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Yiddish street signs: Commemoration or marginalization?
This is a revised translated version of the original article in Yiddish which you can read here.
One sunny day in spring 2021, without asking permission, artist Sebestyén Fiumei climbed a ladder in central Berlin and attached a white sign to a pole. It was inscribed with an antiquated Yiddish spelling of the street’s former name, “Grenadierstrasse.” Apart from the name change and the Yiddish alphabet, Fiumei’s illicit artwork was identical to the official German street sign on the same pole.
Until 1938, Grenadierstrasse was the most visibly Jewish street in Berlin. Its Jewish residents were predominantly Yiddish speakers born in Eastern Europe. In a sense, they’d brought the language home. After all, the Yiddish language originated in Germany, or “Ashkenaz,” and most German Jews had shifted to German just a few generations earlier, hoping conformity might bring them equality.
The Holocaust catastrophically exposed the false promises of German assimilation, while nearly obliterating Yiddish, the language of 85% of the murdered Jews.
Fiumei’s rogue street sign was quickly seized by a street patrol. But a Jewish district official, Nathan Friedenberg, was moved by its message: that German memorials and museums should commemorate not only affluent German speakers, but working-class Yiddish speakers as well — and reflect how Jews lived, not only how they died.
Together with historian Jess Earle, Friedenberg sought funding and approval for 10 official Yiddish signs around the old Jewish quarter, modeled on Fiumei’s.
The project quickly got snarled in red tape. Even the white background and the words “sign” and “art” were verboten. To make matters worse, regulations nearly prohibited the official use of Yiddish at all, due to the fact that it isn’t one of Germany’s recognized minority languages.
Five years later, on March 11, Earle, Friedenberg, and the institutions they work for, held an unveiling on the corner. The new “marker” retains Fiumei’s Yiddish spelling, above a contextualizing plaque in German and English. A QR code links to a new local history website headlined “Without a trace?”
The roughly 30 people who attended the unveiling included at least four Yiddish professionals, all thrilled to see our language in a public space. But the ceremony didn’t include a word of Yiddish.
“Of course not,” Earle told me unapologetically. “Yiddish isn’t the focus. It’s only mentioned when completely necessary.” Indeed, the website barely invokes it. Friedenberg, for his part, acknowledged the omission and promised to involve Yiddish speakers in future events.
But what exactly has vanished “without a trace”? Most Jews living in Germany today are from Eastern Europe, especially the former Soviet Union — another wave of Ashkenazis returning to Ashkenaz. Latvian-born Yiddish singer Sasha Lurje, for example, settled in Neukölln — an immigrant neighborhood like the old Jewish quarter — where she spearheaded a vibrant Yiddish music scene with her friends.
“I deeply connect to the people who once lived in the Jewish quarter,” says Lurje. “They remind me of my relatives.”
That Neukölln scene spawned the cultural organization Shtetl Berlin, with its regular events and an annual Yiddish music and culture festival, which is gradually coalescing with the literature and arts scene around a second group, Yiddish.Berlin. (I work with both groups.) In March alone, the combined community hosted a jam session, a potluck, poetry events, concerts, a Yiddish-speaking bar meetup, and assorted reading and writing groups.
Not all “real” street signs in Germany are monolingual. In late March, I drove 110 km (70 miles) to Lusatia, home to two recognized Slavic minority languages: Lower Sorbian (Wendish) and Upper Sorbian. There, Sorbian place names are legally mandated on village signs, street signs, even canal signs. But all weekend, I didn’t hear a word of the language.
For centuries, German governments suppressed Lower and Upper Sorbian: imposing German names, banning Sorbian-language newspapers, expelling pastors, resettling outsiders, collectivizing farms and destroying more than 130 villages to make way for coal mines.
Eventually, parents stopped speaking Lower Sorbian to their children, and Upper Sorbian survived in just a few Catholic enclaves. But serious revitalization efforts are now underway for both languages, with a goal of 100,000 Sorbian speakers by 2100.
The Sorbian languages are now protected under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, a status that brings funding and institutions: a Sorbian research institute; wide-ranging arts programs; language immersion programs for children and adults; a publishing house; several museums; two high schools; and, crucially, salaried jobs.
The Sorbian Institute even hired two linguists, Šyman Blum and Evan Bleakly, to visit 70 villages by bicycle and photograph every sign in the “linguistic landscape,” even ones that illegally exclude Sorbian.
For some people, seeing the revitalization of “definitely endangered” Lower Sorbian elicited an emotional reaction. “When I first heard children speaking the language, I almost cried,” Bleakly said.
Sorbian artist Bernhard Schipper called the bilingual signs “very important,” and the language activist Měto Nowak is proof. The signs inspired Nowak to learn Lower Sorbian; he later chaired the body representing Germany’s minority languages.
In a message to me, Nowak wrote: “I’ve often wondered why Yiddish is not a minority language in Germany, as it is in eight European countries.” Its significant support in Sweden, for example, was recently highlighted in the comic documentary Swedishkayt.
At a café on former Grenadierstrasse overlooking the Yiddish sign, Nowak told me behind-the-scenes stories about the politics of minority languages and how they attain this status. A week later, he published his own article about the Yiddish signs — written in Lower Sorbian.
As it happens, Fiumei was working on more than one public-facing Yiddish project in spring 2021. He also launched a campaign with his then-roommate Eliana Jacobs for Yiddish to become Germany’s eighth minority language. Their Facebook page has been silent for years — but the new signs have revitalized the discussion.
“Let’s relaunch the campaign!” Jacobs told me.
“It’s very realistic,” Lurje agreed.
One can only hope. Yiddish has certainly not vanished from Berlin — but without official recognition, it remains nearly invisible.
The post Yiddish street signs: Commemoration or marginalization? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever
The Israeli city of Netanya has renamed one of its streets Rechov Avrom Sutzkever (Abraham Sutzkever Street), after the renowned Yiddish poet and Vilna partisan.
The event on June 10 marked an important cultural moment, recognizing the legacy of a poet who devoted his life to Yiddish language and Jewish culture. During his lifetime, Sutzkever was celebrated not only for his poetry, but also for editing the storied Yiddish literary magazine Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) for 46 years. His work remains a fixture in the field of Yiddish literature today.
Sutzkever was born in 1913 in the shtetl of Smorgon, in what is now Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother Rayne moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever survived the Vilna Ghetto. He was a leader of the “Paper Brigade” that rescued Jewish cultural treasures from the Nazis and later became the only Jewish witness called by the Soviets to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.
His poetry chronicled his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna ghetto and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1947 he settled in Palestine, later Israel.
In Israel, he continued to create, publish and preserve Yiddish culture for decades. Yet, despite his immense influence around the world, he remained less known in Israel because he chose to write and fight for the Yiddish language rather than switch to Hebrew.
This is the first time a street in Israel has been named after him. Even Tel Aviv never did so, despite the fact that Sutzkever lived there for many years and the city was once a hotbed of Yiddish cultural activity, due to the influx of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who settled there after the Holocaust.
The street-naming ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Netanya, Avi Slama; representatives of the Lithuanian Embassy; public figures, artists, and members of the family, including Sutzkever’s granddaughter, Hadas Kalderon.
In the past decade, Kalderon has been instrumental in keeping Abraham Sutzkever’s memory alive, most notably through two documentary films: Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?) in 2021, and Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever in 2018.
Kalderon told me that she was very moved by Netanya’s decision to name the street after her grandfather, in a garden overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. “It was not only a tribute to Sutzkever himself, but also a powerful moment of recognition for Yiddish language and culture within the State of Israel,” she said.
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At the dawn of the World Cup, the story of the Jews who helped bring soccer to America
When the North American FIFA World Cup starts in Mexico City on June 11, the story will largely be told through the familiar lenses of Lionel Messi, the geography of the 48 participants and three hosts, and — because 75% of the games will be played there — the continuing rise of soccer in the United States. But there is another, less familiar story woven through the tournament: the long, strange and often overlooked history of Jews in North American soccer.
Mostly that’s been in the United States where players and owners have included a larger proportion of Jews than in Canada and Mexico. By my count, no Jewish players have represented Mexico, and only two Jewish men have represented Canada at senior international level and one of them, Tomer Chencinski, only did so once, in a friendly game where Canada lost 2-0 to Belarus in Doha. (Daniel Haber played 5 international games in his career).
For whatever reason, whether more closely linked to Europe, denied entry to other sports, or just arbiters of excellent taste, Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of soccer in the United States for over a century. The first American to play for a major European team was Eddy Hamel for Ajax Amsterdam in 1922. Hamel was a New York-born winger who became a star for Ajax in Amsterdam during the 1920s. An injury forced his retirement in the 1930s and, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he was deported and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. His story remains one of the most tragic intersections of Jewish history and world football.
Jews also comprised the largest soccer crowd in America when 46,000 New Yorkers watched Hakoach Vienna play New York All Stars in 1926. That record stood for over 50 years but it also encouraged a number of members of the Hakoach team to emigrate to the US and start a New York team that was a crucial part of the American Soccer League of the era.
Later, in the 1970s, the National American Soccer League — the glitzy NASL — became a success thanks to the glamorous New York Cosmos. As head of Warner Communications, their CEO Steve Ross, born Rechnitz, was the person who brought Pele over and made the league the star-studded affair it became. After Herman Sarkowsky co-founded the Seattle Sounders, the continent was almost ready for football.
When the NASL faded and folded, soccer dwindled as a major sport in the United States. Alan Rothenberg saw an opportunity to revive the sport by hosting the 1994 World Cup and founding the MLS as a reset. As president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and the chief executive of the World Cup USA 1994 organizing committee, he made both of those happen and laid the foundations for the current shape of U.S. soccer.
The success of the MLS was not a foregone conclusion, though; indeed, it barely survived to the millennium. It was founded in 1993 but only started playing in 1996 — losing an estimated $350 million between its founding and 2004. The league initially turned to Don Garber, a former NFL executive, in August 1999 but even he couldn’t turn it around. By late 2001, it looked like the league would fold like its predecessors but it was able to secure new financing from owners Lamar Hunt, Philip Anschutz, and the Kraft family to take on more teams. Over the past 20 years, it has become robust, enjoying the general boom of all things soccer, riding the coattails of the English Premier League.
Without Robert Kraft and Anschutz, Major League Soccer might not exist today. During the league’s precarious early years, the two billionaire owners absorbed enormous losses to keep the fledgling competition alive. Kraft, the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, was also a central figure in bringing the 2026 World Cup to North America. As chairman of the United Bid Committee, he played a crucial role in securing the tournament for the United States, Canada and Mexico.
If Kraft represents one side of the Jewish soccer story, Chuck Blazer represents another.
The larger-than-life American soccer executive helped expose corruption inside FIFA, serving as a key witness in the investigations that ultimately toppled some of the most powerful figures in world football. Yet Blazer was a product of the very system he later helped unravel. His spectacular rise and fall remains one of the strangest chapters in soccer history, a tale of luxury apartments, exotic pets and global corruption.
Unlike baseball, basketball or boxing, soccer never became known as a major arena of Jewish achievement in the United States. Perhaps that has been due to the historic lack of status for soccer in the country. Despite the excellence of Yael Averbuch West for the USWNT and a number of Jewish players for the USMNT including Jonathan Bornstein, Benny Feilhaber, Dan Calichman, DeAndre Yedlin, Kyle Beckerman and the maverick Yari Alnutt there have been no soccer equivalents of Sandy Koufax or Hank Greenberg.
The stalwart defender Jeff “Goose” Agoos came closest with 134 international appearances and six more for the U.S. soccer Olympic team. But playing with a mediocre USMNT, he enjoyed few legendary moments. In fact, arguably no professional moments outshone the bizarre story of his 1989 NCAA championship ring in his junior year, the season that he played in the Maccabiah. On Dec. 3 of that year, his Virginia Cavalier team (playing for future USMNT coach Bruce Arena) met the top ranked, undefeated Santa Clara team in a freezing cold stadium in Piscataway, N.J. The teams were still tied 1-1 after FOUR overtimes and, with no penalties on the books, they shared the spoils. It was the third time that two teams shared the championship and has never happened again.
This year’s USMNT squad does include the only Jewish player at this summer’s tournament — reserve goalkeeper Matt Turner. If, as coach Mauricio Pochettino plans, Turner exclusively warms the bench, he will take his place alongside many of America’s notable Jewish soccer figures who have furthered the game, even if not on the field.
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‘Remember the Liberty’ has become code for ‘Israel Is Evil’
The first tragedy of the U.S.S. Liberty attack is that it happened at all. The second is that Israel’s critics have weaponized it to spread hate.
When Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood on the House floor on June 8, the 59th anniversary of the attack, and called for a Congressional probe into the incident, he wasn’t seriously trying to bring the truth of some long-buried historical secret to light. Massie, who in 14 years never once brought up the U.S.S. Liberty on the House floor, was using the latest cudgel in the Israel-haters’ arsenal to level one last official blow at a country he loathes.
“I’ve got a call to action for everybody here,” said Massie, speaking of attack survivors who were in the audience, “Honor these individuals. Quit ignoring that they exist. Let’s have an investigation. It’s long overdue.”
Let’s put aside the fact that there have been numerous official investigations into what exactly happened on June 8, 1967, the second day of the Six Day War, when Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the Liberty off the Sinai Peninsula, killing 34 American service members.
These investigations concluded that the tragedy was a friendly-fire incident. The Israelis initially mistook the Liberty, an intelligence-gathering vessel, for an Egyptian warship. After the smoke cleared, they accepted responsibility, apologized and paid $12 million in compensation to the victims.
Of all the explanations, it’s perhaps the least satisfying but the most logical. During the Vietnam War, happening at the same time, an estimated 11% to 15% of casualties were from friendly fire.
Massie’s call for a new investigation would be more believable if he then didn’t go on to recite the alternative one-sided narrative of the incident long pushed by some survivors and now taken up with gusto by Israel haters Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and others.
To them the attack was deliberate: The Israelis ignored the large American flag the Liberty was flying and began shooting.
“It was intentional murder by the country of Israel,” said Massie on the House floor, “either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”
What Massie and his fellow conspiracy theorists are alleging is a crime, but none of them has sufficiently proven a motive. Why would Israel attack the ship of its most important and powerful ally?
The false flag theory — the idea that Israel wanted to sink the Liberty, blame Egypt or the Soviet Union for it and draw America into the war — makes no sense.
The war was all but won by June 8. Moreover, as the historian and former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren relates in Six Days of War, the Israelis actually stopped firing initially when they suspected the ship was American.
The Israelis sent helicopters to investigate, but heavy smoke obscured the ship. Meanwhile, as Israeli torpedo boats closed in, a U.S. Navy crewman, perhaps not hearing his commander’s orders, opened fire.
The Israelis, now convinced it was an enemy ship, unleashed torpedoes, killing 25 Americans.
Massie left all this out of his narrative. He quoted then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who said at the time, “the attack was, quite literally incomprehensible,” implying that a murky conspiracy underlay it all.
But he didn’t include the rest of what Rusk said: That what happened was “an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life.”
In other words, Rusk’s full quote doesn’t suggest intention, but gross carelessness, which is a far cry from premeditated murder. It was chaos, miscommunication, uncertainty, incompetence, fear — the fog of war.
But to Massie and others, there’s no need to establish a coherent motive for why Israel attacked its harmless friends, because in their minds that’s just who Israelis are.
If Massie wants another investigation, fine. But I find it hard to believe that any investigation that doesn’t find Israel guilty of murder in the first will ever satisfy him or the people for whom “Remember the Liberty” is shorthand for “Israel is evil.”
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