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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.”
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Israel’s enemies say it is anti-Christian. Jewish extremists are helping them make the case
One of the more damaging charges against Israel now circulating in the United States portrays the Jewish state as increasingly hostile to Christianity and Christians. The accusation has acquired considerable prominence in American media, where stories about attacks on clergy, harassment of worshippers, restrictions around Christian holy sites and violence against Christian communities have accumulated into a broader portrait of a country becoming inhospitable to one of the faiths born in the Holy Land.
The Washington Post recently devoted a major article to attacks on Christians in Israel and the government’s lackluster response, while other reporting has focused on Jews spitting at Christian clergy and pilgrims in Jerusalem, vandalism of Christian property and the April assault on a Roman Catholic nun near the Old City.
The nun’s case was particularly appalling: according to the subsequent indictment, a Jewish Israeli man chased the 48-year-old French Catholic sister, pushed her to the ground and kicked her after identifying her as a Christian nun. Israeli police arrested the suspect and prosecutors charged him with an assault motivated by religious hostility.
The Armenian Christians of Jerusalem have become another symbol of the phenomenon. Their community predates almost every modern political dispute over the city, with a continuous presence stretching back some 1,700 years. Yet Armenian clergy and residents have described repeated episodes of spitting, intimidation and abuse.
Israeli media in recent weeks described Israeli teenagers arriving at the headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the Old City and asking whether Christians were inside because they wanted to spit at them.
Scenes like these travel instantly around the world and provide ready-made material for anyone seeking to portray Israel as a place where Christians are despised. In fact, Israel’s Jewish extremists have no particular beef with Christians – but rather a conflict with, and often a hatred for, Arabs in general, of any religion.
Overall, the incidents are not representative of Christian life inside Israel. About 200,000 Christian citizens lived in the country at the end of 2025, most of them Arab Christians, and the community has continued to grow. Arab Christians have exceptionally high educational attainment and are disproportionately represented in Israeli higher education. Christians serve as judges, diplomats, doctors, academics and public officials, and their churches and institutions form a recognized part of Israeli public life. Moreover, the assault on the Catholic nun produced an arrest and indictment rather than tacit approval, and Israeli authorities regularly proclaim their commitment to Christian worship and the protection of Christian holy places.
Yet a radical Jewish fringe appears determined to furnish Israel’s enemies with the pictures, anecdotes and headlines required to transform an inflammatory accusation into a plausible story. The latest damaging example comes from Taybeh, the last predominantly Christian Palestinian village in the West Bank (and home to its only beer brewery).
Taybeh has endured months of tension and violence. In June, Israeli settlers obstructed Palestinians attempting to extinguish a large fire near the village, according to Palestinian firefighters and a local priest. Residents have complained of arson, vandalism, incursions onto private property and intimidation.
“The settlers can do whatever enters their heads,” said the Rev. Jack Abed of Taybeh’s Greek Orthodox community. “And every now and then we have rioting from settler youth who come into the village. They bring sheep with them to graze in our fields.”
This week the Israeli military responded by closing the village to Israelis, saying the measure followed violent attacks by Israelis in the area and was intended to protect local residents and maintain order.
The order illustrates two realities at once. The Israeli army is using military power to protect a Palestinian Christian community from Israeli Jewish extremists. This tells a very different story from the sweeping claim that the Israeli state has embarked upon a campaign against Christians. At the same time, the necessity of such a measure shows the extent of the problem Israel has permitted to develop.
Indeed, Israel Radio this week reported that there have been 660 cases of “nationalistic crime” by Jews in the West Bank in the first six months of 2026 – a 50 percent increase over the same period last year. The report, citing military sources, said six Palestinians were killed and 140 injured in these attacks. There are rarely long-term arrests and no settlers have been convicted in the deaths.
I recently wrote in these pages about Jewish terrorists in the West Bank after extremists torched two mosques, burned cars and fields and attacked Palestinian motorists. One mosque in Qusra was burned and covered with revenge graffiti; another in Kur was set ablaze.
The violence belongs to a larger pattern of attacks on civilians, destruction of property and vigilante incursions into Palestinian communities. I described this as both a moral failure and a national-security disaster because every such episode creates another security problem for the Israeli soldiers and police who must contain the consequences, while simultaneously providing Hamas, Iran and Israel’s other enemies with propaganda more effective than much of what they could manufacture themselves.
The Christian dimension makes the strategic stupidity even more breathtaking. Israel depends upon deep reservoirs of sympathy among Christians around the world, especially in the United States, where tens of millions of evangelical Christians have provided some of the most consistent political support for the Jewish state. Christian attachment to Israel also extends far beyond evangelical politics to people who regard the survival of ancient Christian communities and access to the holy places of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the Galilee as matters of profound spiritual importance.
Every video of an extremist spitting at a priest, every report of an Armenian Christian being harassed and every attack on a Christian Palestinian village chips away at that reservoir of goodwill. These extremists are weakening Israel’s security, staining Judaism and turning potential friends of Israel into skeptics and existing skeptics into enemies.
The military’s action in Taybeh is therefore welcome, and it is also woefully insufficient. Israel’s Oct. 27 election offers the possibility of a different approach. Should Netanyahu be defenestrated and a new government take office, a comprehensive crackdown on Jewish terrorism in the West Bank should rank among its first priorities. The task requires arrests, prosecutions and enforcement rather than declarations of concern after each fresh outrage.
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A Democratic upset in Connecticut — but Israel was not a factor
(JTA) — Luke Bronin scored a decisive victory over longtime Rep. John Larson in Connecticut’s Democratic primary Tuesday, marking another defeat for AIPAC which had backed the 14-term congressman.
The pro-Israel lobby group is increasingly viewed as politically toxic in Democratic primaries across the country, with several progressive candidates notching victories after making opposition to the group a centerpiece of their campaigns.
Israel and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, however, were not at the forefront of the contest in Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District, reflecting a more nuanced picture regarding Democratic voters’ shifting sentiments toward Israel.
Bronin and Larson, the race’s two candidates with more traditionally pro-Israel positions, together won nearly 90% of the vote, with Bronin receiving 53% while Larson received 34%. The two progressive candidates in the race, Jillian Gilchrest and Ruth Fortune, who both accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, finished a distant third and fourth.
Bronin, 46, who has Jewish ancestry on his father’s side, is the former mayor of Hartford and also served in the Obama Administration as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. His campaign largely centered on affordability and emphasizing the need for new leadership in the Democratic party.
“If we are going to fix this mess that we are in, we need to build a Democratic Party that is bringing a whole new energy to this fight,” Bronin told supporters following his victory.
Israel was not entirely absent from the campaign. Larson, who first took office in 1999, split with Bronin during a primary debate last month when Larson defended his recent vote in support of U.S. military aid to Israel.
“Yes, I voted in favor of making sure that Israel, our ally, is going to get the aid from the United States that it needs. But the Palestinians need humanitarian aid, and Donald Trump has got to enforce the law,” Larson said.
Bronin pushed back at Larson, replying, “Trusting Donald Trump to do the right thing is a mind-blowing example of putting hope over all of the evidence in front of us.”
While Larson had long supported Israel during his tenure in Congress, he has been critical of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza and treatment of Palestinians and vocally opposed the United States’ war in Iran.
Bronin, meanwhile, has said he is against taxpayer money going toward funding offensive military aid to Israel, though he supports “defenses for civilians that protect civilian life against rockets and missiles and drones.”
“I think it’s hugely important that Israel exists as a safe, secure homeland for the Jewish people,” Bronin said when asked about his views on Israel on The Lisa Wexler Show in May. He also spoke out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, explaining that the premier had “done enormous damage to Israel’s security, Israel’s standing in the world,” adding that “we have an obligation as a country to say what’s happening is not okay.”
Bronin slightly outraised Larson on the campaign trail, receiving roughly $3.1 million largely from individual donations from billionaires and large firms, while Larson received $2.7 million and relied more on donations from PACs, according to the Federal Election Commission.
Larson received roughly $120,000 in AIPAC-linked donations during the campaign cycle, according to the campaign finance database Open Secrets.
Bronin will now face Republican Amy Chai, a physician and mental health advocate, in the general election for the state’s first congressional district. The district, which spans Bristol, Hartford and Torrington, is home to 27,800 Jews, representing 3.9% of the total population, according to the Berman Jewish Data Bank.
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Jack Ukeles, who used data and idealism to shape Jewish communal life, dies at 89
(JTA) — Throughout a storied career of more than five decades that included key roles in teaching courses at elite universities, policy planning for city and state governments and community surveys for Jewish organizations around the world, Jack Ukeles had one consistent goal: to blend research, data and strategic problem-solving with idealism in making the world a better place.
Ukeles, who died July in Jerusalem at the age of 89, was widely and deeply admired as well for his integrity, wisdom and compassion on both a personal and professional level.
He was also one of the most prominent members of a cohort of Jewish social scientists who, from the 1980s through the 2000s, played a central role in setting the agenda for organized Jewish life. Philanthropists and nonprofit leaders sought their data and recommendations on hot-button issues like rising intermarriage, attachment to Israel, population trends and declining engagement with Jewish institutions.
In 1981, Ukeles joined the Jewish non-profit world as senior planning officer of the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies (now UJA-Federation of New York). He led the charity’s first scientific study of the New York area’s Jewish population, and major studies on senior services and Jewish poverty.
Five years later, he went out on his own, launching Ukeles Associates, Inc., and for 28 years led consulting projects combining his experience in policy research, planning and management for a range of secular and Jewish non-profits.
Speaking at the funeral in Jerusalem, where Ukeles and his wife, Mierle, lived since making aliyah in 2012, longtime friend and colleague Asher Ostrin predicted that Ukeles’s teaching, in both classrooms and nonprofit board rooms, will have a lasting effect, especially for American Jewry.
“Generations of Jewish communal professionals are his students, and are taught to reflect the method and values he held dear,” said Ostrin, an executive at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Those values were shaped growing up in a religious Zionist home, aware of the trauma his parents endured in Eastern Europe before settling in New York. Ukeles’s mother wanted a first-rate Jewish education for her only son, and after visiting a number of yeshivas, moved the family from The Bronx to Brooklyn so he could attend the Yeshiva of Flatbush, where he thrived academically and as student council president and member of the basketball team.
After seeing a newspaper ad announcing the opening of a university in Israel committed to integrating modern scholarship and traditional Jewish learning, he applied and was accepted in 1955 to Bar-Ilan University’s first class.
“My father was proud to be a member of that first class, and as a student leader there, he wanted to help build the school and be a part of its growth” in synthesizing secular and religious studies, his daughter Raquel Ukeles recalled. “But the administration wasn’t interested.” He was 18 at the time.
After a year in Israel, Ukeles attended a yeshiva and Brooklyn College, where he took courses in community planning, research and data. He received his B.A. in political science in 1959, and an M.A. in city planning two years later at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1962, Ukeles spent a year in New Delhi, India, as a Fulbright Fellow and returned to complete his Ph.D. at Penn in 1971.
During his graduate school years, Ukeles turned a summer job in the New York City planning department into a three-year position. He helped produce the first data-driven analysis of New York City’s housing needs, and was part of a team that reshaped the city’s approach to urban renewal.
He then turned to academia, starting a long-term pattern of moving back and forth between university posts — including the New School, where he later became chairman of the first urban policy graduate program in the U.S. — and designing and leading civil service and financial reforms in New York through the mayor’s office under Abe Beame and Ed Koch.
On behalf of Jewish organizations, he conducted a 2006 survey of Atlanta’s Jewish population that confirmed the explosive growth of Jewish communities in the Sun Belt, and co-authored a 2002 community study showing how Russian immigrants and Orthodox Jews were changing the face of New York City Jewry.
Ukeles was he co-authopr of a 2012 study showing that New York City area’s Jewish population was on the rise again, thanks largely to the growth of Orthodox households.(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
In 2009, he wrote a report on how nonprofits can turn the severe economic downturn into opportunity. Drawing on his experience in city management, he advised nonprofits neither to panic nor deny the reality of squeezed budgets.
“You can forget about strategy if you do not have courage, if you do not have big ideas, or if you do not have vision, and most importantly, if you do not have compassion,” he said in a lecture that year drawing on the report. “In fact, without the ‘right stuff,’ you are in the wrong line of work.”
Family members noted that the common thread in Ukeles’s career in academia, city government and non-profits was to deal with difficult problems by making decisions based on real data, not theoretical ideas, and to bring the stakeholders around the table to make the best — or sometimes least worst — decisions based on need and priority.
Elie Kaunfer, CEO and president of the Hadar Institute, a center of Jewish life and learning, said that when Ukeles conducted the first formal evaluation of the organization in 2011, “he taught me so much about what kind of questions to ask — not just about experience of the program but ultimate impact on people’s lives.”
John Ruskay, former CEO of UJA-Federation, described him as “a loyal friend and dear colleague who I and so many others turned to repeatedly for counsel, for wisdom, for ‘chizuk’” (inner strength).
Sometimes his counsel came with critique. Steve Bayme, a former American Jewish Committee executive and longtime Ukeles friend, noted: “Jack knew how to offer constructive criticism and even occasional rebuke in ways that colleagues, including those in senior communal positions, could hear and absorb.”
Alan Gill, who served as CEO of the JDC, praised Ukeles for “his expertise in challenging and guiding us.” He said Ukeles “yelled at us” once, which was unheard of from consultants who tended to be dispassionate and analytical, he noted. But the outburst had “a positive effect,” Gill added, reminding JDC staff how much “the mission and work mattered” to Ukeles.
That sense of heartfelt criticism also applied to Ukeles’s devotion to, and frustration with, the state of Israel in recent years. He agonized over the growth of extremism in the haredi Orthodox community and Jewish settler violence, and he spoke out in pieces he published in The Times of Israel.
“Jack loved the Jewish people,” said Sally Gottesman, who was hired by Ukeles as a young consultant in 1997. Now an activist-philanthropist focused on gender and justice in the Jewish community, Gottesman said Ukeles was “a mentor and master teacher” and praised his efforts to promote equality for women.
A prime example was his support for and great pride in the accomplishments of his wife, Mierle, who in seeking to blend art with waste management became the official artist-in-residence of the NYC Department of Sanitation, a volunteer position she has held since 1977. Her unique career was the focus of an award-winning 2025 documentary, “Maintenance Artist.”
“Jack was my heart and soul,” she said. “His support, championing my being a free artist and a full person, all through the years, extending as well to his supporting the work of many other women artists of our time, was without a peer, without an end.”
In addition to his wife, Ukuleles is survived by his daughters, Raquel, who is head of collections at the National Library of Israel, and Yael, a product market manager and founder of two non-profit Israeli environmental education programs, and a son, Meir, who works with an Israel-based VC fund investing in startups.
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