אָט איז דער בופֿעט [פֿון סטראַטעגיעס]. װאָס האָט גערירט דעם עולם? װי אַזױ האָט דאָס געװירקט אױף די אַרטיסטן די נישט ייִדיש־רעדנדיקע? װי אַזױ האָבן געאַרבעט די פֿאַרשײדענע עקספּערימענטן אַרײַנצונעמען ענגליש אינעם סצענאַר?“
צװײ־שפּראַכיקײט הינטער די קוליסן
דער אַנסאַמבל שטעלט מיט זיך פֿאָר אַ מין „װען־דיאַגראַם“: אײן קרײַז מענטשן געניטע אױף דער בינעקונסט און אַ צװײטער קרײַז מענטשן באַהאַװנטע מיט ייִדיש. אַ קלײנע צאָל ייִדיש־רעדנדיקע, פּראָפֿעסיאָנעלע אַקטיאָרן פֿאַרבינדט בײדע קרײַזן.
מע האָט אױך עקספּערימענטירט הינטער די קוליסן, בײַ די װאַרשטאַטן און רעפּעטיציעס, װוּ די 20 שפּילערס זענען זיך צונױפֿגעקומען. אַ טײל האָבן נישט תּיכּף געכאַפּט די בינע־אָנװײַזונגען ווי למשל: װעלכע זײַט איז „בינע־רעכטס“? — און אַנדערע האָבן זיך געבראָכן די צונג אױף די רעפּליקן.
דער אַקטיאָר בען װאַרדי האָט פֿאַרגליכן דעם ייִדיש־טעאַטער מיט זײַנע ייִדיש־לעקציעס: „קײן מאָל װעל איך נישט פֿאַרגעסן די װערטער װאָס איך האָב געזאָגט אױף דער בינע. זײ ׳קלעפּן זיך׳ דאָרט אַ סך פֿעסטער װי אין קלאַסצימער. איך האָב זײ צוגעבונדן צו עפּעס פֿרײדיקס, קינסטלערישס און שאַפֿערישס. דאָס פֿאַרזיגלט זײ אין מײַן מוח.“
די שפּילערס האָבן צוגעהאָלפֿן אײנער דעם צװײטן. בײַ די רעפּעטיציעס האָט מען געמאַכט אַ פּאַמעלעכן איבערגאַנג פֿון ענגליש אױף ייִדיש — און געפּרוּװט צו שפּילן דראַמאַטישער, ייִדישלעכער טאַקע, נישט „פֿון האַלדז אַרױף“ (ד״ה, בלױזן מיטן קאָפּ און מיטן קול), װי אין ענגלישן טעאַטער.
שנײַדער, 63, געדענקט נאָך דעם ייִדיש־טעאַטער פֿון אַ מאָל. זײַנע באָבע־זײדע זענען געװען ייִדיש־אַקטיאָרן און טעאַטער־מאַכערס. אין די 1980ער יאָרן האָט ער אָנגעהויבן שרײַבן אַ דיסערטאַציע בײַם אָקספֿאָרד־אוניװערסיטעט לגבי ייִדיש־דראַמעס. אָבער אַנטשטאָט צו שרײַבן אַקאַדעמישע אַנאַליזן האָט ער צום סוף געשריבן אײגענע סצענאַרן און געשפּילט קאָמעדיע אין טעאַטער, טעלעװיזיע און קינאָ.
שנײַדער געפֿינט זיך אין סאַמע מיטן דיאַגראַם.
מגדל בבֿל׃ אַן אוראַלטע מעשׂה
מע דאַרף נישט מײנען, אַז די לאָנדאָנער ייִדיש־שפּילערס ראַנגלען זיך מיט שפּאָגל־נײַע פּראָבלעמען, אָדער אַז יעדער אײנער אין אַ ייִדישן טעאַטער האָט פֿריִער געקענט „דעם קיניגינס ייִדיש“.
לױטן רומענישן ייִדיש־רעזשיסאָר אַלעקסאַנדער האַוזפֿאַטער האָט דער ייִדישער טעאַטער זינט בראשית — 1876 אין רומעניע, מיט פּונקט 150 יאָרן צוריק — תּמיד געהאַט אַ לינגװיסטיש געמישטן עולם. טאַקע דערפֿאַר זענען די זינגלידער, דער ספּעקטאַקל און דאָס איבערגעזאַלצענע שפּילן אַזױ צענטראַל.
אינעם מלוכישן ייִדיש־טעאַטער פֿון בוקאַרעשט, װאָס האָט זייער אַ לאַנגן ייִחוס, שפּילט מען עד־היום אױף מאַמע־לשון מיט רומענישע איבערקעפּלעך — כאָטש נישט די אַקטיאָרן און נישט דער עולם קענען הײַנט האַלטן אַ שמועס אױף דער שפּראַך.
שױן אין די 1950ער יאָרן האָט דער בוקאַרעשטער טעאַטער פֿאַרמאָגט אַ הײַ־טעק־סיסטעם פֿאַר אױדיאָ־איבערזעצונגען. קינדװײַז פֿלעג האַוזפֿאַטער דאָרט אױסלײַען אַ הער־אַפּאַראַט אינעם פֿאָיע און אַרײַנשטעקן די שנור אין אַ שטעפּסל בײַ זײַן זיץ. דורך אײן אױער האָט ער זיך צוגעהערט צו די אַקטיאָרן אױף ייִדיש, און דורכן צװײטן — צום רומעניש־דאָלמעטשער, װאָס האָט אױף אַ באַלקאָן געשושקעט אין מיקראָפֿאָן אַרײַן.
האַוזפֿאַטערס טאַטע, זיצנדיק לעבן אים, האָט נישט געדאַרפֿט קײן איבערזעצונג. ס׳האָט נישט אויסגעמאַכט וואָס דער טאַטע האָט געלאַכט פֿון די וויצן אַ ביסל פֿריִער.
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Their art was whimsical, elegant, ‘scandalous,’ and colorful. It was also revolutionary.
Even under glass, designer Fritzi Löw’s intricately beaded “Adam and Eve” bag manages to sparkle.
One of 200 objects and artifacts on display in “Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte,” a major new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, presented in cooperation with the MAK — Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, the piece captures the show’s theme of casting off old ways and old fashions.
Founded in 1903 and active through 1932, the Wiener Werkstätte, or Vienna Workshops, gave women, who were entering public life and the workforce in greater numbers, a way to turn specialized artistic skills into lifelong professions, including architecture, decorative arts, ceramics and textiles. In so doing they changed the way they and women outside the workshop saw themselves.
“For some, their first opportunities for paid artistic work were through the Wiener Werkstätte, which became a vital professional pipeline for women artists while also bringing an influx of virtuosic experimentation to the workshop,” Kristina Parsons, the museum’s assistant curator, said.
At least one-quarter of the nearly 200 women who worked for the multidisciplinary collective were of Jewish faith, Jewish descent, or came from Jewish families.
While the exhibition features many Jewish artists, it spotlights Vally Wieselthier and Felice Rix-Ueno. Their prolific work in ceramics and textile design has had a lasting influence on both disciplines.
The exhibit “brings together art, design, fashion and Jewish history to illuminate the central role Jewish women played in shaping modernity, both as visionary makers and as influential patrons,” said James S. Snyder, director of the Jewish Museum.
For example, Rix’s fanciful, colorful designs appeared on toys, tableware, wallpaper and dresses. The exhibit showcases her elegant tasseled cigarette case, a chiffon cinched waist dress as well as whimsical designs for a papier-mâche bird and another for a toy carriage pulled by a dog.
The early 1900s ushered in the era of the “New Woman,” a time when women were shedding the boned and corseted fashions of the past in favor of more fluid, and even fanciful, garments. It was also a time when women increasingly pursued higher education, fought for suffrage, and challenged restrictive gender roles and clothing.
That sensibility is captured in the dozens of fashion postcards on display, which served as both advertisements and collectibles. In one, a woman wearing a sky-blue turban and a form-fitting white-and-black dress trimmed with fur glances casually over her right shoulder as she walks a small black dog. In another, a woman peers assuredly from beneath a plumed hat, her curly hair cut in a bob, scarlet red lipstick her only hint of makeup.
As Parsons explained, the Wiener Werkstätte’s fashion department allowed women to directly address public perceptions of modern femininity by designing clothes and accessories that they, and other like-minded women, could incorporate into daily life.
“Women’s dress was an important point of convergence between larger impulses toward reform and feminist politics — fashion was then, as now, understood for its capacity to be a revolutionary statement,” she said.
It’s an idea captured in Wilhelm List’s 1910 “Young Woman in Undergarments.” The oil painting depicts a woman believed to be Wally Neuzil, who later trained as a nurse. She wears ruffled “umbrella drawers,” which fall loosely around her knees, and a sleeveless chemise. The garments allow for ease of movement and comfort in one’s own skin.
The exhibition also shows how Jewish women such as the noted socialite and arts patron Adele Bloch-Bauer and the journalist and salon hostess Berta Zuckerkandl helped ensure the workshop’s success.
In turn, upper-class clientele, including progressive Jewish intellectuals, commissioned furniture and interiors, wore Werkstätte fashions, sent Rosh Hashanah greetings on Werkstätte-designed stationery, and celebrated the workshop’s creations.
During its 30 years of operation, the workshop produced hundreds of patterns. Between 1910 and 1917 alone, it created more than 500 designs. One wall of the gallery is given over to textiles. Bold reds and purples evoke coral formations, while zigzag patterns combine purple and orange with chocolate and persimmon.
Aside from textiles and illustrations, there are also dozens of ceramics, such as Susi Singer’s design for a green and gold oven that, with its cake-like tiers, looks as if it belongs in a Disney animated film.
Artist Vally Wieselthier’s mirror, fashioned from glazed earthenware and adorned with a trio of busts, hangs near a collection of her outsized ceramic heads. The heads, some of which stand nearly two-feet tall, were modeled after mythological and classical figures, but also shopkeepers and everyday people. The works drew both praise and ridicule, dismissed by one newspaper as “scandalous bimbo business.”
While the Werkstätte sputtered out in 1932 for a host of reasons, including poor management, financial troubles, a resistance to mass production, and a decline in wealthy patrons, its influence remains.
According to Parsons, “In bringing together highlights from the remarkable body of work made by Jewish women for the Werkstätte, this exhibition spotlights their creativity, ambition, and influence, while inviting visitors to explore a group of artists who embraced decoration as a central expression of modernity.”
Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte continues through Nov. 15, 2026 at the Jewish Museum.
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