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In ‘Mapping Jewish San Francisco,’ a treasure trove of Bay Area Jewish history goes on display
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — The year was 1968. Young people from around the country were descending on San Francisco looking for ways to express themselves, making efforts — sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic — to free themselves from the bonds of American society.
At the same time, a group of Jews came together in the city to create something new.
“After painfully realizing that the Jewish leaders and especially, in San Francisco, are only interested in lectures on the terrible lost generation, but have no wish of giving them a helping hand, we opened, on our own, a house of love and prayer in San Francisco.”
Those words, by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, are on a handmade brochure from 1968. It’s only one artifact in a treasure trove of documents and photos displayed in a new, online exhibit out of the University of San Francisco called “Mapping Jewish San Francisco.” Much of the historical material is being seen publicly for the first time.
“We really want people to get a sense of the unique elements of Bay Area Jewish life,” said Oren Kroll-Zeldin, lead curator of the project and assistant director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the university.
The first part of a brochure advertising the House of Love and Prayer, 1968. (Mapping Jewish San Francisco)
The San Francisco project was inspired by “Mapping Jewish Los Angeles,” a UCLA endeavor that for more than a decade has been bringing multimedia stories of L.A.’s diverse Jewish neighborhoods to life.
“I thought, oh my goodness, we need to do this about San Francisco!” Kroll-Zeldin said.
He brought the idea to Aaron Hahn Tapper, director of USF’s Swig Jewish studies program.
“He was immediately excited and supportive of it,” Kroll-Zeldin said.
They got to work, but executing the projects was a bit more daunting than expected, including making sure the multimedia elements of the website worked perfectly.
But now the site has launched with two inaugural exhibits: Kroll-Zeldin’s deep dive into Carlebach’s synagogue and religious commune known as the House of Love and Prayer, and a comprehensive look at the Karaite Jewish community in the Bay Area and beyond.
“Through ‘Mapping Jewish San Francisco,’ we aim for people to better understand how today’s Bay Area Jewish community came to be and the role that Jews have played in the creation of this major American city,” Hahn Tapper said in an email.
Kroll-Zeldin said a key factor in the effort was the access he had to personal papers, stories, photos and anecdotes, provided to him by the people who were there. He calls it “one-of-a-kind archival material.”
“This is only possible based on the willingness of these people to tell these stories,” he said.
There are also videos, including a series of oral histories with locals who experienced communal living, and archival audio recordings of Carlebach’s teachings and music. The exhibit covers the reach of the rabbi’s impact, but also touches on the controversies around Carlebach, who was accused of sexual assault by many women.
The second exhibition, led by Hahn Tapper, highlights the history of the Karaite Jews, a small but distinct and vibrant community of Jews who are the inheritors of a little-known branch of Judaism.
It is a custom among Karaite Jews to pray kneeling on the ground, as seen here in the sanctuary of Congregation B’nai Israel in Daly City. (Courtesy Kararite Jews of America)
They split from the mainstream, theologically, somewhere between the eighth and 10th centuries. While they follow Torah, they do not follow the rabbinic interpretations in the Mishnah and Talmud. Karaite Jews have many customs and prayers that set their religious practice apart.
The largest group of Karaites lived in Egypt until the 1950s, when tensions, violence and war drove many of them out. Some moved to Israel and others to the Bay Area, where they built a tight-knit and active community.
Only 50,000 or so Karaites are left in the world today, with an estimated 1,000 in the Bay Area, site of the only Karaite synagogue in the Western Hemisphere.
“They are a very important subcommunity of Jews,” Hahn Tapper said. “In addition, as a religious studies scholar who focuses on contemporary social identities, the ways this Jewish community has re-established itself here in the Bay Area is astounding.”
Hahn Tapper said he went through mounds of documents and hundreds of hours of video interview footage to put together the online exhibition, called “Out of Egypt.” He said the videos are invaluable because so many of the Karaites who immigrated to the United States have died in recent years.
“Through this exhibit we have documented their lives, lives of Jews in Egypt that no longer exist,” he said. “These interviewees paint a picture of what it was like to celebrate Jewish holidays in Cairo, some of whom did so with their Muslim neighbors.”
Kroll-Zeldin said each exhibit takes up to two years to prepare, in collaboration with academics, students and community leaders; scholars first collect and digitize the material, then do the research, writing and bibliography work.
The next project is being led by Rabbi Camille Angel, USF’s rabbi in residence, who is working with her students to collect stories of Jewish LGBTQ life in San Francisco. Their research and findings will help tell that chapter of Bay Area Jewish history, a form of storytelling that will continue to be central to the project as it unfolds.
“People like stories,” Kroll-Zeldin said. “Stories connect people. And there are so many interesting stories to tell.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
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How God’s covenant with Abraham helps us deal with being wronged
ווייניק זאַכן רופֿן אַרויס אַזוי פֿיל אַנגסטן און דעפּרעסיע ווי דאָס געפֿיל, אַז עמעצער האָט זיך נישט־שיין אויפֿגעפֿירט מיט דיר. דאָס לאָזט איבער אַן אַלגעמיינעם געפֿיל פֿון נישט־ווערטיקייט און הילפֿלאָזיקייט, אויסער דעם באַזונדערן ווייטיק פֿון דער באַעוולונג גופֿא. דאָס קען דעם מענטש ממש פּאַראַליזירן.
אַ מאָל איז גרינג צו פֿאַרשטיין ווען אַ געוויסער ווייטיק איז נייטיק און אַפֿילו נוצלעך, און ווען נישט. ווען מע זעט נישט קיין קלאָרן באַניץ, קומט מען צו דער אמונה: מע קען גלייבן אַז עס האָט נישט קיין זין, אָדער מע קען גלייבן אַז יאָ.
אויף וואָס קען אַ מענטש באַגרינדן זײַן גלויבן, אַז די אומגערעכטיקייטן וואָס ער דערלעבט און וואָס זעען אויס ווי עכטע עוולות, וועלן אים אין דער אמתן צו ניץ קומען — אויסער דעם וואָס ער וויל אַזוי גלייבן, ווײַל עס איז אים באַקוועמער?
איין אופֿן איז זיך אַרײַנצוטראַכטן אינעם מקור פֿון זײַן ליידן. ווען עס וואָלט געווען דער מענטש וואָס באַשליסט מיר צו טאָן שלעכטס, וואָלט דאָס נישט דווקא געווען פֿאַר זײַנט וועגן. אָבער ווײַל גאָרנישט געשעט צופֿעליק, און עס איז דער אויבערשטער — דער מקור פֿון אַל דאָס גוטס — וואָס האָט באַשטימט אַז איך זאָל לײַדן, איז עס אָן אַ ספֿק פֿאַר מיר לטובֿה, אַפֿילו ווען איך פֿאַרשטיי נישט ווי אַזוי.
און דאָ קומען מיר צו איינער פֿון די יסודותדיקסטע קשיות: ווי אַזוי קען מען צוזאַמענפּאַסן די צוויי יסודות פֿון בחירה חפֿשית (די מעגלעכקייט וואס דער מענטש האט אויסצוקלײַבן פֿרײַוויליגערהייט ווי זיך אויפֿצופֿירן) און השגחה פּרטית (דעם אויבערשטן׳ס אויפֿפּאַסן אויף יעדער איינצלהייט און פּאַסירונג אין דער וועלט)? מיט אַנדערע ווערטער: ווער האָט דאָס לעצטע וואָרט אין דעם וואָס געשעט אויף דער וועלט — דער אויבערשטער אָדער דער מענטש?
אויב דער אויבערשטער באַשטימט אַלץ וואָס געשעט, אַרײַנגערעכנט די עוולה וואָס איך האָב געליטן, מיינט דאָס דען, אַז דער מענטש — אַרײַנגערעכנט יענער נאַר וואָס האָט מיר געטאָן די עוולה — איז פּטור פֿון אחריות פֿאַר זײַנע מעשׂים? און אויב דער מענטש איז יאָ פֿאַראַנטוואָרטלעך פֿאַר זײַנע באַשלוסן, מיינט דאָס דען, אַז דער אויבערשטער האָט נישט קיין השפּעה און קיין קאָנטראָל איבער דעם וואָס געשעט אין זײַן וועלט, און אַז עס קענען פּאַסירן עכטע אומגערעכטיקייטן?
אַ מעגלעכער ענטפֿער אויף דער דאָזיקער רעטעניש געפֿינען מיר אין דער וואָכעדיקער סדרה, לך־לך.
איינע פֿון די וויכטיקסטע געשעענישן אין אונדזער געשיכטע איז באַקאַנט ווי דער ברית בין הבתרים — ווען דער אויבערשטער זאָגט אונדזער פֿאָטער אַבֿרהם, אַז זײַנע קינדער וועלן דורכגיין אַ תּקופֿה פֿון פֿיר הונדערט יאָר פֿון פֿרעמדשאַפֿט און קנעכטשאַפֿט, און אַז דערנאָך וועט ער באַשטראָפֿן די וואָס האָבן זיי פֿאַרשקלאַפֿט, און זײַנע קינדער וועלן אַרויסגיין מיט גרויס רײַכטום.
צווישן די פֿילע קשיות וואָס פֿאַלן גלײַך אין די אויגן, קען מען פֿרעגן: ווי אַזוי פֿאַרשטייט מען דאָס וואָס דער אויבערשטער זאָגט אַז ער וועט באַשטראָפֿן די אויספֿירער פֿון זײַן אייגענעם רצון? אויב דער אויבערשטער האָט באַשטימט אַז די קינדער פֿון אַבֿרהם מוזן דורכגיין אַ פּעריאָד פֿון שקלאַפֿערײַ, פֿאַר וואָס זאָל ער באַשטראָפֿן די וואָס פֿירן אויס זײַן גזירה?
אַ תּירוץ אויף דעם גיט דער רמב״ם: כאָטש דער אויבערשטער האָט באַשטימט אַז די קינדער פֿון אַבֿרהם זאָלן דורכגיין אַ תּקופֿה פֿון קנעכטשאַפֿט, האָט ער נישט באַשטימט וועלכער יחיד פֿון דעם פֿאָלק וואָס וועט זיי פֿאַרשקלאַפֿן זאָל דאָס אויספֿירן. יעדער מצרי האָט פֿאַר זיך אַליין, מיט זײַן אייגענער בחירה, באַשלאָסן אויפֿצוהייבן די האַנט און געבן דעם שמיץ מיט דער בײַטש. און פֿאַר אָט דעם באַשלוס האָט ער פֿאַרדינט די שטראָף.
דער זעלבער פּרינציפּ גילט אויך אין אונדזער טאָג־טעגלעך לעבן: דער אויבערשטער באַשטימט וואָס עס וועט פּאַסירן מיט יעדן איינעם, אָבער נישט דווקא ווער עס וועט זײַן דער אויספֿירער.
אויב דער אויבערשטער באַשליסט אַז איך דאַרף פֿאַרלירן פֿופֿציק דאָלאַר, האָט איצט יעדער מענטש די מעגלעכקייט צו באַזליסן צי ער וויל זיי בײַ מיר גנבֿענען. ער וועט באַשטראָפֿט ווערן פֿאַר זײַן באַשלוס עובֿר צו זײַן אויפֿן איסור פֿון לא תגנובֿ — מע טאָר נישט גנבֿענען. אָבער ווען נישט דעם אויבערשטערס באַשלוס אַז איך זאָל דאָס געלט פֿאַרלירן, וואָלט קיינער אויף דער וועלט נישט געקענט אויסקלײַבן זיי בײַ מיר צו גנבֿענען.
דעריבער איז די „געצײַג“ פֿון דער וואָך דאָס פֿאָלגנדיקע:
ווען עס טרעפֿט אונדז עפּעס אומאָנגענעמס אין לעבן, זאָלן מיר, אַנשטאָט זיך צו בייזערן אויפֿן „שליח“, געדענקען דעם אמתן מקור פֿון דעם וואָס איז געשען. מיר זאָלן זיך דערמאָנען אַז דער ציל פֿון דער „ידיעה“ איז — אָן קיין ספֿק — פֿאַר אונדזערט וועגן, און זוכן ווי אַזוי מיר קענען אויסניצן די ווייטיקדיקע סיטואַציע צום גוטן.
The post How God’s covenant with Abraham helps us deal with being wronged appeared first on The Forward.
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Can this suburban kibbutz and civil rights trailblazer maintain its identity in the 21st Century?
POMONA, NY— The Skyview Acres Cooperative is located about 30 miles north of New York City. Think of it as a suburban kibbutz.
“One felt like they had many parents,” recalled Carol Bowman, a professor of education at Ramapo College who grew up in this close-knit housing development in leafy Rockland County. “When I was growing up I could just walk into any of the houses where I had friends.”
“It was just a giant united family,” said Jo Simons, a retired piano teacher whose parents taught music and organized community singing events at Skyview.
Skyview was created in the aftermath of World War II as an intentionally integrated community. Quakers figured prominently in its creation. The land for Skyview was purchased in January 1947 with loans totaling $16,500 from two Quakers, who were strangers to the founding families and to each other. The loans came with terms that could’ve come from the Hebrew Free Loan Society: They were interest-free and simply said, “Pay us back when you can.”
The founding families scraped together the rest of the $29,500 purchase price. Today, Skyview consists of 115 acres and about four dozen homes. Most of them have at least two acres of land.
About a third of the original 45 or 46 families at Skyview were Jewish, according to Naomi Kleinberg, a retired editor and children’s book author, whose parents were among the original families who cleared land to build homes, make roads and create a swimming pond here. Key residents who played pivotal roles in Skyview’s evolution as a progressive bastion and a caring community included Jo’s father, Edward Simons, who founded what is now the Rockland Conservatory of Music, and Irving Wolfe, a political organizer for whom the cooperative’s ball field is named.
At the community’s recent 80th anniversary celebration, Wally Glickman recited an original poem. Skyview, he wrote, is a “ magic island in suburbia.”
‘My father wanted nothing more than to live in the woods’
Jack and Lena Kleinberg were among four Jewish couples who came to Skyview together from the Lower East Side. Back in the city their social lives revolved around the University Settlement House on Eldridge Street.
They raised a son and three daughters at Skyview. The son, Joseph, remains in the family home where he makes a living as a beekeeper and vegetable farmer.
“My father wanted nothing more than to live in the woods,” Naomi Kleinberg told me.
Jack Kleinberg was a World War II veteran who considered himself an atheist but was “adamantly, proudly, belligerently Jewish,” she said.
His maternal uncle’s entire family perished in Poland during the Holocaust and Kleinberg resolved that his family would know how to defend itself, so he taught them how to shoot revolvers and rifles.
“My father said he would never allow his family to be led like sheep to the slaughter, like in Europe,” Naomi Kleinberg said.
Her parents grew up on the Lower East Side amidst much misery and poverty. That experience prompted her late mother, who was raised in an observant Sephardic household on Orchard Street, to work as a social justice activist. In the 1930’s, Lena Kleinberg campaigned on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, the Black men wrongfully charged with the rape of white women in Alabama. During the 1940’s, Lena worked for the establishment of the Jewish state, volunteering with the American League for a Free Palestine. During the Cold War, she demonstrated at missile sites near Skyview and, in more recent years, stood vigil at a local abortion clinic, to counter anti-abortion protesters intimidating patients.
“All this involvement in social justice, making tikkun olam, it’s so Jewish,” Naomi told me.
‘Can you imagine how dangerous that was in the ’40’s?’
Although there were seders and Hanukkah parties held at the cooperative, Kleinberg remembers only two Skyview families who attended synagogue regularly.
The other families had “Jewish upbringings, Jewish identities,” Kleinberg said, “but not a Jewish existence.”
For the most part, religious tradition was supplanted by political activism. Skyview residents attended seminal civil rights marches in Washington, brought medicine to Cuba, demonstrated against the Vietnam War and went to Nicaragua to aid the Sandinista regime. To this day, residents demonstrate regularly against the Trump administration at an intersection in Nanuet that has long served as Rockland’s town square for political protest.
A handful of key political activists lived at Skyview during the 1960s. Among them were Conrad Lynn, the Black civil rights attorney who defended Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown and one of the Puerto Rican nationalists who carried out the attack on the U.S. House of Representatives in 1954; George Houser, a co-founder of both the Congress of Racial Equality and the American Committee on Africa; and Alfred Hassler, a Methodist minister who served as executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the interfaith peace and justice group. Lynn, Hassler and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin went on a freedom ride down south in 1947.
“They did that in the 40’s, not in the 60’s,” noted the poet Wally Glickman. “Can you imagine how dangerous that was in the 40’s?”
Skyview has also been home to some prominent entertainers, including Krishna Das, a globe-trotting Jewish performer of Hindu devotional music. The late Steven Hill, born Solomon Krakovsky, had starring roles in the TV shows Mission: Impossible and Law & Order. Hill left Skyview after becoming an observant Jew and moved to nearby Monsey. Eliot Asinof, who wrote for such classic western TV shows as Maverick and Wagon Train and authored the nonfiction account of the Chicago “Black Sox” World Series scandal in 1919, Eight Men Out, rented a home at Skyview during summers in the 1950’s and 60’s. And two founding members of the Grammy-nominated jazz fusion group Spyro Gyra currently live at Skyview.
But no one in showbiz had quite the run as Ed Simons, who was said to be the oldest working conductor in the country when he wielded a baton at the age of 100. The maestro’s career included performing in the military band that accompanied President Harry Truman to the Potsdam Peace Conference in the Summer of 1945 and conducting pit orchestras for eight Broadway musicals, including My Fair Lady.
Edmund Gordon, a Black psychologist who was one of the architects of the federal Head Start program, is still professionally active at the age of 105. He treads water in the indoor pool at his Skyview home.
Several people I spoke with offered the same quip to comment on the longevity of the cooperative’s residents: “There must be something in the water.”
‘I was the first Skyview baby’
Some of the children who lived at Skyview Acres inherited their parents’ political sympathies. In the 1950’s, several Skyview kids refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or participate in the “duck and cover” drills held during the Cold War to prepare students for a nuclear attack. In 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign set up a tent city dubbed Resurrection City on the National Mall in Washington D.C., some teenagers at Skyview erected their own Insurrection City in the woods. And, no matter how liberal and left-leaning the cooperative’s grown-ups may have been, young people skinny dipping in Skyview’s man-made pond upset some of the adults.
Several people who grew up at Skyview and are now in their 70s or 80s, recall attending the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” in 1963 where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Skyview’s roughly four dozen households filled two buses for the march. That year, Skyview block party attended by some 400 Rockland County residents raised money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The contribution elicited a signed thank-you letter from Dr. King, then SCLC’s president.
And many of the Skyview kids carried on the good works of their parents.
Two of Edmund Gordon’s children are tenured college professors. Ted Gordon teaches Black Studies at the University of Texas. Jessica Gordon Nembhard teaches political economy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Then there is Laura Hassler, the daughter of Skyview co-founder Alfred Hassler, a conscientious objector during World War II and the man responsible for introducing Martin Luther King Jr. to the Vietnamese monk Thich Nnat Hanh in 1966, a connection credited with influencing King’s opposition to the Vietnam War.
“I was the first Skyview baby,” Laura Hassler told me during a phone interview. “I wear it with pride.“
Hassler started the Netherlands-based non-profit Musicians Without Borders. She recalled kids at school calling the Skyview students hippies and communists. One oral history of the cooperative recounted a local hardware store that refused to service Skyview because its residents were “commies.
Some of the Skyview residents had, in fact, been members of the Communist Party earlier in their lives. Conrad Lynn was active in the party during the 1920’s and 30’s. Irving Wolfe was also a member. Wolfe, whose Honda sedan bore a VIVA CHE license plate, defied the U.S. embargo against Cuba 16 times to bring humanitarian aid to the island. In the 1980’s, he served on a construction brigade in Nicaragua.
Ed Simons, the conductor, was suspected of communist sympathies and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958 where he was successfully represented by a lawyer from Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians.
‘Still a genuine community’
Skyview is located about six miles north of the burgeoning ultra-Orthodox community of Monsey. New Square, another Haredi hamlet, is even closer. Those communities have a pressing need for more housing. Many current Skyview residents told me they are reluctant to speak publicly about the threat posed by new housing development, fearing that their efforts to limit development might be interpreted as antisemitism.
A number of Skyview residents have been active in the NAACP, which has been battling the East Ramapo school board run by Orthodox Jews who tend not to send their children to public schools. Test scores, graduation rates and other data indicate that the school district, once the best in New York State, is now among the worst, according to Oscar Cohen, a Jewish NAACP activist and retired school administrator who lives nearby. A 2026-2027 U.S. News & World Report ranking of high schools noted that Ramapo High School had proficiency rates in math and English of 18% and 44% respectively.
Skyview residents are particularly concerned about the future of a 75-acre forested parcel known as the Stryker property that borders Skyview to the south, according to Anna Friedberg, a lawyer who serves as president of the Skyview’s board. Friedberg noted that the property’s development could impact traffic in the area, as well as the local watershed, which includes a stream that feeds Skyview’s pond and the west branch of the Hackensack River, a source of water for Nyack and Northern New Jersey.
“There have been some plans by the town to suggest that they would develop that entire property,” she told me at the cooperative’s annual Winter Doldrums party in March. “There is a tremendous population boon in this area and so there’s significant pressure to find more housing for folks.”
The Stryker property was purchased with a public bond approved by residents of the Town of Ramapo that earmarked the land for open space and low-income, clustered housing for first responders. But the town subsequently commissioned a planning study that cited a religious campus as one potential use of the Stryker property. Michael Specht, the Ramapo town supervisor, wrote in an email, “There are no plans at this time to develop the Stryker property or use it as a religious campus.”
“I would take anything that the town says with a grain of salt,” said Bob Trostle, a retired builder who grew up in Skyview and now lives just outside its border. “We’ve learned that the hard way, especially concerning development planning, zoning, and things like that.”
In 2015, the Skyview Acres Land Trust was created to preserve the cooperative’s greenery. Membership in the trust is voluntary but once a homeowner joins, subsequent owners of that home can’t add more buildings to their property or clear-cut trees. The trust is headed by Paul Nagin, a longtime Skyview resident who now lives in Connecticut. Nagin not only continues to be involved in the land trust but is still active in the Spring Valley NAACP, which has been in court fighting the East Ramapo school district.
“As far as I’m concerned, the Stryker property is a sword of Damocles hanging over Skyview,” Nagin told me. “It’s going to be an ongoing issue for sure.”
Skyview is “a pretty blue dot in the middle of a reddish part of Rockland County,” according to Robin Shapiro, a Skyview resident who describes himself as a checkbook Democrat active in J Street. He sees the concerns over housing development in the area as “a special case of NIMBYism with an overlay of religion and politics.”
“I don’t think that you can explain the opposition to development plans as antisemitic,” he told me. “There are legitimate and long-standing concerns about preserving open space, water quality, traffic that you’d see in any community that was encountering very rapid growth from new folks of any kind.”
Will Skyview retain its unique political and communal character as its properties turn over? Will it continue to be the kind of place where Wally Glickman and his fellow Skyview poet Brian Kates post their poetry on trees along a pathway in the woods?
“This is still a genuine community. I don’t really see that ending,” said Kates, who won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing when he worked at the New York Daily News. “I think it’s something more than politics. It’s an ethos of people helping each other, of being kind to each other, a kind and caring community.”
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American music producer Justin Goldner at work on a Yiddish album
How many Yiddish rock stars do you know?
Maybe more than you think.
If you watched the Grammy Awards back in 2018, you might have seen one of them, Justin Goldner, accompany Ben Platt as he sang “Somewhere” from the Broadway musical West Side Story.
A multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and lute, Goldner has worked with an all-star array of artists as a session musician and producer, including Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Ricky Martin and Macy Gray. Goldner also appeared on Broadway and in Madison Square Garden, performed with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and recorded music for Disney’s live-action Snow White.
Goldner is no stranger to the spotlight, but for his latest project, he stepped away from the roaring arenas of pop stardom to inhabit a more intimate space: a dive into Yiddish culture. His work in progress, Songs of Longing and Belonging (Vi shturem a benken in Yiddish), sets Yiddish poetry to music, creating tracks that sound refreshingly contemporary even as they plumb the Yiddish literary archives for inspiration.
By the end of the project — which is being supported by a fellowship from the Jewish Writers Institute — the songs will comprise an entire album. Goldner estimates the full album will appear next spring. For now, he has been releasing them one at a time on YouTube under his Yiddish moniker, Reb Tsudek.
Like many younger people interested in Yiddish today, Goldner didn’t grow up with the language. Although Judaism was part of his upbringing in suburban Philadelphia, it was not a central part of his identity. “I grew up in what I would imagine is a pretty typical Reform family,” Goldner said when I spoke with him. “I had a bar mitzvah. I went to Jewish summer camp. But in retrospect, my memory of my Jewish upbringing was a little bit like: ‘Here’s Judaism. Don’t get too close to it.’”
If he had anything resembling religious commitment, it was to music, specifically the guitar, an instrument he took up at 13. “Relatively quickly it became an all consuming pursuit,” he recalled. “In high school, I barely did anything else. I was a very obsessive listener and wanted to devour as much music as possible.” After graduating high school, he earned a degree in music from NYU.
Goldner said he began to think differently about his Jewish heritage when he saw how his friends related to their own cultural backgrounds. “The thing that sort of primed the pump for me was getting into Greek and Spanish and Arabic and other languages and cultures,” he said. “I just found that so engaging. I was really inspired by my friends and colleagues who come from these backgrounds and carry their culture and their heritage with them, but they’re not living in the past.”
That epiphany, combined with the experience of getting to know a great-aunt with dementia who increasingly reverted to her native Yiddish, led Goldner to purchase a copy of College Yiddish, the classic textbook by Uriel Weinreich. For many years, Yiddish was a linguistic passion that he nurtured privately. Now it has become central to the evolution of his musical career.
The Yiddish title of Goldner’s project — Vi shturem a benken — comes from “Dos lid fun a meydl” (The Song of a Girl), a poem by Anna Margolin, a 20th-century Yiddish poet who immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in 1906. Previously unfamiliar with her work, Goldner was drawn to the “intensity” of Margolin’s lyric, which he translated for me as “it rocks me like a storm, this yearning.”
“I feel like she, as a writer, leaps off the page,” Goldner told me. “The intensity of wanting to do something or be something and not even knowing what, but just feeling like you can’t hold yourself back.”
Featuring vocalists Temma Schaechter and Ben Abraham, Goldner’s version of “The Song of a Girl” reveals another facet of Songs of Longing and Belonging: its blending of heritage languages and diasporic experiences. Besides Yiddish and English, “The Song of a Girl” also includes lyrics in Indonesian, one of the languages spoken by Abraham’s parents.
Future songs will take a similar approach. For example, “Meyerkepl” ( Seashell), based on a poem by the Yiddish writer Yehoash, will include words by Cuban poet José Marti. “I’ve been fascinated by Cuban music for a very long time,” Goldner said. “My wife’s family is Cuban. I was struck by how this sense of exile, of diaspora, of being far away from something or someone that we construe as home, manifested with these two very different authors in very similar imagery.”
In taking up Yiddish as a medium of musical expression, Goldner joins a growing group of artists recording contemporary music in the language, including Daniel Kahn, whose Yiddish versions of classics by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits are ingenuous feats of translation; Isabel Frey, whose 2020 debut album Millennial Bundist repurposes Yiddish labor and protest anthems; and the Bashevis Singers, a Melbourne-based folk band who, like Goldner, frequently turn to Yiddish poetry as a source of musical inspiration.
Meanwhile, independent record labels like Borscht Beat are producing Yiddish music that runs the gamut from traditional to experimental.
This thriving world of Yiddish popular music reflects a larger cultural and linguistic renaissance in which Goldner is a passionate participant. He has attended the Yidish Vokh, an annual week-long retreat for Yiddish speakers in upstate New York, takes online Yiddish classes, and has even developed a Yiddish keyboard app, YidShrift, that aims to bring familiar features like autocorrect and autocomplete to modern Yiddish communication.
Beyond the Yiddish lyrics he sets to music, Goldner has incorporated his affinity for the language into Songs of Longing by including Yiddish interviews with some of his collaborators, emphasizing the currency of Yiddish as a medium of colloquial expression.
While Songs of Longing and Belonging is firmly rooted in Goldner’s engagement with Yiddish language and lyrics, he also believes that the texts he is drawing on speak to shared human experiences.
“I think that there is a longing for connection that is universal and that manifests itself through the concepts and stories of who we are,” he said. That longing often pushes people to ask themselves probing questions of identity like “Who are my people?” or “where is my home?”
“I don’t think that there are ever simple answers,” he said.
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