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Year Two, Week 20: A Hiatus, of Sorts


 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.

Yiddish cowboy


I just want to talk about the fact that I listen to country music. A lot of country music. It represents the largest percentage of my music collection. I listen to it when I go to sleep at night, often for the entire night. I listen to it when I'm going to work and when I'm returning from work. I was in a country band for a year (albeit a novelty country band) and once released an album of country songs.

I mention this because this is not the sort of thing usually associated with Jews. In fact, it is so not associated with Jews that Kinky Friedman's entire career is rooted in how not Jewish country music is presumed to be.

I could mount a defense of country music. It's an extraordinarily diverse form, and it doesn't just draw from a dazzling variety of musical influences (if you have a band with a banjo, lap steel, and yodeling, you've combined African, Hawaiian, and Alpine influences), but also features an unexpectedly diverse selection of performers. I could name Jewish country performers, including Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel, Shel Silverstein, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and, in many of his songs, Bob Dylan.

But I don't need to defend country. I just need people to know that Jews are varied. We have wide-ranging tastes and interests.

I don't remember precisely when I started listening to country music. I think it was when I was a child. I had, and have, a taste for cowboy movies, and like cowboy songs very much. I grew up at the tail end of the 1960s and early 70s folk scare, and so we learned various American folk music styles in school, including square dancing and songs of the American west.

It was still a time when there were representation of cowboys just about everywhere. I watched cowboy movies for fun as a boy and with a growing interest as I got older; I began to increasingly appreciate how the genre tackled the mythology of the American west. Cowboy movies had moved into deeply revisionist and sometimes spectacularly weird territory by the 70s, and so they were less a celebration of the story of the American west than a troubled and troubling look at a time period that often was genocidal and psychotic.

I end up doing cowboy stuff now and then. I had my own cowboy show in Omaha, where I twirled guns and yodeled and sang cowboy songs and played cowboy movies for children. I wrote a play about Buffalo Bill that was produced in Omaha, and another about the Indian Congress of the Trans Mississippi Exposition that also played in Omaha. I recently learned that a cowboy poem I wrote is being anthologized in a collection of that sort of poetry.

I still dress in cowboy duds every so often, and feel usually comfortable in them. I'll probably get back to wearing them more, as casual wear, because I like them and I want to. It's my birthday today, and I might just swing by a western store uptown and treat myself to some more western gear.

But it's not just cowboy stuff for me. I listen to all sorts of country music: String groups, hobo songs, countrypolitan, outlaw country, country gospel. I listen to a lot of soul and jazz covers of country songs. I listen to country rock and rap music that borrows from country themes. I listen to cowpunk and soundtracks to blackspoitation films set in the American west and country music from Australia. I am a product of the 70s, and as a product of the 70s I grew up with working class rebel films and their music: Trucker songs, honky tonk fight songs, songs about factory workers storming off their jobs and urban cowboys drinking at corner dives.

So that's me, or a part of me, anyway. I lived in England for a little while, and that left its mark, especially in my taste for folk horror movies in which ancient paganism rises in rural English towns. I am Minnesotan, and so have a great love for local culture, including wild rice soups, plays about ice fishing, and lumberjack stories.

I try not to judge my own tastes, because we like what we like, and generally there should be no shame in feeling passion for and taking pleasure in art. I know that sometimes I seem to be a few different people, instead of just one guy, because my tastes are simultaneously so odd and so far-ranging, but they're all me.

And I know a lot of these seem really off-the-beaten path for a Jew. I was wearing my cowboy shirt and hat and discussing Yiddish with my girlfriend, and she mentioned that this might seem odd to someone passing by, a cowboy talking about Yiddish. An Irish-American cowboy walking a tiny one-eyed dog in downtown Minneapolis talking about Yiddish.

But this is also a Jew. This is really, authentically me, doing the things I like, and it would probably be worth it for people to expand what they presume a Jew is, what a Jew looks like, how a Jew dresses, what a Jew listens to, and who you might hear speak Yiddish.

Because I know I'm a little off-the-beaten path. But I'm not that off the beaten path. It's just that the path is broader and longer and, frankly, weirder, than people give it credit for.

Year 2, Week 18: The birthday


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 462 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 298 hours
I have reviewed 5,090 individual flashcards

Tomorrow is my 49th birthday. I started this project like I start all my projects, from a fairly absurd declaration that I then try to live up to. In this case, I decided that I thought all Ashkenazi Jews should be able to speak Yiddish by the time they are 50.

This is a product of my own experiences, where, when I was younger, I would sometimes find myself in the company of older Jews who would, on occasion, spontaneously and comfortably switch into speaking Yiddish -- sometimes a word or two, sometimes a sentence, sometimes complete conversations.

I don't know how fluent they actually were. I used to play guitar, and I was pretty good at it, but I would go to guitar stores and watch others sit down and play something utterly astonishing. Sometimes these people were genuinely terrific guitarists, but sometimes they were okay guitarists like me who had a few really impressive tricks. I had a few really impressive tricks too, and am sure when I ran through them people thought I was much better than I was.

So it is with everything. It's hard to gauge competence, especially when you are comparatively incompetent. Maybe I know enough Yiddish now so that the younger me would have been impressed.

I have a year left until I am 50, and I will be curious as to my comfort with the language then. It's starting to click for me, to an extent. Words come easier to me when I want them, and I am able to construct fairly complicated thoughts out of the words I know. I increasingly understand Yiddish when I hear it spoken, or at least some of it -- enough to get the gist of a sentence. I know my grammar is poor -- I mostly built sentences as though I were speaking in English. But not entirely. I have now memorized or partially memorized may 500 phrases and proverbs, and I find myself building new sentences out of them, and those new sentences are presumably closer to how they would be said in Yiddish.

I have always had an image in mind when working on this project -- me at age 50 sitting in a deli reading a Yiddish newspaper. I'm not sure where that image came from, but I am a long way away from it. While my oral Yiddish skills are coming along apace, my literacy is probably dreadful, because I never work on that. I panic at seeing Yiddish in small print, because it's so small and there are so many Yiddish words, and so I never do any reading at all.

I must rectify this. I probably know enough Yiddish now to be able to read children's books, and most of my English acquisition came through reading; I don't know why this wouldn't also be the case with Yiddish.

I shall have to make plans to address this. I don't actually have anybody to speak Yiddish with just now, but I can always have a relationship with a book.

Year 2, Week 17: Discipline


 The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 454 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 288 hours
I have reviewed 5,001 individual flashcards


Through sheer force of will, I have gotten myself back on track. I suppose I'm just learning the discipline of learning a language.


Discipline is hard to acquire. I've only got a few place in my life where I am really disciplined. I'm a disciplined writer, in the sense that if I sit down in front of a blank computer screen I know that within an hour or so I will have written somewhere in the area of 600 to 1,000 words. It's a discipline I had to develop as a journalist, although I am not disciplined enough to do my writing early; I typically do it on the day it is due.


I suppose every discipline is made up of many smaller disciplines. In writing, you have to learn the discipline of writing when you don't want to write, revising when you don't want to revise, writing when you are uninspired, writing when you don't have any idea what you're going to say, and the discipline of not hating your editors, which may be the hardest discipline of all.


In learning Yiddish, there are similarly a series of disciplines, some of which I have acquired, some of which I still struggle with. There is the discipline of constantly creating new flashcards. There is the discipline of creating flashcards containing words other than Yiddish slang for sexual activities. There's the discipline of actually studying the flashcards. There's the discipline of trying to locate gaps in your study and fill them. There's the discipline of caring that there are gaps in your study since all you do with Yiddish is talk to your dog. There is the discipline of not spending all your free time playing with your dog and getting back to studying. And don't even bring up video games.


Anyway, it helped to reshuffle my schedule a little. I now wake at 6:30 or 7 a.m., so am not as exhausted to the extent I was -- it's amazing how much an extra half hour or so can help. Instead of reviewing flashcards first thing in the morning, I review them on the bus to and from work, during my lunch break, and then before I got go to bed, which seems to work about as well.


I'm back to just finding words at random in the dictionary, but when I was last doing this, I was trying to be sort of fair to my dictionary. If I opened it to the page where I had already picked a few words, I flipped around until I find a page where I have learned no words at all. That was starting to take a lot of time, so I have gone back to being loosey goosey about the whole thing.


I am also working my way through a grammar book, as I mentioned, and continue to plug in a Yiddish homily or folk expression or proverb every other day, so there is some nice variety to my studies. I may get back to plugging in text from "Say It in Yiddish," which has turned out to be the collection of the dullest sentences ever conceived. Still, they are well-constructed Yiddish sentences, and it is useful to have a lot of those memorized.

I have made one shift in how I study that I would like to mention. It's small, but I feel like it has been surprisingly effective. It used to be that if I came across a flashcard I knew, I would say the answer and then click past the card. Now, even if I know the answer, I review the card five or so times.

This seems to be helping me to cement the flashcards in my old noggin. Otherwise, once I have learned a card, they only get very brief reviews, and I quickly start forgetting them again. I guess this is another discipline of learning Yiddish: spending time with a word you think you already know.

Also, a quick note: I passed 5,000 flashcards this week, which was one of my milestones. I bought myself a whiskey to celebrate.
 

Yiddish Film: Menashe (2017)


There are a lot of posts I do where I feel like am a duplicating the efforts of other. As an example, there is a fairly comprehensive book on Yiddish film, "Bridge of Light" by Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman. There is probably some value in me writing about, say, "Mamele," in that criticism always benefits from a plurality of voices, but aside from my own eccentric take on the subject I don't think I can contribute any new information not provided by Dr. Hoberman.

But Hoberman wrote his book in 1995, so there has been 22 years of new Yiddish film since then, and they have not been written about comprehensively. And every so often I get to tackle a new film relatively early, such as "Menashe," an independent film I viewed at the Minneapolis St. Paul Film Festival; it has not yet gone into wide release.

In some ways, I feel like I got into this one too early. The film is set in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, and is largely made up of Hasidic and ex-Hasidic actors. It was scripted by director Joshua Z. Weinstein, along with Alex Lipschultz and Musa Syeed, none of whom, to the best of my knowledge, have extensive experience with the Haredi experience (in fact, Syeed is Muslim.)

But director Weinstein has a background in documentary filmmaking, and it sounds as though the cast (especially including star Menashe Lustig, whose biography this movie borrows from) contributed to the eventual film. Presumably this brought a needed authenticity to the story, with the cast and star acting as a refernce and providing checks and balances to how they are represented. But, again, the film is not yet in wide release, and probably will not generally be seen by Hasids, who tend to avoid secular films. I have some connections in the ex-Hasid world, and will be curious to see what they think.

From the outside, the film seems unusually nuanced. Firstly, the plot: The movie tells of a widowed Hasidic man and his troubled relationship with him community and his son. Menashe, played by Lustig, is an eccentric by Hasidic standards, particularly in his refusal to remarry. He seems to be wavering between extremism and liberalism, but mostly seems to be struggling both with poverty and immaturity.

Menashe is a shlemiel -- he's called that by his brother-in-law. Usually this word suggests someone who is comically unlucky or inept, but "Menashe" is not a comedy, and so the main character's experiences are more often frustrating or humiliating than humorous. Especially thorny: His son has been taken away from him until he remarries.

At first, this seems like an unusually cruel communal convention. Menashe deeply loves his son, and it visibly tortures him to be separated. (It should be noted that Lustig's performance in this film is superlative; the whole cast is superb.) But the film also hints that this rule is specifically being enforced because Menashe is too immature to properly care for his child; he can't even properly tend for a pet chicken he has purchased.

It can be tough to watch. There is a line in the movie "Amelie" that describes a character as not liking to see a parent humiliated in front of their child, and sometimes this seems to be the entirety of "Menashe." Additionally, the title character reveals the source of his ambivalence about marriage, and it becomes obvious that he's deep in the throes of what is called "survivor guilt." His guilt about his wife's death, and his relationship beforehand, may be the source of his irresponsibility and occasional hostility toward his community, which has neither the skills nor the language to address his experience.

The film allows both flashes of compassion and cruelty -- the same community leader that slips Menashe extra money and praises his terrible cooking is, in another scene, shown refusing a girl the opportunity to go to college. We just hear her in the background, and hear that her heart is broken.

The film represents the extent to which Hasidic life is circumscribed by ritual -- we see Menashe praying at night before he goes to sleep and washing his hands as soon as his wakes. It's a balancing act, as, if the film approached the subject as a documentary might, it would be possible to get lost in the rituals -- the thrice-daily prayers; the complicated rules around what can and cannot be done on shabbos; the dense, insular language of piety. The Hasidic world in not merely closed because some speak Yiddish, or because some live in religious enclaves, or because it has a handful of particular rules.

No, it is a denser world than that, and the film carefully threads the needle as to showing the particulars of that world while opening it up enough for viewers to connect with Menashe, his grief, and his struggles to reconnect with his son. As an outsider, I feel the filmmakers did a fine job with this, but, as I said, I do not yet know what insiders (or, at least, former insiders) think.

Year 2, Week 16: 160,000 flashcards


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 446 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 282 hours
I have reviewed 4,919 individual flashcards

I made some progress breaking out of my slump this week. I have received a copy of "Colloquial Yiddish" by LilyKahn and have started plugging lessons from that book. I have also started creating word lists of the sorts of things I talk about for new vocab words, rather than simply finding words at random in the dictionary, which was amusing for a while and maybe will be again in the future.

My word lists began with words about cowboys, because of course it did. I also added in a lot of words related to music, and I have a long time this weekend and think I shall spending it just making lists of words I use and then plugging them into my flashcards.

I think I need to revisit my schedule. I was waking up at 6 a.m. to take out my dog and then study Yiddish, and it has just left me exhausted. I had to stay out later last night and so slept in until 7 a.m., and it was wonderful.

So when to study Yiddish? I have been trying an experiment this week where I study on the bus, in waiting rooms, whenever I have downtime. Instead of studying in one fell swoop, I study in five or 10 minute chunks throughout the day.

This has turned out to work fine, so I think I will continue to experiment with it. It makes plowing through 100-plus words a lot less daunting, and kills time nicely where otherwise I would often be bored.

In the meanwhile, I also bought a new iPod. The last one kept running into memory problems, and so I use the old one pretty much exclusively for my Yiddish flashcards now and the new one for music, video games, everything that would no longer fit on the old iPod.

So I'd better keep this going. My goal is to literally fill up my old iPhone with flashcards. Currently the flashcards use 854 MBs of memory; my iPod has 32 GB total storage. I'm almost at 5,000 flashcards. So my iPod should hold at least 160,000 flashcards.

I reckon by the time I get there I will speak pretty good Yiddish.

Year 2, Week 15: The burnout


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 439 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 277 hours
I have reviewed 4,876 individual flashcards

I added no new flashcards this past week. Usually it's the last thing I do at the end of the day, just before I go to bed, but I would reach the end of the day, exhausted, and just not have the energy to plug in 15 new cards.

I know that some of it is that daylight saving time has thrown me for a real loop this year, worse than I remember. I wake exhausted and go through my day that way, fighting sleep at work, and slipping into naps on the bus on the way to and from my job. I will study my flashcards for a while and then feeling my eyes cross and have to sleep for 10 minutes, 15 minutes before I can focus again.

It also doesn't help that I gave up sugary food and caffeine recently. I had to. I am somewhat overweight, have a slight genetic propensity for diabetes, and a biological grandfather who died from the disease. The sugar also kept me on a constant, unpleasant rollercoaster of rising and falling blood sugar, which kept me snacking constantly.

With the sudden drop in caloric intake, my body has probably already run through whatever reserves of glucose it had, and so now I'm ending my day in a deficit. You want this if you want to lose weight, but, boy, by 11 p.m. I am ready to just crawl into bed and be done with the day.

But there is something else going on. It's burnout.

I was in the Lynn-Lake neighborhood of Minneapolis a few days ago and I passed a store there, Schatzlein Saddle Shop, which sells saddled and tack and also a selection of cowboy clothes.

I had wandered into the store years ago, curious about it, and was struck by a red cowboy shirt emblazoned with musical notes. After resisting for a few days, I bought the shirt, and quickly turned into the sort of person who would wear that shirt. I taught myself cowboy songs on ukulele, and taught myself to yodel, and taught myself how to spin a pistol. I even had my own little cowboy show in Omaha for a while.

I missed it. I still listen to country music quite often, and watch cowboy movies now and then, but it was a lot of fun turning myself into a singing cowboy.

There are few things in my life that I sometimes throw myself into, just for the fun of it. I am awful fond of the poppier aspects of mid-20th century horror films — I wrote about horror-themed novelty music for quite a long time, and really enjoyed that.

I found myself thinking about these things. And I found myself missing the fun. Should I dress in cowboy clothes once per week and go to western bars? Should I secretly start a blog about cowboy horror films? What could I do to get the fun back?

And then I realized I was not having fun with the Yiddish project.

Now, this was a momentary thought, and it's not especially true. I had a blast in New York doing various Jewish activities. But, for whatever reason, at that moment, I was ready to drop the Yiddish project. I wasn't sure where I was headed with it. I felt like maybe it had run its course.

I may have just packed too much into too short a time and need to pare back a little. I may also just be tired, and have been sick, and may be struggling with a lack of sugar and caffeine. The next day, I felt better.

But the fact that I have stopped adding new words indicated to me that I'm not getting anything out of that anymore. And of course I am not.

It's an awful lot of work, memorizing words and phrases. It's also tremendously frustrating, as you just keep forgetting what you have learned and must reteach yourself the same information over and over.

And so I am struggling to learn a massive amount of information that, at the moment, I have no practical use for. And because my grammar is so terrible, I can barely use it to put together a sentence to have a conversation with myself.

Nonetheless, I have continued studying my flashcards unabated, which means my burnout isn't so bad that I want to just take a break from it altogether. And thank goodness -- those are the sorts of breaks that people often don't come back from.

It may not help that I work full-time at a Jewish newspaper, which means that I am interact constantly with Jewish content. I may simply have over-Jewed myself a little.

But I think I have reached a moment where I need to come up with a practical application for the Yiddish I have been studying. In the meanwhile, I need to figure out a way to make the flashcards fun again.

Knowing me, it will be something very silly. Maybe something about cowboys.

Jews and microaggressions


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.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: Zwack


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.
As the story details, Zwack disappeared in Hungary during the war, its factories destroyed, its family fled to America, and after the war the drink was nationalized by the Communists, although with a substitute recipe, as the Zwack family brought the original recipe to America with them (literally secreted in Peter Zwack's pocket).

The drink was originally conceived as a cure for indigestion, and it is still often drunk as a digestif, after a meal to aid indigestion. Although, as I mentioned, the American version is sweeter than the original, it is still possible to taste the drink's carminative herbs, which have a bracing bitterness to them; if you have ever drunk the Italian amaro liqueur, the flavor will be familiar.

 So put on your freshly Swiss-cleaned silk shirt, buy three tickets for the opera, and enjoy a Hungarian meal of sour cherry soup, beloved by Hungary's Jews, before capping it off with some Zwack to aid indigestion. We can't all be Budapest Jewish merchant aristocrats, but we can all live like one.

Jewish culture: The shvitz


I have what my girlfriend calls a "Jewish bucket list," which consists entirely of Jewish cultural activities that I want to do, but haven't been able to due to problems with timing or location: Either it is done anymore, or it isn't done where I am.

Now, I've been to a sauna before, and that's really all a shvitz is -- it's Yiddish for sweat, short for shvitzbod, which means sweatbath. I'm from Minnesota, and, thanks to its Scandinavian heritage, there are saunas everywhere, including one that just roams around the city like a food truck full of semi-naked humans. I've even lived in apartments that had saunas in them.

But there are difference between the moderately heated, wood-lined Northern Europeans and the sweat-drenched, highly social Russian baths beloved by old Jews. I had never been to a Russian or Turkish bath, and, by God, I planned to do so.

There is a place that has both, appropriately called the Russian and Turkish Baths, also known as the 10th Street Baths, in Greenwich Village, which dates back to 1892, as the sign boasts. The place is the stuff of legend, some old, such as the popular rumor that Jewish gangsters used to meet here and so the attendants were dead mutes (seemingly confirmed by this New York Times story).

There are newer legends as well, such as the fact that the baths are owned by two men, Boris and David, and the two have nothing to do with each other. You can buy cards to attend the bath, but David's cards will not be honored on Boris' weeks and vice versa. David caters to a younger hispter crowd, and Boris caters to an older immigrant crowd, and the experience must be very different from one week to another, based on Yelp reviews. Those who go on Boris weeks uniformly describe the place as unkempt and the staff rude, but I suppose if you are looking for authenticity, that's going to be an example of it.

There is a documentary about the whole shvitz experience made in 1993 by Jonathan Berman that captures the flavor of the places at the time, mostly focusing on a Coney Island bathhouse but also with a section set in the 10th street structure. The bathhouses were then in decline, hugely reduced in number by indoor plumbing and further suffering from the AIDS epidemic, which had killed or scared away the gay clientèle. (The film makes it abundantly clear that while there were explicitly gay bathhouses, gay men also cruised Jewish bathhouses, and nobody seemed to mind.)

But the few that are left in the film are beaten-up old places filled with corpulent, naked, hugely chummy old Jewish men, who start the experience with a shot of vodka, end it by sleeping on wooden chaise longues and nibbling on Russian food (made in house), kibbutz an awful lot, and otherwise just sweat, or lie back and get rubbed by an even older naked man with oak branches, a massage called platza, the Yiddish word for upper back.

Some of it is still available. You can't start your bath with a shot of vodka at the 10th Street Baths, unless you bring your own, and on co-ed days, when I went, people are younger and in bathing suits, rather than naked. But there are the saunas -- four of them in increasing temperature, including a dry Norther Euopean sauna, a steam-filled aromatherapy bath, a very hot Turkish bath, and an inferno-like Russian bath.

The difference between the baths seems to be the materials used to make them, the amount of steam, and the amount of heat. Some shvitzes also have rooms made of salt. The Russian bath, also called a banya, is essentially a rock cave where the stones are superheated overnight and radiate scorching levels of hear throughout the day. The heat can exceed 199 degree F, and in old pictures you see people wearing wool sauna hats to protect their heads. Nobody wore these when I went in, or, if they did, I didn't see it -- my girlfriend insists attendants in there looked like executioners with hoods on their heads, so perhaps they had hats like that.

They spoke only Russian and so mostly communicated by shoving their clients into position,  and paused frequently to dump massive buckets of ice water over themselves. There baths also have an ice cold pool that most waded into, yelped for a few seconds, and then ran out of. This is what I did. And it is what I wanted -- a proper cultural experience should be a little bit of a shock to the system.

The attendants provided platza massages, which are very soapy and use bound leafy branches to scrub the body. I had considered doing so, but instead I watched and generally got the idea. The bath was simply too hot for me to consider lying there for 15 minutes to get massaged with branches. Perhaps in the future, although both the sauna hat and the platza branches (called veniks) are available for purchase online, and I have a shower that gets extremely hot, so I may simply DIY this particular experience.

The 10th Street Baths also have a dining area with Russian food. I ordered red borscht, which is hot and oniony and delicious, and pelmeni, or Russian dumplings, like little peirgoies. The food was uniformly delicious, even if the cook seemed to have wandered over from Boris week and interjected with everyone with a gruff irritability that is either charming or appalling, depending on what you want or expect from food service. 

All told, I probably spent about two and a half hours there. There baths used to be relatively cheap, but now charge day spa prices, but even still it seemed a pretty good deal for the amount of time I spent (and the food is cheap). I'll probably try another shvitz when I got to New York -- there's one in Coney Island, just blocks from where my mother grew up and probably studiously avoided. Add that to the bucket list.

 That's the secret to this bucket list, by the way. For everything that gets crossed off, something new gets added, sometimes several new things. Culture isn't something you do once and then mark it done. It's something you keep doing, and do more of, and try doing in new ways, and more, and longer.

 There is a real possibility I will be living in a Russian baths with three years. I wouldn't put it past myself.

Jewish Food: Kishka


Sometimes, when I am bored, I will find old delicatessen menus online and flip through them.

I'm not really the target audience for delicatessens, although I remain a longtime patron. The Jewish deli is a uniquely Jewish American creation, originally a German invention that Ashkenazi Jews seized on and made Ashkenazi.

And they sort of went crazy with meat. As I understand it it, red meat wasn't a common part of the Eastern European Jews's diet, where it was often rare, expensive, and difficult to obtain thanks to kosher slaughtering rules. There was meat, certainly, but the dietary staple of many Eastern European Jews were fish and foul.

But in America there was a superabundance of inexpensive meat. And, since Jews must separate their milk products from their meat products, two traditions evolved: The milkhidiker restaurant, which served dairy, or the deli, which served meat. (For those unfamiliar with Jewish dietary laws, fish and foul are, for these purposes, neutral, and could be served at both establishments.)

 And boy did delis serve meat. They still do: massive towers of sandwiches piled high with brisket, pastrami, chopped liver, tongue. 

 Now here is where I should point out that I am a vegetarian, and have been since I was 16. When I go to delis, I mostly eat sides and snack on pickles. But my Jewish food is the food of the milkhidiker restaurant: blintzes, borscht, latkes and the like.

 But still ... when I flip through the old deli menus, I can't help but wonder. Before I turned 16, I had most of the staples, the triple-decker turkey sandwiches, the pastrami on rye. I know the taste of those foods, even if I don't eat them anymore.

 But these older menus have foods on them that I couldn't get in Minnesota. Some you can't really find anywhere anymore, like miltz, a cow's spleen stuffed with garlic and onions, or lungen stew, a cow's lung with garlic and onions; apparently almost any offal can be cooked with garlic and onions and it becomes food.

 But there are a few items that still linger on New York deli menus. Despite my vegetarianism, I will make exceptions when it seems like exceptions must be made, and, in this case, my curiosity about these old Jewish foods got the better of me.

 So when I was in New York recently, I stopped by the Second Avenue Deli, a New York classic dating back to 1954, and ordered two items I have long wondered about. The first was kishka, the second gribenes, and I will write about the first now and the second later.

 I have discussed the word kishkes previously. The word means intestines, and that's, in part, what it is: fat and flour or matzah meal stuffed into an intestinal casing. As I mentioned in my earlier piece, it sometimes goes by the name stuffed derma, which is supposed to be better but sounds frankly disguising to me.

 Kishke used to be a staple of Jewish events, but has since sort of fallen off the map; I would guess that this is because the recipe has changed significantly. It used to be made like cholent, the traditional sabbath meal: slow-cooked, sometimes in the cholent, acquiring the flavor. Now it is usually boiled and served rather quickly, often in an inedible artificial casing, which sort of defeats the point.

 The kishka I had was a pasty, sweet potato-colored mound with no visible casing and a brown gravy on the side. It had an extremely strong umami flavor, but indistinct -- kishka is frequently made with onion and sometimes carrot or celery. None of those flavors could be distinguished. The Joy of Jewish cooking from 1974 has a recipe in which the kishka is covered with apple cider, but this was not done here. 

I suspect this is a food that could easily be revived by foodies. There are vegetarian versions as well, stuffed with potato or simply using oil to replace the fat in the original recipe. Once expects that, slow-cooked and balancing the ingredients, either the original or the vegetarian version cold be tremendous. The deli version wasn't, and I would not eat it again.

 However, there is another meal, almost identical, but the ingredients are stuffed into a chicken neck instead of intestines. This meal is called helzel, and is often made with garlic and black pepper, and I might have to break my vegetarianism to try this if I ever get the chance.

Year 2, Week 14: The Flibbertigibbet



The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 431 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 272 hours
I have reviewed 4,876 individual flashcards

I was congratulating myself on managing to study Yiddish last week in New York, and then it all fell apart. Thanks to a combination of exhaustion and an extremely busy schedule, this past week was something of a bust, with me managing maybe 15 minutes of study per day and adding almost no new words.

Some of it was exhaustion, due in part to the onset of a small cold, my third this year, god damn it. (Woe be to you if you hear a child cough in an airport.) Some of it was a busy schedule. Some of it, stupidly, was a little video game I have gotten obsessed with where you solve puzzles to bring new life to a dead garden on an ancient mansion, like a video game version of "The Secret Garden."

But I know some of it is due to the fact that I am a flibbertigibbet, and must constantly find new ways to amuse myself or my attention wanes. Frankly, the fact that I have been able to maintain this project as long as I have astonishes me, because it usually only takes me a few weeks to become distracted by something new.

This means that I need to shake the program up a little. I'm not quite sure how to do this. I've ordered a new grammar book, "Colloquial Yiddish" by Lily Kahn, and if it helps me construct better sentences, I might enjoy that. But I feel like I need to drill down more, to find something that sort-of obsesses me. Something that will make me want to do the busy work of studying, the stuff that's hard and not especially fun.

I'm not sure what that might be just yet. But the thing that has kept this project going has been my ability to refocus when my attention wanes, to make the project fun again. I'll chew on this this week and see what I come up with.
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