Last week’s Grammy Award to the Klezmatics for their first all-English album, “Wonder Wheel,” was joyously reported by many Jewish news outlets, including this newspaper. For all the media coverage, however, no mention was made of the Klezmatics’ iconic status in the Queer Yiddishkeit movement.
Never heard of the Queer Yiddishkeit movement? Until last summer, neither did I.
Then, an Israeli friend told me he had learned from his (straight) daughter, a doctoral student in women’s Yiddish literature at Berkeley, that a large proportion of her colleagues are gay. Really? Interviews over the next several months of past and present YIVO staff members, klezmer performers, Yiddish scholars and others confirmed it: Gay Jews have flocked to Yiddish and klezmer.
It’s not that the Queer Yiddishkeit movement has been kept secret; it was more than 10 years old when, in 1996, The Village Voice reported that there was “a groundswell of gay and lesbian interest in Yiddish culture” and that the Klezmatics are “squarely in its forefront.” The piece described KlezKamp — “kamp” being a double-entendre par excellence — a weeklong Yiddish folk-culture convention, as “the original spawning ground of Queer Yiddishkeit.” Soon there emerged other gay-oriented klezmer groups with such irresistible names as Isle of Klezbos and Gay Iz Mir.
And the insurgency was not only in performance art. For example, the board of the National Yiddish Book Center, founded in 1980, consisted of “Aaron Lansky and five lesbians,” according to Adrienne Cooper, director of program development of the Workmen’s Circle and herself a Yiddish singer and actress.
All of which irritated the hell out of the usual suspects.
Well-placed individuals in the Yiddish and klezmer revivals described attempts by some to put a stop to a “takeover” by gay people. None of the individuals wanted to be quoted on the record.
Nevertheless, the snowball kept rolling. Alicia Svigals, a superb violinist and founding member of the Klezmatics, wrote that gay people “surprised each other and everyone else with our unexpectedly large numbers at Klezkamp, the YIVO summer program, and on the staff of YIVO and the National Yiddish Book Center. As younger gays started showing up, they brought queer sensibility, and then queer Yiddishism, with them.”
The affinities between gay people and Yiddish, and especially bundist, culture are, when you think about it, obvious: both are staunchly secular, cosmopolitan, progressive and often marginalized. “Queer Yiddishkeit gives me permission to go back to the world of my grandparents without leaving myself behind,” juggler Sara Felder said.
“It’s about alienation from the Jewish religious establishment,” said Alisa Solomon, a former staff writer for The Village Voice. “There’s a kind of analogy people make with the marginalized status of Yiddish itself. It’s an outsider stance.”
(Spoilsport David Roskies, a professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, says Yiddish is popular because it provides an easy but short-lived way for people to connect with a piece of their Jewishness. “You don’t have to belong to any organization, don’t have to have any ideology,” he said, according to a news report. “You can lay any trip you want to on Yiddish and feel you’re doing something authentic and meaningful.”) The modern Yiddish revival is a way for some progressive Jews, gay and straight alike, to repudiate the macho, Israel-inspired “new Jew.” In the past 25 years, machismo has lost its appeal for many, and that much-maligned Eastern European intellectual no longer looks so bad.
It is also a way to be Jewish while avoiding “the Israel problem.” (Having it both ways, klezmer musicians have played on the sidelines of recent Israel Day parades for the “Two Peoples, Two States” contingent, supporting Israel while opposing the occupation.)
The klezmer appeal, though, is not as obvious. Klezmer, after all, is closely associated with wedding music, a Jewish ritual largely denied to gay people. Furthermore, the old-time klezmorim weren’t necessarily so progressive.
But there is the beauty of the sound of klezmer. And maybe because klezmer was primarily instrumental and therefore textless, it has been available to the staunchly secular revival. Which is not to say that klezmer was ever divorced from Jewish religion. But turning liturgical melodies into upbeat dance tunes, as klezmorim did, “was not an expression of opposition to religion”; it was, rather, a manifestation of “total comfort with it” as well as the “integratedness of religion into Jewish life,” Svigals said. (Modern klezmorim embrace the wedding music tradition and turn it to queer purpose with such songs as “Kale-Kale Mazel Tov.”)
The presence of gay people and gay themes in Yiddish culture, however, is not new. Queer Yiddishists tell us, for example, that Yiddish cinema in the 1930s contained “encrypted messages” on homosexuality — think Molly Picon in her trouser role in “Yidl Mitn Fidl,” what Eve Sicular calls “cross-dressing in the service of family values.” She refers to the “gay subtext of Yiddish cinema during its heyday, from the 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, which reveals distinctly Jewish concerns of the time” such as “conflicted identity, passing, and same-sex attachments.”
With these and other examples, queer Yiddishists say that this movement is in no way a disjuncture with the Jewish past but is in fact old strands woven into a new and vibrant Jewish reality. With the Klezmatics as Exhibit A, they make a convincing case.
Kathleen Peratis, a partner in the New York law firm Outten & Golden, is a trustee of Human Rights Watch.
...as I was saying...
The real reason that there is an interest in Yiddish is simply that Yiddish is indeed interesting. The claim that it is a "short-lived" way to connect to Jewishness is nonsense. There are many fields of Jewish interest, and Yiddish is no less significant or mainstream than taking an interest in Midrash. Moreover, the claim that Yiddish is a means "to avoid" Israel is likewise nonsense. The essense of Yiddish culture is that the Jews have their own language in which to express their cultural identity - and the culture of Israel (based on modern Hebrew revived by Yiddish speakers) is a continuation of that historic essence that language and identity go hand in hand.
<p>its not at all surprising that gays and lesbians have been drawn to the yiddishist movement._they feel totally rejected by the dominant hebrew based religion driven jewish culture. and are looking for a way to be involved in jewish culture without sacrificing their own self identity and self worth. unfortunately they have attached themselves to a dying language and culture. let's face it friends, aside from the hasidim and a few geriatrics the yiddish language and culture of eastern and central europe are just about dead. and, though you want to bring them roaring back alive, there is simply a dearth of numbers: you are lacking a critical mass of like minded individuals and communities. and, frankly, since you folks are not re-producing at all or quickly enough, yiddish will remain the domain of the ultra-religious. by the way you all make very strange bed-fellows. good luck. you'll need it.</p>
I don't think it's any more surprising to find gays and lesbians interested in Yiddish than to find them interested in any other aspect of Jewish culture; if you want surprising, see the subject of gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews, addressed with superb sensitivity in the film "Trembling Before G-d." Although the contribution of gays and lesbians to contemporary secular Yiddish culture is legitimate and significant, I think that articles such as this calling attention to this as a theme-in-itself--absent a "man bites dog" angle--ultimately do a disservice by underscoring the marginalization of both gays and lesbians, and Yiddish, to the mainstream of Jewish culture: they provide fodder for the homophobes and anti-Yiddishists among us, while providing no useful or even interesting information for the silent majority or the embattled partisans of either group. Just as gays and lesbians are to be found in every walk of life, Jewish or otherwise, so are modern Yiddishists (though admittedly in smaller numbers). Neither subculture should be treated as a novelty item....
Makes sense to me. Secular Yiddish is dying out (even many klezmer musicians can't speak it), and gays and lesbians tend not to procreate. Although unlike klezmer, there are gays and lesbians one can listen to for more than a few minutes. PS You found someone who was surprised that there were gays and lesbians in the SF Bay area (Berkley)?
I can't understand why some people find pleasure in declaring Yiddish dead. These people want to deny the fact that millions of Jews in E.Europe spoke this language up until recently? And in contrast to such languages as Celtic or Sanscrit, Yiddish will never die because of the high birth rate among the Hasidim. Another reason that Yidish won't die is its close similarity to German. You can always switch from German to Yiddish with a few small adjustments.
I agree with Leon that Yiddish is alive and that it is not even in danger of extinction. However, the very soul of Yiddish (as Y.L. Peretz once noted) is its Hebrew/Aramaic component - hence one cannot simply speak Yiddish by making a "few adjustments" to German (the word "soul" - "neshomeh" from Hebrew - is one of many, many examples). Yiddish is a product of a Jewish society, and it reflects a Jewish cultural point of reference (Tanakh, Talmud, Siddur) - and it reflects a Jewish historical perspective (an exiled people). One simply cannot appreciate a Yiddish story without familiarity with the Jewish narrative. Presenting Yiddish in the above article as "an outsider's stance", when indeed Yiddish can only be understood by an "insider", shows a complete misunderstanding of Jewish historical creativity.
I agree with Reuven that Yiddish has a significant Hebrew component and ironically it has increased as the time went by. But the most basic words in Yiddish are of the German origin. Words which describe family members, basic activities and body parts are all German. Hebrew words are usually "higher purpose words" and originate in the Torah. So from that we can deduct that originally Yiddish was a Germanic language. Many Jews didn't like this fact and they tried to "correct" it by introducing Hebrew words into Yiddish. Today you can barely understand Yiddish if you don't know Hebrew also. I personally prefer Yiddish as represented by the Harkavi dictionary, call me old-fashioned.
Yiddish is obviously from the Germanic language family as Leon argues. However, the spirit of Yiddish comes from the heart of the Jewish tradition. An expression such as "a nekhtiker tog" ("yesterday's day", meaning "total nonsense") is composed of words that are all of German origin - yet the expression is totally Jewish. It is based on Psalms 90:4 ("ke-yom etmol"). An interest in Yiddish, in opposition to the article in discussion, is an interest in mainstream Jewish creativity.
Yes, I agree that Yiddish is once again is becoming a mainstream language among Jews in America. Yiddish may have hit the rock bottom in the 1970's and 80's but now it's back on the upswing thanks to the Hasidic Jews. One may say that the Hasidim are isolated from the mainstream Jews but I don't agree. As the number of Hasidim grows they will require the services from the secular Jews such as lawyers, doctors, plumbers, etc. And in order to better communicate with these Hasids these seculars will have to learn Yiddish and this is how Yiddish will once again spread out among Jews.
Please don't call it Yiddishkeit.
Every expression is authentic. Jews of every expression are welcome in the eyes of G-d....being Jewish makes you holy.
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