Uncategorized
YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory
(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.
A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.
As Max explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.
Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s W. 16th Street.
This week YIVO and the NLI will announce the completion of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had to invite Max, not just because of his connection to Inna Grade but because he has become a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel “The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.
We met on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)
The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies the years of effort that went into putting them in order. Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he visited shortly after Inna’s death.
“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apartment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks, there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts and books and books…. But the thing I remember most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart.
Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind his mother and his first wife under the assumption that the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in 1925, and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Chaim Grade had already established a reputation as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war; English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish press brought him recognition in America for what the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, says that Grade was possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, showed us the physical evidence of that possession: Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Sacrifice”); a photograph of Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy.
Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.
Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)
The archivists are also careful to give Inna her due. After arriving in America she studied literature and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her, hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles about him have survived.
Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,” said Brent. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”
If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is: In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that had happened to him — his fame — but this they never referred to,” wrote Ozick. “Instead they discussed his style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.”
Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her husband read and hated the story. In it she describes Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”
For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval, “this is probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of the archive. He described publishing projects already underway with Schocken Books and other publishers that will draw on the material.
Max and I discussed what it felt like to see what had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary preservation. Max was struck by the way Inna’s personality came through in the papers. “This was her,” he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It was definitely remarkable to see that.”
I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna, and how her behavior could seem funny and exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation may also have prevented scholars from doing the work that would have made him better known.
“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are true at the same time,” said Max. “Those kinds of scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody really cared and that literature was taken so seriously. And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite divest from the rest of it.”
—
The post YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Nearly Half of Jewish Students Report Experiencing Antisemitism on US College Campuses, Survey Finds
A student puts on their anti-Israel graduation cap reading “From the river to the sea” at the People’s Graduation, hosted for Mahmoud Khalil and other students from New York University. Photo: Angelina Katsanis via Reuters Connect
The campus antisemitism crisis has changed the college experience for American Jewish students, affecting how they live, socialize, and perceive themselves as Jews, according to new survey results released by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in partnership with Hillel International.
A striking 42 percent of Jewish students reported experiencing antisemitism during their time on campus, and of that group, 55 percent said they felt that being Jewish at a campus event threatened their safety.
The survey also found that 34 percent of Jewish students avoid being detected as Jews, hiding their Jewish identity due to fear of antisemitism.
Meanwhile, 38 percent of Jewish students said they decline to utter pro-Israel viewpoints on campus, including in class, for fear of being targeted by anti-Zionists. The rate of self-censorship is significantly higher for Jewish students who have already been subjected to antisemitism, registering at 68 percent.
“No Jewish student should have to hide their identity out of fear of antisemitism, yet that’s the reality for too many students today,” Hillel International chief executive officer Adam Lehman said in a statement on Tuesday. “Our work on the ground every day is focused on changing that reality by creating environments where all Jewish students can find welcoming communities and can fully and proudly express their Jewish identities without fear or concern.”
The survey, included in AJC’s new “The State of Antisemitism in America” report, added that 32 percent of Jewish students feel that campus groups promote antisemitism or a learning environment that is hostile to Jews, while 25 percent said that antisemitism was the basis of their being “excluded from a group or an event on campus.”
Jewish students endure these indignities while preserving their overwhelming support for Israel. Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed identified caring about Israel as a central component of Jewish identity and 76 percent agreed that calling for its destruction or describing it as an illegitimate state is antisemitic.
“While we welcome the fact that the vast majority of campuses have not been disrupted by uncontrolled protests in the past year, the data make clear that Jewish students are still experiencing antisemitism on their campuses,” Laura Shaw Frank, the AJC’s vice president of its Center for Education Advocacy, said in a statement. “This survey gives us a critical look into the less visible, but no less important problems, that Jews face on campus.”
She continued, “Understanding the ways in which Jews are being excluded and changing their behavior out of fear of antisemitism is vitally important as we work with institutions of higher education to create truly inclusive campus communities.”
The AJC and Hillel’s survey results are consistent with others in which Jewish students have participated in recent months.
According, to a recent survey of Jewish undergraduates of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), a significant portion of Jewish students still find the climate on campus to be hostile and feel the need to hide their identity over two years after the campus saw an explosion of extreme anti-Zionist activity and Nazi graffiti.
The survey, conducted by Penn’s local Hillel International chapter, found that 40 percent of respondents said it is difficult to be Jewish at Penn and 45 percent said they “feel uncomfortable or intimidated because of their Jewish identity or relationship with Israel.”
Meanwhile, the results showed a staggering 85 percent of survey participants reported hearing about, witnessing, or experiencing “something antisemitic,” as reported by Franklin’s Forum, an alumni-led online outlet which posts newsletters regarding developments at the university. Another 31 percent of Jewish Penn students said they feel the need to hide their Jewishness to avoid discrimination, which is sometimes present in the classroom, as 26 percent of respondents said they have “experienced antisemitic or anti-Israel comments from professors.”
Overall, 80 percent of Jewish students hold that anti-Israel activity is “often” antisemitic and that Israel’s conduct in war is “held to an unfair standard compared to other nations.”
College faculty play an outsized role in promoting antisemitism on the campus, according to a new study by AMCHA Initiative which focused on the University of California system. The study, titled “When Faculty Take Sides: How Academic Infrastructure Drives Antisemitism at the University of California,” exposed Oct 7 denialism; faculty calling for driving Jewish institutions off campus; the founding of pro-Hamas, Faculty for Justice in Palestine groups; and hundreds of endorsers of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
The University of California system is a microcosm of faculty antisemitism across the US, the AMCHA Initiative explained in the exhaustive 158-page report, which focused on the Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz campuses.
“The report documents how concentrated networks of faculty activists on each campus, often operating through academic units and faculty-led advocacy formations, convert institutional platforms into vehicles for organized anti-Zionist advocacy and mobilization,” the report stated. “It shows how those pathways are associated with recurring student harms and broader campus disruption. It then outlines concrete steps the UC Regents can take to restore institutional neutrality in academic units and set enforceable boundaries so UC resources and authority are not used to advance activist agendas inside the university’s core educational functions.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Uncategorized
Forverts podcast, episode 6: At-risk languages
דער פֿאָרווערטס האָט שוין אַרויסגעלאָזט דעם זעקסטן קאַפּיטל פֿונעם ייִדישן פּאָדקאַסט, Yiddish With Rukhl. דאָס מאָל איז די טעמע „שפּראַכן אין אַ סכּנה“. אין דעם קאַפּיטל לייענט שׂרה־רחל שעכטער פֿאָר אַן אַרטיקל פֿונעם ייִדיש־אַקטיוויסט דזשייק שנײַדער, „וואָס אַקטיוויסטן פֿאַר שפּראַכן אין אַ סכּנה קענען זיך אָפּלערנען איינער פֿונעם אַנדערן.“
צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
אויב איר ווילט אויך לייענען דעם געדרוקטן טעקסט פֿונעם אַרטיקל, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ און קוקט אונטן בײַם סוף פֿון דער זײַט.
The post Forverts podcast, episode 6: At-risk languages appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
An audiobook narrator told Zionists to kill themselves. A popular romance novelist hired him anyway.
A bestselling romance novelist is facing backlash from her Jewish readers after hiring an audiobook narrator who previously posted on social media telling Zionists to kill themselves.
Abby Jimenez’s novel The Night We Met, set to be published next month, features voice actor Zachary Webber as the narrator of the audiobook.
“If you’re a Zionist and you exist, you should not do that anymore,” Webber posted on his Instagram story in September 2024. “No one likes you and you suck, and go f—cking kill yourself.”
Webber later apologized on Instagram, writing that his comment was “a poorly-worded joke aimed at a violent settler-colonialist enterprise. I regret any language that suggested otherwise. Fortunately, my anti-Zionist Jewish friends understood it was a joke, and moved on with their beautiful lives.” He did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
Webber, who has a low, gravelly voice and sums up his job as “I READ SEX,” has narrated more than 250 steamy audiobooks, including eight of Jimenez’s. But amid backlash over Webber’s social media comments, Jimenez originally said she would go in a different direction for the audio narration of The Night We Met, a novel about forbidden love between two best friends.
But earlier this month, Jimenez changed her mind.
“I know I mentioned that I was going with a male voice actor that I’ve never used before, but I’m going to be really honest with you — the fit wasn’t right,” Jimenez posted in her private readers Facebook group. “We did a day of recording and he just wasn’t Chris. All I could think the whole time was how perfectly Zachary would have captured the tone and personality of this character and at the end of recording Day One, I made the choice to change narrators.”
Several readers commented in the Facebook group expressing concern about Webber. But those comments were removed, with Jimenez citing group rules against “political or negative conversations.” She added that she did not “want to be forced to leave to protect my mental health. I cannot go to a comment section to see vitriol, even if it’s vitriol I happen to agree with.”
Neither Jimenez’s literary agent nor Hachette Book Group, the publisher of The Night We Met, responded to the Forward’s request for comment.
The backlash among Jimenez’s readers represents the latest flare-up over Israel in progressive-coded subcultures, from knitting circles to vegan cooking. The romance publishing world, consistently the top-grossing genre in adult fiction, has not been immune: Other recent flashpoints have included boycotts of authors labeled “Zionist” and the decision by SteamyLitCon, a romance book convention, to remove Israeli-born author Michelle Mars from its lineup last year over social media posts organizers said were “anti-Palestinian.”
“It just made me really sad about the state of the industry,” said Chayla Wolfberg, a Jewish author and former fan of Jimenez’s books. “There’s a lot of obviously very complicated things when it comes to engaging with criticism of Israel. And what [Webber] was doing wasn’t that.”
Happily ever after?
Romance publishing has spent the past few decades broadening its vision of who gets a love story — elevating LGBTQ+ narratives, highlighting authors and characters of color, and celebrating diverse body types. But some Jewish writers and readers say they have been excluded from that push.
The lack of Jewish representation in romance was part of what inspired 27-year-old Wolfberg to self-publish Late Night Love, a Saturday Night Live-inspired enemies-to-lovers rom-com featuring a Jewish protagonist. Too often, Wolfberg said, Jewish characters only appear in stories defined by trauma and suffering.
Romance, by contrast, is governed by two nonnegotiable rules: The story must center on a developing romantic relationship, and the conclusion must be emotionally satisfying — the genre’s trademark “happily ever after” (HEA), or at least “happy for now” (HFN). When it comes to Jewish storytelling, Wolfberg said, that structure can feel subversive.
But Wolfberg didn’t feel accepted by the broader romance book community. When she promoted her work online, viewers commented that she was a Zionist and thus shouldn’t support her book.
“It is a radical thing, especially if you are from a historically oppressed or a minority community, to be writing a story that has a happy ending and isn’t just about suffering,” Wolfberg said. “But I think that is where anti-Zionism unfortunately creeps in, in the way that it has become part of the lexicon for people who are anti-oppression.”
Wolfberg has instead found support mostly among other Jewish authors. She said her next book will feature a character who has family in Israel — even though she’s aware that aspect could make it a tough sell.
Meanwhile, popular romance authors whose books have nothing to do with Judaism or Israel have also been targeted.
In a 2015 interview with the Jewish Chronicle, Sarah J. Maas, author of the massively popular A Court of Thorns and Roses series, mentioned going on a Birthright trip to Israel. Maas said she “left Israel overflowing with pride,” and described the country as “a magical, welcoming place.” Nearly a decade later, those comments landed her on the X account Zionists in Publishing, which points out Zionist authors to boycott.
Rebecca Yarros, author of the bestselling romantasy series Empyrean, appeared on a similar account that exposes Zionist authors. Her offense? Posting on Oct. 15, 2023, that “children are not collateral damage” and that she was “horrified by the despicable attack on Israel” and “terrified for the children and Palestinian innocents in Gaza.”
The extent to which those blacklists actually impact sales is unclear; both Yarros and Maas have sold millions of copies.
But it’s still a dynamic Jewish romance enthusiasts would prefer to avoid. In response, they’ve carved out their own spaces: Author Jean Meltzer, who writes Jewish rom-coms such as The Matzah Ball and Kissing Kosher, runs a Facebook group called “Jewish Women Talk About Romance Books,” which has 3,300 members. There, women discuss books they read as part of the The Jewish Joy Book Club, which has one rule: “We read books where nobody dies at the end.”
The need for a Jewish space in the romance genre was also evident to Gillian Geller, a 35-year–old in Toronto, Canada, who used to run a book blog focused on all kinds of novels, with a focus on romance. But after Oct. 7, she shifted to spotlighting Jewish books.
For her, Jimenez’s decision to rehire Webber is another example of how Jewish authors and readers have been excluded from a genre that is otherwise increasingly sensitive to inclusion.
“I felt like if I wasn’t stepping up to help promote these books,” she said, “then nobody else would.”
The post An audiobook narrator told Zionists to kill themselves. A popular romance novelist hired him anyway. appeared first on The Forward.