One thing about the late Forverts staff writer and critic Miriam Hoffman — she cooked a heavenly eggplant in tomato sauce.

And why do I know this about one of our writers? Hoffman, a veritable lexicon-caldron of Yiddish sayings and terms she’d archived from her own mother’s distinct poylish dialect, was many things: A distinguished long-term professor of Yiddish at Columbia University; a theater critic turned playwright who turned the New York Public Theatre’s founding director Joseph Papp into a serious supporter of Yiddish culture; a child survivor of Siberian exile, and so much more.

As she encountered immigrant American life in da Bronx, the tiny dynamo that was Hoffman delighted in becoming American, freely advising everyone on the best consumer goods this country had to offer. A country that was a home and refuge to her, her parents, her husband and so many in her vast circle of Yiddishist friends, students, fellow writers, educators and chosen family. And then, once upon a time, she welcomed me into her Florida home for an overnight stay, so that I could record her jaw-dropping tales of how she and her beloved mameloshn Yiddish both survived the khurbn, the Holocaust. And talk into the video camera she did.

But first, there was lunch.

Rest in all your ferocious deliciousness, Miriam Hoffman, and thank you. For the eggplant, the advice on the best toothpaste, the stories — and for doing everything, everything, everything possible, to transmit your Yiddish to another generation.

 

The Yiddish Teacher

The Yiddish teacher bending saying:
In my book you’ll learn
the alefbeys through pictograms like so:
The gimel is a camel
The beys a house
You see?

The Yiddish teacher has an archive
in her bedroom closet
The folding doors open revealing:
shoeboxes filled with
stories and
poems and
songs she
wrote as a child
in the displaced persons camp
on paper donated to Jewish refugees

The Yiddish teacher was once
seated in back
of a transport truck
with all the other refugees
Trying to go over the Swiss Alps
to Mandate Palestine

The Yiddish teacher was born
in a Siberian prison camp
“people were starving, sure,
but there was sex”

The Yiddish teacher was the only
woman writer on staff
at the Forverts Yiddish newspaper

The Yiddish teacher remembers
the first time her family ate
Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti and
meatballs
from a can
in the Bronx

We go shopping together
The Yiddish teacher loves Rao’s tomato sauce
“it’s the best”
The Yiddish teacher recommends
“Mavis Toothpaste”
It’s the best

The Yiddish teacher loves to
go fly fishing

The Yiddish teacher is short and slim
and round

I think
if I cup my hands together
I can
carry her around always

— Chana Pollack

 

The post ‘The Yiddish Teacher’ (Poem) appeared first on The Forward.

“Before there were Jews… there was ‘The Odyssey,’” a theater manager infamously posted on a marquee in Portland, Oregon.

While the mythic, Bronze Age events recounted in the blockbuster film likely never transpired, Homer’s epic poem is by any measure younger than the Jewish people. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, now a proxy for a pitched battle over the essence of Western civilization, could not exist as it is without the Jews. Indeed, whether it knows it or not, it is telling a foundational story of our history.

Much of the criticism surrounding the film, which managed to agitate classicists from its first set photos of Matt Damon in a crested Grecian helmet (not a period-accurate Mycenaean boar-tusk ensemble) and bigots of all stripes with its casting of a trans man and people of color, has shifted since its release just before Tisha B’Av, taking aim at the film’s ideas and how they may clash with those of antiquity’s.

“Did you Christianize The Odyssey?” podcaster Zhong Shu asked Nolan in a now-viral interview.

Nolan explained that he was drawn to the ancient ethic of “xenia,” called “Zeus’ Law” in the film. In the Greek conception, this means welcoming guests because you never know if they may be a God. In Nolan’s blockbuster it’s described as treating others how you would be treated. When the law is breached, society as we know it comes undone, leading to our hero’s atonement and qualms that seem at odds with his traditional characterization.

While Nolan’s understanding mirrors the Christian Golden Rule, which itself is antedated by statements in the Torah and by Hillel, his vision of civilizational ruin when it is trespassed is more central to Judaism. Odysseus laments that, by creating the Trojan horse, and exploiting the code of hospitality to launch a massacre, he has broken something.

“To burn the walls of Troy is to burn the world entire,” Damon’s Odysseus tells Anne Hathaway’s Penelope. This is more or less a paraphrase from Talmudic wisdom: “To destroy one life is to destroy the world entire,” and its more recognizable corollary, “to save one life is to save the world entire.”

The Hebrew Bible is rife with examples of hospitality in extremis. In Sodom, Lot offers his daughters to a mob of rapists rather than have them violate his heavenly guests. The result: a destroyed city and a wife reduced to a table condiment. (Just before, Abraham fed these visitors, plus another angel of God.)

But watching the film Tuesday, I was reminded of another story. Remember when I mentioned Tisha B’Av, the holiday marking the destruction of Judaism’s ancient capital?

Our tradition teaches that the second temple fell because a man holding a banquet in Jerusalem kicked out his enemy, a fellow by the name of Bar Kamtza. Humiliated by his host, Bar Kamtza plots his revenge. He goes to Caesar and tells him the Jews are conspiring against his rule. To prove it, Bar Kamtza, like the wily Odysseus, concocts a ruse, suggesting the Romans send a sacrifice to the rabbis and see if they offer it.

They don’t, as Bar Kamtza blemishes the animal, making it unfit for offering.

In The Odyssey, the famous gift horse is presented as a tribute to Athena. Its blemish is the fighting force it hides inside, ready to sack the city.

The upshot of the rejected temple sacrifice was the razing of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans. The temple is desecrated, in much the way the temple of Athena is in the film.

Christian theology doesn’t argue quite so forcefully that the violation of the Golden Rule augurs a civilizational collapse. Quite the contrary today, where xenophobia and whispers of Great Replacement — akin to the trade-wind rumors of sea peoples in Nolan’s film — have taken root in the Evangelical right. (Ezra Klein, and really anyone attuned to commentary as subtle as IMAX subwoofers, picked up on this tension.)

Jewish history tells us we fare poorly in places where the stranger isn’t welcome.

In a departure from the text, Nolan ends Odysseus’ wandering with his voluntary exile. He sails west, predicting a benighted age to come, where his exploits will be sung as men lose the ability to write.

Our story ends on a similarly bleak, yet hopeful note.

When Jerusalem fell, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai devised his own deception, sneaking past the city walls in a casket (before he was let out, zealots wanted to stab the bier, recalling the Trojans’ stabbing of the horse).

But before Yohanan can make his escape he’s intercepted by the general Vespasian, who he mistakenly refers to as the emperor. Vespasian offers a correction, but almost instantly a messenger confirms this designation, telling him Caesar died and named him his successor. Regarding Yohanan’s mistake as prophecy, he offers him a request.

Jerusalem had fallen, self-determination was unrealistic, and so Yohannan asks for the city of Yavneh and its sages. From there our modern history began, literacy thrived and a dark age was subdued.

The Temple and Troy have yet to be rebuilt, but their legends live on.

The post Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ is a Talmud-quoting, Tisha B’Av epic appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Britain’s antisemitism watchdog says it received reports of nearly 2,000 incidents in the first half of 2026 — the second-most its recorded ever for the time period, following only the first half of 2024.

The new figures released Wednesday by the Community Security Trust represent a 21% increase in reported incidents over the same time period last year, which followed a surge in the early months of the war in Gaza that started when Israel attacked Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.

Watchdogs in multiple countries have recorded surging antisemitism since and say the numbers portend an unsettling new normal when it comes to Jewish safety and security.

The increase in antisemitic incidents from January to June in Britain was driven, the CST found, by both violent attacks and a sharp rise in online abuse. While the largest category of incidents recorded was abusive behavior, which accounted for more than four-fifths of all reported incidents, the group also recorded a record number of assaults for any January-to-June period, while incidents affecting synagogues, schools and other Jewish institutions also reached new highs.

The CST has tracked, reported on and published antisemitic incidents since 1984.

Among the incidents highlighted in the report were the April stabbing of two visibly Jewish men in London’s heavily Orthodox Golders Green neighborhood, which British authorities treated as a terrorist attack, and a series of arson attacks targeting synagogues and Jewish organizations, including the destruction of ambulances belonging to the volunteer Jewish emergency service Hatzolah.

The report also cited suspected hostile activity linked to Iranian intelligence targeting Britain’s Jewish community. CST said the U.S-Israel war with Iran coincided with another spike in antisemitic incidents.

“These attacks are directed against British Jews but they are also attacks on Britain and our society,” CST’s chief executive, Mark Gardner, said in a statement, adding that the incidents should “concern everyone who cares about Britain and the threats against it, whether state-directed from Iran, or internally driven by Islamist, far Right, far Left, or other ideological extremes.”

The findings come as the British government has expanded funding for security at Jewish institutions following a series of violent attacks over the past year. Following the release of the report, Policing Minister Sarah Jones said, “Antisemitism goes against our country’s values and I will do everything in my power to protect our Jewish communities.”

CST compiles its statistics from incidents reported directly to it as well as cases recorded by police and other agencies. CST reviews each report before including it in its database. It says it does not include reports of anti-Israel rhetoric or activity that do not also include “explicit anti-Jewish language, targeting, or motivation.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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