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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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Four Plead Guilty in 2024 Assault of Pro-Israel Attendees at North Carolina Library Event
West Asheville Library in North Carolina. Screenshot: buncombecounty.org.
In 2024, two Jewish residents and an 80-year-old senior citizen were beaten and dragged out of a public event in North Carolina which celebrated Hamas and was organized by an anarchist bookfair. Now, almost two years later, four people have pleaded guilty in relation to those attacks at the West Asheville Library.
On Tuesday, three individuals entered a guilty plea for simple assault in Buncombe Superior Court, while a fourth pleaded guilty to resisting a public officer.
According to a local news report, “All four persons were placed on supervised probation for one year. As conditions of their probation, each must complete 30 hours of community service, have no contact with the victims, and refrain from posting about the event on social media.”
One of the Jewish victims, David Moritz, was in the courtroom during the proceedings and told me, “I am happy we got some measure of justice.”
Another person beaten that day in 2024 was Bob Campbell, an 80-year-old military veteran with cancer and a stent in his heart. Campbell was stomped, assaulted, and pushed to the ground, a footprint clearly visible on his shorts. Local police encouraged Campbell to see a doctor.
Now, two shocking security camera videos have been shared which capture some of the violent assaults against the three pro-Israel attendees. Moritz told me it was this video evidence which led to the guilty pleas.
In one video, Campbell is seen on his knees with masked radicals all around him, while Moritz is being attacked.
In another video, Moritz — the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors — is seen being violently pushed out of the public library while he tries to defend himself and return to help his friends being assaulted in the building.
Moritz informed me that there were further violent aspects of the assault, which involved victims being struck multiple times, taking place in areas of the library that were not under video surveillance.
He conveyed that there were numerous additional individuals who assaulted them at the library who remain unidentified. He expressed gratitude for the diligent efforts of the local police and district attorney’s office and hopes that law enforcement will continue to pursue further suspects.
Moritz is extremely appreciative of the assistance that he and the two other victims received from StandWithUs, a prominent organization that fights antisemitism and educates about Israel. StandWithUs provided the three victims with pro bono legal support throughout the entire process and helped in identifying a suspect.
Yael Lerman, director of StandWithUs Saidoff Law, told me that her organization is “tremendously proud of the victims for working tirelessly to help identify their attackers, despite the fact that many of the attackers wore masks to conceal their identities.” Lerman said she is “thrilled” they worked together to help identify the attackers so they could “bring them to justice.”
“We need to give a lot of credit to the police department and the prosecutor. They really came through,” she added.
“The victims were fearless and persistent,” Lerman continued. “One of them was in his 80s and it did not stop him from fighting back. In this day and age, a lot of people — including Jews — feel fearful. The victims in this case are wonderful role models.”
Peter Reitzes writes about issues related to antisemitism and Israel.
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How Moses Created an Enduring Model of Great Leadership
Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (1659), by Rembrandt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Socrates is supposed to have said, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” And he didn’t just toss out this aphorism to sound clever — he literally lived it.
One day, in ancient Athens, a group of young aristocrats gathered around Socrates, who cut a strange figure standing barefoot in the bustling marketplace. Merchants were shouting prices, craftsmen were hammering bronze, and locals bustled from stall to stall in search of what they needed to buy. And in the middle of all this noise stood Socrates, asking questions.
One confident young man, eager to show off his intellect, stepped forward to challenge him. Socrates asked him a simple question: “Tell me, what is courage?” The young man gave a polished answer — something about bravery in battle.
Socrates nodded thoughtfully. Then he asked another question. “But what about the courage of someone who endures hardship? Is that courage, too?”
The young man paused for a moment, then adjusted his answer. Socrates asked another question. And then another. Each time the young man tried to refine what he had already said.
Within a few minutes, the initially confident student who started out with such bravado suddenly realized something uncomfortable: The more he tried to define courage, the less certain he became that he understood it at all.
Socrates smiled. He had not humiliated the young man. Nor had he delivered a lecture explaining the answer. Instead, he had done something far more powerful: He had made the student think. For Socrates, teaching was never about pouring knowledge into passive listeners. It was about awakening curiosity, provoking reflection, and guiding his students to discover the truth for themselves.
Incredibly, Socrates left behind no books at all. His ideas survive entirely through the students he inspired — most famously, Plato, whose own student, Aristotle, would go on to tutor Alexander the Great.
This concept was not unique to Socrates; a similar pattern appears in the history of medicine. Hippocrates is remembered as the father of medical practice; his name is associated with the Hippocratic Oath, the ethical pledge physicians have taken for centuries.
But Hippocrates’ greatest achievement was not a single medical breakthrough, but the creation of a teaching tradition. His true legacy was a lineage of physicians who refined and expanded his ideas.
Hippocrates understood that medical advances would not come from one brilliant doctor, but from generations of practitioners who shared their knowledge with those who followed.
Centuries after Hippocrates, the same philosophy reappeared in the career of one of the founders of modern medical education, the great Canadian physician William Osler. In the 19th century, much medical training still took place in lecture halls, where students memorized facts from textbooks.
Osler believed that this approach fundamentally misunderstood how doctors are made. “Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom,” he insisted. At Johns Hopkins he transformed medical education by bringing students directly into hospitals to observe patients, diagnose illnesses, and learn from real cases. His influence spread through the countless physicians he trained, many of whom went on to become leaders in medicine themselves.
This tradition of multiplying knowledge, rather than hoarding it, also lies quietly at the heart of Parshat Vayakhel. After the trauma of the Golden Calf, the Jewish people are given the opportunity to rebuild their spiritual life through the construction of the Mishkan. It is an enormous national project — architecturally complex, artistically demanding, and seemingly beyond the scope of a recently liberated nation of former slaves.
One might therefore assume that Moses, the towering leader who brought them out of Egypt and delivered the Torah at Sinai, would oversee every detail of the project. But that is not what happens. Instead, Moses steps back and appoints a master craftsman, Betzalel, to lead the work.
Alongside him is Oholiav, and together they assemble a team of skilled artisans described by the Torah as people whose hearts were filled with wisdom and whose spirits were inspired to contribute. Curiously, Moses does not micromanage the process. Instead, he empowers others to build.
It is a remarkable moment. The leader of the Jewish people — the man through whom God speaks — understands that the Mishkan will never become a national spiritual center if it is simply the project of one man. It must become the creation of an entire people.
And so, Moses does something that many leaders struggle to do: He lets others lead. Because the ultimate leaders understand that their true legacy is not what they build with their own hands, but what they inspire others to build with theirs.
Moses’ greatest achievement here may not have been the Mishkan itself, but rather the establishment of a model of leadership that nurtures a new generation of leaders and builders. This same model would guide Jewish history at one of its most fragile moments.
When the Romans stood on the brink of destroying Jerusalem and the Second Temple in the year 70 CE, it seemed as if the spiritual center of Jewish life might disappear forever. The Temple had stood at the heart of Jewish religious life for centuries. Without it, the future looked bleak.
At that moment of crisis, the leader of Jerusalem’s beleaguered community, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, understood something essential. The survival of Judaism would not depend on rebuilding stones and walls once they were gone. It would depend on building the next generation of Jewish leaders.
With this in mind, he had himself smuggled out of the besieged city and asked the Roman general Vespasian to allow him to establish a new center of learning in Yavneh. Vespasian agreed, and after the destruction, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai began teaching a remarkable group of students.
The Mishnah in Pirkei Avot records their names and their individual strengths with unusual care: Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah, Rabbi Yose HaKohen, Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel, and Rabbi Elazar ben Arach. Each possessed a different temperament and intellectual strength, and each would go on to shape the next generation of Jewish scholarship.
Like Moses, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had his eye on the future. He set about creating the scholars who would carry Judaism forward after the Temple was gone — and after he himself was gone. From Socrates in Athens, to Hippocrates in the early days of medicine, to William Osler in the hospitals of modern universities, the pattern repeats itself across history: The greatest mentors do not simply teach. They create teachers.
And perhaps that is the deepest lesson of Moses’ leadership in Parshat Vayakhel. His example — like that of Socrates, Hippocrates, and Osler — shows that the measure of great leaders is not in what they build alone, but how they empower and inspire future generations to build and lead.
Moshe did not merely build a sanctuary in the wilderness. He created a model of leadership that empowered others to build alongside him. Which is why, for posterity, he is not known as King Moses or Priest Moses — but Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher.
Because the greatest leaders do not leave behind monuments. They leave behind people who know how to build them.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Apartheid Week Exposed: Combating a Vicious Anti-Israel Lie on Campus
An “Apartheid Wall” erected by Harvard University’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. Photo: X/Twitter
On a sundrenched corner of coastline, a light breeze dances across the blue waves. But what seems pleasant at the surface, ideal even, is hardly the full story. To the side, a metal sign reads: “Under Section 37 of the Durban Beach by-laws, this bathing area is reserved for the sole use of members of the white race group.” The city is Durban, the third-most populous city in South Africa, and this scene was commonplace under its erstwhile apartheid regime. “Apartheid,” Afrikaans for “separateness,” was a brutal system of legally enforced racial segregation that dominated Africa’s southernmost nation until being finally abolished in 1994.
But what does this faraway land have in common with Israel? According to the anti-Zionist movement, a heck of a lot. To compare this former regime to the anti-Zionists’ warped version of the Jewish State, they even hold an annual ritual of “Israel Apartheid Week” (IAW) in protest of the latter’s continued existence. This canard is being legitimized at the very top, with California Governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom recently going so far as to assert that many observers are “appropriately” describing Israel as an “apartheid state.” What was once a fringe preserve of college radicals is now being increasingly indulged by the mainstream.
In reality, aside from those sunny beach fronts, Israel has precisely nothing in common with the racist regime that stained South African society for far too long. Under Israeli law, racial discrimination is illegal, and previous surveys suggest that 80 percent of Arab citizens prefer living there than anywhere else. Arab-focused political parties are elected to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and people of all backgrounds hold prominent roles across all sectors. Israeli Christians, the majority of whom are Arab, are an upwardly mobile minority over-represented across law and computer science subjects.
Such facts would not have been simply unlikely in apartheid South Africa, but completely out of the question. Non-white South Africans could not even legally sip coffee in the same cafe as their Caucasian compatriots, never mind hope to seek employment or excellence in the same fields or pursue friendship or relationships.
When confronted, Israel’s detractors dismiss these facts, which disprove their apartheid slur, as “strawman” arguments, and move to claim instead that military courts, checkpoints, building restrictions, administrative detention, or alleged “Jewish-only roads” are evidence of “apartheid.”
The allegations are false — Israelis of all religions share the same roads — or at best specious. Where residents under the Palestinian Authority are prevented from roads used by Israeli Jews and Arabs, it relates to jurisdiction and security responsibility, not race or religion. During the Second Intifada, roads were repeatedly used for ambushes, drive-by shootings, and roadside bomb attacks targeting Israeli civilians: Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Druze, or otherwise. Security restrictions were introduced to separate civilian traffic from known attack corridors, which significantly reduced the frequency of attacks. Checkpoints and military courts, too, arise from an unresolved territorial conflict and ongoing security concerns, not a policy of racialized segregation.
This organized intellectual assault on Israel’s existence is nothing new. “Apartheid Week” was launched in 2005 and has been an outlet for misinformation and lies ever since. While the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aids it brands itself as “grassroots,” it enjoys swathes of establishment backing. NGO Monitor has exposed how various governments, the European Union, and anti-Zionist groups like the New Israel Fund routinely help pay for and publicize groups responsible for such campaigns on campus and beyond. It is therefore up to the rest of us to put up a veritable opposition to their tempting babble.
Naturally, there will always be a core of hardline activists unwilling to interrogate their own prejudices, but plenty of ordinary students have simply never heard another side to the story. Many young people also feel intense social pressure to accept flawed anti-Zionist talking points. Giving such students the space to hear a new perspective can help them interrogate and form their views in a more constructive environment. This is what the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA)’s sixth annual “Apartheid Week Exposed” campaign, and our work all year-round, seeks to encourage at this critical juncture.
This week, our campus program will partner with “Israel-is” to host a campus speaking and tabling tour across Florida and California. The program will feature two speakers with firsthand perspectives on the Middle East. In Florida we will host Neriya Kfir, an Israeli Oct. 7 survivor and former IDF soldier, and Padideh Daneshzad-Moghaddam, an Iranian speaker who grew up under the Islamic Republic and will share insights into her life in her home country and the aspirations many Iranians have for freedom. Then in the Golden State, Staff Sergeant Dean Cohen and Farriba, an activist born in Mashhad, northeast Iran, will take the reins.
We have already, and will continue, to hold similar educational events with students across the US and around the world. We are also providing students with helpful myth-busters on Israel and the Middle East, offering them the factual grounding to help them navigate what may feel like a lonely university experience.
We seek to elevate voices that you are not likely to hear on campus. IAW and its allies routinely celebrate the tyrannical theocrats responsible for massacring peaceful protestors, abusing women, and organizing terror around the world, atrocities they both bizarrely celebrate and continue to deny. IAW activists seemingly place little value on any human life deemed to get in the way of their anti-Israel aims. This year, and in previous ones, various campus groups are using IAW to rally for the release of Marwan Barghouti from Israeli prison. In 2004, he was convicted on five counts of murder for the deaths of four Israelis and a Greek Orthodox monk.
Students in America and beyond — Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or otherwise — deserve a better future. One in which constructive dialogue replaces name-calling and intimidation. Administrators, for their part, should also make clear that the university does not endorse the claims made during these partisan campaigns and should enforce standards of conduct when activism crosses into harassment or violence. It is certainly a big ask, but we can only hope for such a change if we help to build it.