Archive for 2017

Year Two, Week 20: A Hiatus, of Sorts

Published on Wednesday, May 24, 2017 By maxsparber

It's been a few weeks since I have posted, which is never a good sign on a blog. Life has gotten unexpectedly, and, to an extent, unpleasantly busy.

I am in preproduction of my play "Shaina," which I will post more about this week. I also had some stupid and embarrassingly trashy apartment problems. Without being too specific, people were using the parking lot outside our window for drug deals, and we discovered some of these same people were squatting in empty apartments in our building.

Additionally, I have started a new project, which I felt like I needed to do, as I was getting a little burned out on Yiddish. But when you do things that take a lot of time, that time must be borrowed from somewhere.

I have continued to study my Yiddish flashcards, but have taken a break from adding new ones. This is actually something I have been considering for a while. I have about 5,000 flashcards, and that's plenty for basic communication, but I barely know many of them. I have been thinking it might be worthwhile to stop plugging in as many new cards as fast as I can and concentrate on learning the ones I have already added.

So this is what I have been doing. It reduces the amount of time I spend on Yiddish from an hour-plus per day to a half-hour to 45 minutes, which is manageable. I think I will soon get back to adding in flashcards from my grammar book, because I want to be able to use the words I have effectively, but for the moment it has been a tremendous relief not to commit to so much time every single day, even if I have only really cleared up half an hour or so.

There also gets to be a point where you try something for a while and then revisit the experiment. I have always known that, studying on my own, Yiddish would be of limited practical value.

The American Jewish community has an affection for a hundred or so Yiddish words that is used as a sort of flavoring, but not much interest in Yiddish beyond that. There are a few dedicated Yiddish cultists, and there are communities of Haredi Jews who use Yiddish as a vernacular, but they are largely located in New York. There just isn't much opportunity for me to use Yiddish in a day to day way.

Knowing this, and knowing that things are not likely to change for me, I have to ask myself what degree of commitment I wish to continue to have to studying Yiddish as a vernacular, as I have been doing.

I don't have an answer for that. I genuinely love the language, and I love studying it, and so I think there will always be a place for continuing to do so. And if there is one thing I have learned, it is that one should not make decisions when one is feeling a little burned out.

I develop interests sometimes that I pursue for a little while, and then I lose interest and just never really return to the subject. But there are other things where my interest wanes, and then returns, and then wanes, and so on. These are things that I continue to revisit for my entire life.

Yiddish has been one of those things since I was a teenager. And I know if I got frustrated now and stopped studying, in a year or so I would regret it, because my interest would return and I would find myself frustrated that I forgot so much of what I spent a year and a half studying.

I think it would help me to learn some tools for maintaining what I have learned when my interest cools, so that I don't have to start over again from scratch when I regain interest. And I think it would help for me to learn how to pare back a little when I start feeling burnout, instead of just pushing ahead, because that it one thing that is guaranteed to make me walk away from something completely.

So, for now, I will just continuing reviewing existing flashcards until I feel motivated to add new ones, which could be in a few days or could be longer.

I'm also kicking around the idea of studying another language, but am not ready to add that in yet. I feel like my Yiddish studies have given me tremendous tools for acquiring language, and it might help me to start learning a language that is actually used as a vernacular, so I can get some practice with a language that I can actually use.

It would probably be Spanish, which I have studied in the past, but who knows? One of the things that first got me involved with this Yiddish project was reading books by self-educated poly-linguists, and the idea of speaking a number of languages was very exciting to me.

We will see, though. As I said, I am very busy right now, and sometimes you have to respect how limited your time is.

antisemitism

Published on Wednesday, April 12, 2017 By maxsparber

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I've come to the unhappy conclusion that your average American is no longer capable of recognizing even the most blatant antisemitism, which I suppose I might be happy about if it meant antisemitism had ceased to exist and so memories of it were starting to fade.

This is not the case, of course. I shouldn't be surprised, as we're also in an America where a significant number of white people seem sure that racism no longer exists. It just seems to be a matter of course nowadays that if you don't experience a particular oppression, you're sure it doesn't exist, or that it is being exaggerated, and that everybody is too sensitive.

Oppression tends to pass itself off as common sense, masquerading itself as a teller of obvious if unpopular truths. And so it is entirely possible — quite easy in fact — for people to not believe racism exists and yet to be unrepentantly racist.

A lot of public misbehavior takes the form of something called microaggressions. If you think people complaining about blatant oppression are bellyachers, you're probably not going to be keen on this theory, because they describe momentary encounters. Harvard University professor Chester M. Pierce, who coined the phrase in 1970s, described them as "brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership."

They serve as almost subliminal messages, and the messages are never very good: You are not part of our group; we believe nonsense about you; we do not give you the same courtesy; we think your group is comical and ridiculous.

They're typically presented lightly, as a joke or an aside, and their smallness is insidious. It means any reaction to them is going to seem like an overreaction. Never mind that the people reacting are not reacting to a single microaggression, but to dozens, hundreds, thousands, all piled on top of each other, coming at them constantly, all serving as reminders that you are the subject of contempt.

Jews get it too, and if huge, undeniable acts of antisemitism are barely acknowledged, microaggressions against Jews go entirely unacknowledged. Here's a starter list; it is by no means complete, and I may add to it in the future, but these are the sorts of things Jews hear all the time.

1. Telling a Jew that they don't look Jewish

Jews do this too, to the point that "That's funny, you don't look Jewish" is a longstanding, lazy punchline. Jews shouldn't say this, because there is no one Jewish look. Even in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, when Jews were a relatively homogenized population, contemporary writing reveals that there were significant numbers of Jews with blonde hair, blue eyes, Jewish redheads, Jews with very pale or flushed red skin.

In the United States, the community is even more diverse, drawing from Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish communities, among others, as well as bringing in a great deal of variety through conversion and intermarriage. An estimated 20 percent of the American Jewish community comprises people of color.

Since the community is so diverse, when people say that somebody doesn't look Jewish, they tend to mean that somebody doesn't look like a caricature of European Jews, and I will note that this caricature has long history of being weaponized against Jews. It's hurtful when Jews say it, because it feels needlessly exclusionary. When said by non-Jews, it starts to feel like their idea of Jewishness is more informed by media stereotypes of Jews than by actual Jewish people.

2. Using the phrase "rich Jew"

I used to work with a woman who used this construction quite often: "Oh, it's just her and her rich Jewish friends." Then she would look at me conspiratorially and say, "You know what I mean."

I think she meant "You know I don't mean that in an antisemitic way," but in fact I did know what she meant, as I have heard this construction my entire life. It means that the Jewish experience of money is somehow notable and must be commented on, must be turned into a compound word: rich Jew. I never heard her remark on rich Catholics, despite her having attended a well-heeled Catholic college, or rich Irish, despite the fact that the college was founded by Irish millionaires.

I will note that many of the women she was talking about were not actually rich, but, at best, squalidly middle-class. But if Jews dress up a little, participate in society in any way, spend money in any visible way, suddenly they are engaging in the behavior of the rich, they are showing off their wealth.

Discussions of Jewish wealth frequently tip over from microaggression to blatant antisemitism, and making a casual connection between Jews and wealth is extremely troubling. And it seems especially mean-spirited when speaking to a Jew who doesn't actually have very much money, like me.

3. Forcing Jews to be spokespeople for Israel or demanding an opinion on the subject

American Jews are not Israelis and should not be conflated with Israelis. American Jews have complicated and often divided opinions on the subject, and none of this is really your business unless they broach the topic.

When I was part of a local leftist community, and had co-organized a Jewish political group, I was constantly asked to speak on the topic of Israel, a place I have never been, claim no expertise about, and don't especially enjoy discussing.

American Jews are not proxies for Israelis. They should not be asked to speak on their behalf or to answer for the Israeli government. They certainly don't need to account for the behavior of a foreign government on command.

4. Doing Jewish accents, Jewish mother jokes, neurotic Jew jokes, etc

Yes, tese are staples of American comedy and are mostly borrowed from Jewish comedians, but, as a non-Jew, there are probably two things that you are doing wrong when you approach this material:

First, you're probably not doing it very well. I can't tell you how many bad Long Island accents I have heard from people doing Jewish mother characters, and it's grating. People's "old Jewish man" Yiddish voice is general even worse.

Secondly, you're probably missing a lot of nuance. Without the sort of careful observation that makes a joke specific rather than general, there is a real likelihood that you are going to sound like you are just making fun of Jews, that you think there is something inherently comical in the way Jews talk, or the way they experience the world.

That being said, Eddie Murphy's Saul the Jewish Guy from "Coming to America" was very good.

5. Positive stereotyping

I know people think positive stereotypes about Jews must be harmless; after all, you're saying nice things about the Jewish people, aren't you?

And they probably aren't as harmful as negative stereotypes. At the same time, they present an unrealistic view of Jews that is often far enough removed from the truth as to be frankly bizarre. I used to head that Jews made good husbands, which I think would have come as a surprise to the six or seven ex-wives two of my uncles managed to rack up between them.

And it can be genuinely harmful. A positive stereotype of Jews is that we're not drunks, which is simply not especially true. The statistics that support the idea that Jews drink less merely point out that they are hospitalized less and go into treatment less, but that Jews drink about the same amount as everyone else.

There are two possible ways to interpret this: That Jews simply hold their liquor better, or that they don't and there is cultural pressure not to get treatment for alcoholism. Having belonged to a Jewish fraternity and grown up around Jews who drank quite a bit, the latter jibes with my experience.

So by saying that Jews aren't alcoholics, even if it is meant as a positive stereotype, it may help discourage Jews from getting treatment.

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Dress British Drink Yiddish: Zwack

Dress British Drink Yiddish

Published on Sunday, April 09, 2017 By maxsparber

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Hungary has a national drink, and it is Zwack Unicum, an herbal liquor, and I wish that was what I was writing about, but it is apparently not available in the US. No, instead I will be writing about the version that is available domestically, produced for the American market, which is sweeter and has a citrus quality. I presume the Budapest-based company tried some American hobo wines and decided that this must be what Americans like, and, honestly, they are not far wrong. We do like sweet drinks with a hint of citrus.

The American Zwack is amber colored, easy to drink, and herbal without being medicinal. It's not typically associated with Jews, but it should be. It was, after all, invented by a Jew.

Specifically, Zwack was created by Dr. József Zwack, the Royal Physician to the Habsburg Court, for Emperor Joseph II in 1790. Weirdly, this is a fact that I only really find online on White supremacist websites, who always seem to keep tabs on businesses with Jewish origins for presumably nefarious purposes. There is an interview with one of Zwack's heirs on the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation's website that confirms his Jewish ancestry, although the heir's immediate family converted to Catholicism in the early 20th century.

There is a terrific Washington Post story about this heir, Peter, and his decision to bring Zwack liquor back to Hungary after the Second World War on the Washington Post from 1990, and while it doesn't much discuss József Zwack, it does paint a marvelous picture of the Zwack family prior to the war:

The Zwack family, "predominantly Jewish merchant aristocrats" — though Peter Zwack was born a Catholic — was part of a group of Jewish intellectuals, artists and supporters of both who planted and tended the Austro-Hungarian blumenzeit (the blooming time) at the turn of the century and again between World War I and World War II.

Zwack likes to tell about his father, John, who before World War II wore only silk shirts and sent them to Switzerland to be cleaned. The senior Zwack subscribed to three opera seats so he'd have elbow room during the performances.

Those were the days when the family owned two castles, one near Budapest, the other in the south of Hungary; a town house, now the Turkish Embassy, on Castle Hill, the aristocratic section of the Hungarian capital; 12,000 acres of land; and the factory that produced Unicum liqueur, the never-empty bottle from which all this wealth flowed.

I used to teach a class on DNA and genealogy, and maybe I will again at some point. It came from my own interest in the subject. I first had my own DNA tested four years ago, which wound up connecting me with my biological family.

I initially tested myself through a company called 23andme because they also offered testing for genetic illnesses. As an adopted child, I did not know if I had increased likelihood for heart disease, or stroke, or Alzheimer's, or the like. It was rather terrifying to request the results, but I was then in my 40s and figured if long-term planning would be needed, it would be better to know sooner than later.

The test also offered an ethnicity estimate, which I have reproduced below:

As you can see, 23andme has me as almost exclusively European, and largely English and Irish (they do not distinguish). All this was consistent with what I knew from my biological family, which is Irish-American. There are a few surprises in there: Some French and German, some West African, and even a hint of Native American.

23andme is good about letting you know that these results are highly speculative. In fact, you can change the confidence level of the results, and when I switch it from speculative to conservative, all the surprises go away, and I am left with British and Irish and a collecting of generalized European DNA.

I went on to take a few more tests. The next, from Ancestry.com, gave me the following result:

Again with great confidence in my Irish heritage, which is distinguished from the remainder of Great Britain and comes in at 66 percent, and then, with much less confidence, some Scandinavian, Iberian, and even Jewish ethnicity. In another section, they even guess as to the area in Ireland my people come from: Northern Connacht. My people mostly come from County Clare, which is in Northern Connacht, so well done, Ancestry.com.

Of course, they also had access to my family tree, which I created on their site, which explicitly lists my ancestors as coming from Clare, so maybe this isn't that surprising an analysis.

If you have done a previous DNA tests, you can upload your results to Family Tree DNA, so I did that, and they produced their own ethnicity results, which I will not comment on, as they look like this:

I am something of a completist, so recently I submitted a DNA sample (spit; it's always spit) to the Geneographic Project. This is through National Geographic, and I was interested in seeing their ethnicity estimate.

They do it a little differently; the others rely largely on self-reported ethnicity, and so their results are not quite junk science, but, let's say, still in their infancy. People often don't really know their own ethnicity, or only know a part of it, or have been lied to about it. Americans by and large all seem to think there is a Cherokee princess in their background, as though the Cherokee tribe did nothing but produce princesses who all then married white men. So where these ethnicity estimates say "low confident," I am going to say "probably wrong."

But the Genographic Project bases its results on relatively stable populations, and compares your results against the typical results from that region. They don't offer any low-confidence answers. Instead, my results looked like this:

They then compare this against reference populations, to see what countries tend to have a similar result. Mine was most like the results found on the British Islands, although I lack Southwestern European, Northeastern European, and the small amount of Jewish Diaspora DNA found in your typical British person.

My Asia Minor and West Mediterranean DNA is atypical for the British. And I have twice as much Eastern European DNA as your average resident of the British Isles and Ireland.

The Eastern European influence is new -- none of the other tests produced it. And, as someone who spends so much time working on a project based in my adoptive Eastern European heritage, I am delighted that National Geographic has decided I have actual Eastern European DNA. Sixteen percent may not seem like that much, but its a larger amount that a previous test gave me for English DNA (5 percent), and I am not going to stop drinking Old Speckled Hen anytime soon.

There more, too. The Genographic Project, in particular, was created to look into the distant past of genetics, as far back as 100,000 years, through something called Haplogroups, which look back to a single shared ancestors in the distant recesses of the past.

On my biological father's side, I belong to a haplogroup called P305, which belonged to Y-chromosome Adam, an African and very ancient human male. Much later there is U106, which moved into Europe somewhere between 4,250-14,000 years ago, and then finally there is L48, my most recent haplogroup, and a mysterious one, whose age is unknown and is mostly found in Belgium, the Netherlands, and England, among a few other places.

I can follow the evolution of my maternal DNA like this, starting with a haplogroup called L3, which originated in East Africa 67,000 years ago, and then split off into R about 55,000 years ago, which moved into East Asia, and finally turned into K1a sometimes in the last 18,000 years, approximately. It represents only 2 percent of the population of Northern Ireland, but that's my population, right there.

But there is something else there. I am not genetically Jewish. There is not a hint of Ashkenazi Judaism in any of my tests. But I share a common ancestor with Ashkenazi Jews.

You see, before K1a, there is the K haplogroup, which developed in West Asia around 27,000 years ago, and K is the maternal haplogroup most frequently claimed by Ashkenazi Jews.

Let's stop here for a moment.

Let's stop, because ethnicity is not determined by genetics, and neither is religion. There is a real problem, in fact, with people claiming genetic identities with which they have no other connection. I have especially heard complaints about this from Native American and Rom Gypsy authors, who write about ostensibly white people who suddenly discover some distant ancestry and begin to show up at Indian or Gypsy events, claiming membership and even leadership.

Instead, I'd like to suggest that this demonstrates how awesomely complicated our genetic heritages are, and how they can dovetail with ethnicity in interesting, if not definitive, ways.

I am already a Jew, regardless of my haplotype. I am because I was adopted by a Jewish family and raised within a Jewish tradition. I am culturally Ashkenazi, because that is the tradition I was raised in, and pursue an interest in the experience of Eastern European Jews because that is where my grandparents came from, regardless of whether I have a genetic connection with the region or not.

I am also an Irish-American, and am so because I have direct Irish ancestors, and I have spent my life exploring and participating in the Irish-American experience.

I would offer this suggestion to anyone who gets these sorts of tests: Each ethnic group determines its own membership, but it is generally accessed through some combination of familial relationship and participation. If you discover you have a distant genetic relationship with a group that otherwise you have had no experience with, find out what membership means for them before you claim it for yourself.

And realize that these DNA tests are a relatively new science. They are pretty good at communicating the fact that there is tremendous uncertainty in their results -- try to respect that. Because you don't want to run out and learn Lithuanian and buy a Lithuanian folk costume and start showing up at Lithuanian-American events, if they'll have you, only to have an algorithm update and suddenly declare you Polish.

Identity politics is hard enough without throwing in mistaken identity politics.

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Play production journal: The Balalaika

Shaina

Published on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 By maxsparber

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There are quite a few months before the Fringe Festival in Minneapolis -- the event takes place August 3-13. So you would think there is no hurry to get anything done, and maybe there isn't. The festival can be pretty loosey goosey, with shows slapped together shortly before being mounted, and they end up being a lot of fun anyway, their messiness a large part of their charm.

"Shaina" can't be that. There is too much work to do for it. Last week I wrote a grant to help underwrite its production cost, which I currently have figured at $2,000, although things are always more expensive than you expect.

A chunk of that cost is the balalaika, pictured above and already purchased.

The balalaika is not in the script right now. Also, it's not actually a balalaika.

Let me explain:

In the original conception of the play, the title character performs Yiddish theater songs, and so, when she does so, she is joined onstage by a very nervous Hasidic accompanist on piano. The Hasid drags the piano onstage and off with him, and, well, frankly, this is impossible.

Firstly, Fringe venues are small and temporary, so there will be no pianos. Secondly, musicians are expensive, and my budget is small. So I will be the Hasid, and I do not play piano.

I do, however, play another instrument. I am a relatively skilled ukulele player, and, in fact, used to perform around Minneapolis as the Ukulele King, which then somehow morphed into a cowboy show in Omaha in which I was the Ukulele King of the Great Northwest.

Sometimes even I know how preposterous my stories of my life are, by the way.

So the piano has become a balalaika in the script, because that's a lovely old world instrument. I have another balalaika, and it's a fun thing, but they are odd instruments. There are three strings, and two are tuned to exactly the same note. They're quite good as part of a balalaika orchestra, or to play melodies along with a larger band, but it takes an extraordinary degree of sophistication to use it as a solo instrument.

I don't have that sophistication. Not on balalaika. On ukulele, however ...

So the instrument above is actually a ukulele built into the body of a balalaika.

I wrote a bunch of songs for the play, but never wrote any melodies for them, so I will be doing so with the balalaika/ukulele shortly.

Next on my list, though, is revising the script. Fringe shows are best when they are only about an hour and extremely minimal, and so I need to take my already stripped-down script and carve it down to its barest bones.

I don't mind this. I think plays work quite well when pared down. I'm ready to go at it with a chainsaw and a blowtorch. That's the task for this week. Next week, I write the songs.

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Year 2, Week 12: It's up to you New York

program

Published on Thursday, March 23, 2017 By maxsparber

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The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 430 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 266 hours
I have reviewed 4,821 individual flashcards

I'm going to New York this weekend and won't be lugging my massive Schaechter dictionary with me, but I don't want to have four days in which I add no new words to my collection of flashcards, so I have been working ahead, plugging in as many words as possible.

I think I have added enough to cover me during my trip. Now the challenge will be to see if I can actually peel away the time to study. Although there have been few days in the past 15 months I have failed to study, I have not been faced with the challenge of being in a city as distracting as New York. If I can manage to study there, I suppose I can manage to study anywhere.

I'm going out to New York for a few reasons. The first is that I haven't had a proper vacation in quite a long time and I am overdue. I've been back in the Twin Cities for five months, amazingly, and the move was stressful, as moves always are. I have been settling in at my new job, which has involved a steep learning curve, as happens with a new job.

We have mostly been homebodies since we moved back, largely because it is very cold in the winter and its wise just to curl up someplace warm. But it is starting to warm up, and I am starting to settle in at my job, and it is time to relax a little.

"Relax" may be the wrong word. I will be running around Manhattan a lot. I decided to take this trip, in part, because there is a Yiddish production of "God of Vengeance" and how can I do this project, be a playwright, be producing a Yiddish-themed play, and not take in some Yiddish theater?

There is also a lot of old-school Jewish stuff in New York that I cannot do in Minneapolis -- no tongue sandwiches, no Russian baths, no Yiddish newspapers. So I'll be peeking in on a lot of that stuff, as well as the sorts of things I have grouped in as part of my Jewish identity but are more peripheral. I will be going to a Ukrainian museum, as an example.

I will also likely hit a few Irish bars, although I have done a lot of tours of Irish New York.

I'm not sure why I haven't done this sort of deep dive into Jewish New York before. I suspect it is because it is already so much of who I am: My parents are native New Yorkers, and so I took frequent trips there when I was a boy. I spent a lot of time in New York delis and the like. But the truth is that as an adult I have spent a lot more time exploring the Jewish culture of Los Angeles, where I lived for six years, than that of New York.

I will probably do more of that on my next vacation, which will probably be to Los Angeles.

Having this blog incentives doing a lot more of this as well, as it gives me something to write about and I enjoy writing about it.

And there's something else. I will probably work it up into a more formal essay at some point, as it's still bouncing around in my bean. But I was reading about the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, which was an area in the far east of Russian set aside to be a Jewish region, with Yiddish as the official language (along with Russian). It was a disastrous experiment in a lot of ways, and one of the biggest disasters was that participants realized that Yiddish had been separated from Jewish cultural practices, and, as a result was used to propagandize Soviet ideas to young Jews, encouraging their assimilation.

So Yiddish isn't, in and of itself, enough to support a Jewish identity. Without being wedding to other Jewish practices, it can even serve the opposite purpose and help wean Jews away from the Jewish identity.

And what is identity? I guess I have been coming around to the idea that if your identity is internal, it is just a piece of self-identification that exists inside yourself, that you're Jewish because you know you're Jewish and because you feel somehow Jewish -- well, this strikes me as a weak identity, one that can be hard to maintain and is even hard to pass down to the next generation.

It is a stronger identity if you couple that feeling of being Jewish with actually doing things that are Jewish. I suppose I feel this way in part because my father was a research professor, and so I grew up with Behaviorism, which suggests that our internal world is, in large part, created by our external actions, and not the other way around. That we are what we do.

As regular readers of this site know, my Jewish identity is secular and my religious identity is atheist. So I am always looking for Jewish things to do, or to do things Jewishly, that are not explicitly religious. For the past 15 months, this has largely involved learning Yiddish. But language is just one thing, and, on its own, it is not enough, as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast taught us.

So I am going to New York to find Jewish things to do, or to do things Jewishly. I will report back.