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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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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
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Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so.
A group of Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian parents and students are suing a California school district, alleging that a high school program’s field trip to a mosque — and no other houses of worship — violated the First Amendment.
The suit, brought forth by Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area, focuses on two trips that were part of a social justice program at Palo Alto High School.
According to the complaint filed in the Northern District of California on August 7: “The district failed to maintain religious neutrality, failed to ensure equal treatment among faiths, failed to protect student privacy and failed to vet, supervise, and monitor religiously divisive outside speakers during the school-sponsored event.”
Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools nor the Palo Alto Unified School District immediately responded to requests for comment.
The trip was part of Palo Alto High’s Social Justice Pathway, where according to a promotional video, students in 10th through 12th grades take English and history courses “through a social justice lens rather than the standard analytical lens, where facts and dates are memorized.” Palo Alto High started the program in 2014.
Field trips around the Bay Area are a hallmark of the program, including travels to Angel Island, where many Asian immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the early 20th century, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Students also have heard from a variety of speakers, including a Holocaust survivor and a Cambodian refugee.
The field trips to the mosque happened in 2022 and 2025. The plaintiffs include three Jewish Palo Alto High students, at least one of whom took part in the Social Justice Pathway.
The parent plaintiffs allege that the school had not fully informed them that their children were going to participate in “religiously inflected activity.”
According to the complaint, female students were encouraged to observe the customary dress code of wearing head coverings inside the mosque. They also observed a midday prayer, interacted with participants of a Quran memorization program, received Qurans as gifts and were “taught that Islam, in particular, promotes social justice,” the suit says.
“[The plaintiffs] belong to religious traditions that practice social justice,” the suit says. “The government’s endorsement of Islam in particular as a social justice faith denigrates their respective traditions and their identities as members of faith communities due equal treatment and appreciation within the District, State and country.”
The plaintiffs allege that the visit violated the First Amendment, since the public school was promoting a specific religion, and the 14th amendment, for elevating one religion over others.
A student at Palo Alto High who is part of the Social Justice Pathway disagreed, describing it as part of a broader religion unit.
“There was never a point on this trip where I felt in any way that the mosque or the school was trying to even suggest conversion,” he wrote in an Instagram comment on a local news post about the lawsuit. “The goal was obvious to us: Learn about an underrepresented religion present in our community.”
But plaintiffs also objected to the history of one of the speakers. Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who has faced allegations of antisemitism.
In 2019, Billoo was removed from the board of the Women’s March for past remarks she had made. She faced criticism for a 2021 Facebook post, where she warned against “polite zionists” like Hilllel and the Jewish federations, saying “they are not your friends.” A tweet of hers from October 7, 2023, following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israel, also has faced scrutiny: “Pray for Gaza. We are witnessing decolonization,” she wrote.
In an emailed statement to the Forward, Billoo wrote, “Public schools have an obligation to remain neutral toward religion, but neutrality does not mean shielding students from learning about religion or religious communities.”
“Visiting a mosque, observing Muslims practice their faith, or learning about Islam is not the same as being compelled to practice Islam,” she wrote. “We are concerned that this lawsuit risks turning ordinary engagement with Islam and Muslims into something suspicious and could have a chilling effect on educators who want their students to learn about the diverse communities around them.”
But plaintiffs said allowing Billoo to speak with the students demonstrated negligence on the part of the school.
“Ms. Billoo was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.”
The school also allowed photos of the high schoolers to be taken at the event without parents’ permission, the suit says.
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Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found
(JTA) — The remains of Yehuda Katz, the last Israeli soldier still missing from the 1982 Battle of Sultan Yacoub during the First Lebanon War, have been recovered after 44 years, the Israeli military said Tuesday, bringing to a close one of the country’s longest-running missing soldier cases.
Katz, a 22-year-old tank gunner and yeshiva student who disappeared just 10 days before he was due to complete his military service, was one of three soldiers whose fate was unknown for decades after Israeli forces became trapped by Syrian troops in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 11, 1982.
Twenty Israeli soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded in the battle, with six initially listed as missing. Three were later returned or confirmed dead, leaving Katz, Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman as the only soldiers whose fate were unknown. The remains of Baumel and Feldman were recovered in separate operations in 2019 and 2025.
Katz’s remains were located during a special overnight operation carried out by the IDF in cooperation with Mossad and based on intelligence obtained in recent months. They were returned to Israel and military representatives informed Katz’s family of the discovery Tuesday morning.
For the soldiers who survived Sultan Yacoub, the news ended a wait that had followed them for much of their lives.
Avi Rath, who fought alongside Katz, said the unresolved fate of his comrade had stayed with him for decades. “The look on the family’s faces stays with you your entire life, a look that says, ‘You didn’t finish the job,’” Rath said in an interview on Tuesday with KAN public radio’s “Kalman Liberman” program. “Thank God, this closes a circle and resolves some of the uncertainty, but there is also great pain. It weighs on our conscience.”
Katz had studied in the Hesder program at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, combining Torah study with military service. According to the yeshiva, he slept barely four hours a night while immersed in his studies. He had planned to become a rabbi and teach at a yeshiva after completing his military service.
On the night before the battle, Katz gathered fellow soldiers around him and taught them Maimonides’ laws governing the conduct of Jewish soldiers in battle, the yeshiva said on its website. He then led them in singing Psalm 23, including the verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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