Uncategorized
Yiddish culture shared mainstream racist stereotypes of the 1920s, new book shows
This article initially appeared in Yiddish and can be read here.
America held many surprises for Jewish immigrants arriving at its shores over 150 years ago but one of the most significant was meeting African Americans, something that was very unfamiliar, even alien to them.
Sholem Aleichem conveyed this feeling in his series of stories Motl, Pesye the Cantor’s Son. In one memorable episode, its protagonist Motl, aged about nine, gets on the New York subway for the first time and sees a Black couple on the train. Stunned, he describes them in terms that would shock today’s readers: “Crude creatures. Horribly thick lips. Large white teeth and white nails.”
Critics would naturally focus on the racist stereotypes in this passage. But who’s to blame here: the author or the character?
In his latest book, Gil Ribak (University of Arizona) tackles this very question, putting Motl’s words right in the title: “Crude Creatures: Confronting Representations of Black People in Yiddish Culture.” Hillel Halkin’s English translation of these Sholem Aleichem stories, Ribak notes, omits the phrase, in a sign of modern discomfort around racist language.
Ribak isn’t the first scholar to take on this complicated, sensitive topic. However, until recently, scholars tended to tread carefully around attitudes toward African Americans as reflected in Yiddish literature; positive stories were amplified, and any negative elements kept quiet. Racist stereotypes didn’t figure in conversation, although they had existed all along. Even the Yiddish leftist literati, who openly sympathized with the hardships of Black people, made use of such expressions.
And as Ribak argues in his thoroughly researched study, we must keep in mind that the terms and images that sound so offensive today didn’t have the same meaning for readers a hundred years ago.
The stereotype of Black people as “wild animals” emerged in Hebrew and Yiddish when Ashkenazi Jews were still living in Eastern Europe, where most people had never seen an African person. European culture in general played a major role in transmitting this image, but it also reached Jewish communities through traditional Yiddish books. One example: The popular Yiddish Bible adaptation, Tsenerene, explains that the children of Noah’s son Ham, as punishment for their father’s sin, would be made “dark” and “black.”
When American Yiddish journalists set out to explain the American race problem to their readers, they viewed the South through an Eastern European lens, likening the African Americans to Russian peasants. Yiddish socialists claimed that the bitter experiences of slavery had made both the African Americans and the Russian peasants “slow,” “coarse” and “lazy.” The comparison was bolstered by the fact that Russian serfs and African American slaves had both been emancipated around the same time, in the 1860s.
In the United States, Ribak notes, the African American became a kind of Russian peasant incarnate in the American Jewish imagination. Ab Cahan, the editor-in-chief of the Forverts, drew a parallel for his readers between the Southern whites in America and Polish nobles back in Eastern Europe: hospitable and civil with their own, but when it came to those they considered their inferiors — the slave and the serf — they treated them as less than human.
Even as they protested anti-Black violence in the South, progressive Yiddish journalists and activists like Baruch Vladek and Ab Cahan still used racist stereotypes. Reporting for the Forverts on the Leo Frank trial in Atlanta in 1914, Cahan observed that “the streets were full of Negroes, mostly filthy and ragged.” To see how widespread these stereotypes were, one need look no further than the numerous caricatures by Jewish cartoonists that appeared in the popular satirical weekly Der Groyser Kundes (The Big Prankster).
Sometimes Jews and African Americans found themselves residing side by side in America’s urban centers. As Ribak notes, in Harlem, New York, in the early 20th century, Jews were practically the only white residents living among the majority Black population. But the two groups didn’t mix much, and by 1930, nearly all the Jews had left the neighborhood.
To be sure, Yiddish socialists upheld racial equality as an important principle, recognizing that Black people were the victims of discrimination and oppression. In practice, however, they had little direct contact with African Americans and often perceived them as “weaker and younger brothers.”
This ambivalence also plays out in the works of other American Yiddish writers like Sholem Asch, Joseph Opatoshu and Boruch Glazman. They all opposed racism, but their fictional portrayals of African Americans consistently drew on racist stereotypes, most visibly so in their descriptions of Black physicality, of faces and gestures. Opatoshu’s well-known story, A Lynching, is a telling example.
Ribak concludes that the authors’ negative, aesthetic representations in these literary works were at odds with their progressive, ethical worldviews. In other words, these writers were internally conflicted by their own diametrically opposed attitudes.
Ribak’s book is packed with vivid details from thousands of Yiddish, Hebrew and English sources. Unlike most Yiddish scholars today, he doesn’t limit his analysis to well-worn samplings of “high” culture and progressive journalism, but also cites examples in low-brow Yiddish popular culture.
Ribak’s wide-ranging approach allows him to reveal a series of complicated and sometimes contradictory positions that Eastern European immigrants held on the American race issue in the first othree decades of the twentieth century.
The many examples in this book support Ribak’s argument that Jewish immigrants were far from bias-free when it came to race. There’s a bit of implicit polemic here, too, against the tendency in the field of Yiddish Studies today, to focus exclusively on the progressive, anti-racist elements of American Yiddish culture.
It’s fair to say that by appropriating racist clichés, Jewish immigrants were hoping to take one step further on the path toward Americanization. It made them feel like truly “white” Americans, a very real matter at a time when American society was intensely xenophobic and antisemitic. But things would change. By the 1930s, leftist Jews began to see Black people as potential partners in the struggle for social and economic justice.
The post Yiddish culture shared mainstream racist stereotypes of the 1920s, new book shows appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘Marty Supreme’ and everything else Jewish at this year’s Academy Awards
At last year’s Academy Awards, Anora — a frenetic, somewhat ambiguously Jewish look at a Jewish enclave of New York, took home best picture, original screenplay, director and actress for its Jewish lead Mikey Madison. This year, we have a film that feels, in some ways, quite parallel, while cranking the Yiddishkeit to 11: Josh Safdie’s breathless picaresque Marty Supreme, set on the Lower East Side, is up for best picture and its star, Timothée Chalamet is a favorite for best actor.
There’s also Blue Moon, Richard Linklater’s portrait of Jewish lyricist Lorenz Hart’s breakup with composer Richard Rodgers (Ethan Hawke is up for best actor). And One Battle After Another, a campy and absurdist satire about the infiltration of white supremacists in the U.S. government, is poised to have a massive night, with the blockbuster Sinners serving as its main competition.
That all goes to say that it’s another great year for Jewish stories at the Oscars, with some really compelling fodder for discussion about the place that Jews occupy today in arts and media. What stories are we telling and how are they received?
Here, as ever, the Forward culture team is here to break it all down for you, live as it unfolds. Of course, we cover Jewish movies all year. But at the Academy Awards, we get to see how the rest of the world feels about these movies. We will be updating this story with our thoughts throughout the ceremony.
Traditionally, as we begin these Oscars roundtables, we discuss what we’re all wearing and eating. What’ve we got?
Olivia: brown sweater and jeans; no food but aggressively chewing mint gum. I will later be drinking some of the seltzer I got from Brooklyn’s Seltzer Fest today.
Mira: I did a bunch of cooking for the week so I have vegetarian avgolemono soup and Alison Roman’s fennel salad. (I’m obsessed with this salad.) I am proudly wearing hard pants.
PJ: I am reheating some chicken from last night. Wearing a blue sweater with a little toggle and jeans. How many of Stellan Skarsgård’s large adult sons are here? In other l’dor v’dor news, Bill Pullman just mentioned how they filmed the Spaceballs sequel with his son Lewis.
Talya: I believe I’m wearing the exact same sweater I donned for this event last year — where’s my award for consistency? And, as always, sweatpants; I cannot comprehend suffering through this event in jeans.
Discussion of Israeli-Palestinian protests on the red carpet
Mira: Love a toggle. Speaking of outfits, anyone have thoughts on Odessa A’zion’s spangled red carpet set? She is one of the only people who styles herself on the red carpet, which I do respect.
Olivia: A’Zion’s outfit kind of looks like she forgot to tie whatever was supposed to be holding it up. I don’t think it looks bad, just like it’s falling down.
PJ: It wouldn’t look out of place hanging from the window of a VW van with shag carpet and some Tibetan prayer flags.
Mira: Of note, the past several years have seen protesters approaching people on their way into the ceremony, and a lot of pins on the red carpet taking a stance on the Israel-Hamas war, largely pro-Palestinian ones. We’re seeing less of that this year — though not none. Javier Bardem posted a photo of him wearing a pin reading “no to the war” in Spanish, along with another pin featuring Handala, a cartoon boy considered a symbol of Palestinians. The team of The Voice of Hind Rajab, nominated for best foreign film, are also wearing red pins with a white dove.
PJ: Those have replaced the red hand ArtistsforCeasefire pins, which some said recalled the bloody palms of Palestinians who killed IDF soldiers in 2000.
Olivia: A reporter for ABC in a pre-recorded segment asked executive producers and showrunners for the ceremony Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan if anything would get bleeped, such as mentions of Trump, Israel and Palestine. Recently, the BBC removed director Akinola Davies Jr’s call for a “Free Palestine” from their BAFTA stream. Kapoor asserted that the night’s production team supports free speech, but we’ll see what transpires over the course of the night.
The post ‘Marty Supreme’ and everything else Jewish at this year’s Academy Awards appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
US Sends Additional Arms to Israel to Sustain Iran Operations
The first of two Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors is launched during a successful intercept test. Photo: US Army.
i24 News – The United States has recently increased shipments of munitions to Israel to support ongoing Israeli air operations against Iran.
According to reports broadcast by the public radio network Kan Reshet Bet, several weapons deliveries have arrived in Israel in recent days as part of what officials describe as an ongoing airlift aimed at sustaining the pace of military strikes.
Since the start of the campaign, Israeli forces are believed to have dropped more than 11,000 bombs on targets across Iran.
The shipments come as reports emerge about a potential shortage of ballistic missile interceptors in Israel. US officials told the news outlet Semafor that Israel’s interceptor stockpiles have been heavily used during the conflict.
According to those sources, Washington had already been aware for months that supplies could become strained, though it remains unclear whether the United States would be willing to share its own interceptor reserves. Israeli officials have since rejected claims that such a shortage exists.
Unlike the Iron Dome, which is designed to intercept short-range rockets and projectiles, ballistic missile interceptors serve as Israel’s primary defense against long-range missile threats. Fighter jets can also be used to attempt interceptions, though this method is considered a supplementary measure to missile defense systems.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government has taken additional budgetary steps to support the war effort. During an overnight vote between Saturday and Sunday, ministers approved a roughly 1 billion shekel reduction across various ministry budgets to help finance classified military purchases linked to Operation “Roar of the Lion.”
The government had already approved a 3 percent cut in ministry budgets, a move expected to increase the defense budget by approximately 30 billion shekels as the conflict continues.
Uncategorized
Pope Leo Decries ‘Atrocious Violence’ in Iran War, Urges Ceasefire
Pope Leo XIV leads the Angelus prayer from a window of the Apostolic Palace, at the Vatican, March 15, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Matteo Minnella
Pope Leo made an impassioned plea on Sunday for an immediate ceasefire in the expanding Iran war, lamenting “atrocious violence” that he said had killed thousands of non-combatants and caused suffering across the region.
As the US-Israeli war on Iran enters its third week, the first US pope warned that violence would not bring the justice, stability and peace that the peoples of the region long for.
“For two weeks, the peoples of the Middle East have been suffering the atrocious violence of war,” the pope said at his weekly Angelus prayer in St. Peter’s Square.
“In the name of Christians in the Middle East and of all women and men of good will, I appeal to those responsible for this conflict: Cease fire!” Pope Leo said.
IDEA THAT WAR SOLVES PROBLEMS IS ‘ABSURD’
Leo added that the situation in Lebanon – ravaged by a war between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah – was also a cause of “great concern.”
“I hope for paths of dialogue that can support the country’s authorities in implementing lasting solutions to the serious crisis currently underway, for the common good of all the Lebanese people,” the pope said.
During a visit to a Rome parish later, the pope said war could never resolve problems and hit out at people who invoke God to justify killings.
“Today many of our brothers and sisters in the world are suffering because of violent conflicts, caused by the absurd claim that problems and disagreements can be resolved through war, when instead we must engage in unceasing dialogue for peace,” he said during his homily.
“Some even go so far as to invoke the name of God to justify these choices of death, but God cannot be enlisted by darkness. Rather, He always comes to bring light, hope and peace to humanity.”