Jan 31, 2025
Faces from the Warsaw journal, Ilustrirte vokh (Illustrated Week), including Ruth Bayton and Vladimir Medem.
INTRODUCTION
This piece was written in response to Lawrence Rosenwald’s review of the Yiddish Book Center’s exhibit, “Yiddish: A Global Culture.” Read the review here.
First and foremost, many thanks to Larry Rosenwald — henceforth, prost un poshet Larry — for such a thoughtful, eloquent, and deeply engaged response to Yiddish, A Global Culture, our permanent exhibition. It’s exciting and humbling to be scrutinized with such intensity and generosity. To be — echoing Larry — so thoroughly seen.
I’m particularly encouraged to see how strongly some of our key curatorial decisions resonated with Larry, and I’ll address these and aspects of the broader critique point by point.
1. In his review of the exhibit, Larry emphasized the global framing of the story. That principle underpins the exhibition as a whole and informs the choices within each of its seventeen sections. While some other core principles are kept in the background, this one is messaged more overtly within the exhibition space. Since, to paraphrase Tolstoy, each global culture is global in its own way, we set out to explore the distinctively global footprint of Yiddish, and its many connections within the Jewish world and far beyond. Eastern Europe, North America, and Argentina triangulate our story, but we push well beyond them to places like Cairo, Munich, Sao Paolo, Prague, and Lund, Sweden.
2. Larry also noted the central role given to stories and images of women in Yiddish. This was front and center throughout the five years of exhibition planning. We not only wanted to include the many women creators, as Larry highlights, but – of equal importance in my mind – women as shapers and transmitters of the culture writ large, as readers of story pamphlets, theater audiences, revolutionary couriers, salon hosts, prayer sayers, strike leaders, and general keepers of the Yiddish flame in the home and in the workplace. Women in yidishkayt as well as in Yiddish culture. We tell dozens of such stories in detail, and feature hundreds of named women writers, actors, singers, activists, readers, zine makers and more. We drew from the important scholarship that has recovered women’s voices in recent years, and we explicitly celebrate and acknowledge this body of work. But we also did a lot of our own research. Just one example: as we were putting together our recreation of the Peretz salon, we asked, Who were the women of the Peretz salon? What role did they play? How could we find images of them? Part of the five-year development process of this show was a concerted attempt to work with scholars, dig deep into archives, and reach out to families to tease out some of these hidden stories.
A photograph of Rivka Lunski at home in Vilna reading the Vilner tog, 1932 which is the main image on the introductory panel to the Press section.
3. I was pleased to see that Larry described his visitor experience as an open-ended encounter. I love this observation. It’s true in terms of the design and pathway through the space, but also true, I hope, of the broader approach and the writing. The exhibition is not a journey towards a prescribed destination, and khas v’ kholile, definitely not a survey of an established canon. I understand that some visitors, and some reviewers, want to see a few writers or thinkers given greater prominence. That would be a different exhibition, and there are many great resources online for that purpose. As Larry acknowledges, we tell a more diffuse story and a more democratic one: a set of starting points, a network of connections, a broad canvas without a hierarchy of importance, and a prompt for further reflection. That might be about aspects of Jewish or world history. Or about points of connection with visitors’ own family stories. It’s striking how many people we see walking the exhibition phone in hand, taking constant snaps of text and images. To share, one assumes, but hopefully also to read over and explore in greater depth.
4. In his critique of the exhibit, Larry noted that there could have been more discussion of translation out of Yiddish as opposed to into it. It’s a great point, and one I hadn’t really thought about in quite the way Larry frames it. That’s not to say that translation out of Yiddish isn’t represented in the exhibition at all. There’s a slideshow in the theater section with images of Sholem Asch’s play Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance) in German, Russian, Polish, French, and English stagings. We show Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir as a Yiddish original and discuss its adaptation into French and beyond. And in a small display titled “Sholem Aleichem - Proletarian Hero,” we feature our rare copy of the WWII-era Sholem Aleichem portable exhibit — a Russian-language artifact with added English and Yiddish captions. But I’m grateful to Larry for prompting me to explore this further, and to consider its complexities: is An-sky’s Dybbuk a Russian play translated (or rewritten) into Yiddish, or a Yiddish text that made its way into world culture via a landmark Hebrew production? Both, no doubt, and more, but exhibitions demand strong, clear storytelling. That doesn’t mean telling a simple story, but there’s a point at which too much complexity leaves the visitor lost. How can we discuss the way literary works are created between languages in a multilingual context, without confusing our audience?
Bund leader Vladimir Medem on the cover of Ilustrirte vokh, January 31, 1924.
5. Larry is right, of course, in his assertion that Yiddish culture and scholarship owes much to non-Jews, past, present, and undoubtedly future. Just as Jews have contributed as performers, activists, and scholars, to all manner of fields and cultural traditions. But what are we, as creators of this exhibit, to do with that information? In what ways is it relevant or important? In the case of Rudolf Rocker, a personal hero of mine (how could he not be?) the journey from his German Catholic roots to his calling as a Yiddish editor, workers’ “rabbi,” and global anarchist intellectual was so widely commented on, and such an exemplar of his universalism, that his gentile origins seemed worth mentioning, as we do, in passing. Larry mentions Rocker, Paul Robeson, Marlon Brando, and Salma Hayek, and says, “this is not enough.” I don’t disagree, inasmuch as I am acutely aware of how much we had to exclude in every section, but these figures are far from the only non-Jews included. Some I could name, and others I probably know nothing about, and am not aware of their Jewish or non-Jewish identities. We include a large image of Vladimir Medem, leader of the Bund, and the baptized son of converts. Was he Jewish? Opinions varied. Did it matter? Not really. How many non-Jews would be enough to make this exhibit more inclusive? I’m not sure of the answer, but honestly I’m wary of marking people in this way. Cultures often cultivate a myth of purity, of umbilical chains of transmission, of birthright. Their histories usually point to a very different truth, and a place where I’m sure Larry and I meet in agreement: cultures flourish and are nourished by an absence of gatekeepers. Let anyone who has something genuine to contribute bring it to the party and…. shoyn!
Black American dancer and entertainer Ruth Bayton on the cover of Ilustrirte vokh, July 27, 1928.
6. I was intrigued by Larry’s discussion of the photograph of the two girls on parade in 1909, the way it represents politics, and the questions it asks us. This is fascinating because I read this photograph completely differently from Larry. It never occurred to me that either of the two girls staring back at us wasn’t Jewish, or that the presence of the two sashes in Yiddish and English suggests that might be the case. I see two Jewish girls who are probably part of a much broader coalition of Jews and non-Jews marching together. True, the image invites speculation precisely because it comes with no specific details attached, at least none that we could find. And yes, the brochure aside, we cropped the photograph within the exhibition to fit the square space available, but my concern about that was entirely different: in cropping out the sides, we lost a gendered dimension to the image, given that there are boys pressing in on all sides to look at the camera, but playing the role of extras to the two starring girls. Swings and roundabouts. Either way, Larry’s discussion points us to the question of how the presentation of artifacts directs our attention and guides us toward interpretations that might have been different if other curatorial choices had been made. His wider point about the questions the image asks of us is one I couldn’t agree with more. That mirroring, the intense connection those girls make with us, is precisely why we reproduced it so large in the exhibition – a great call by our project director, Lisa Newman.
7. As for Larry’s discussion of the representation of race, and his call for more of a warts-and-all portrayal, I want to both agree and disagree. It’s true that we accentuate the positive, with stories of Langston Hughes in Yiddish, Dora Teitelbaum’s epic ballad about Little Rock, Arkansas, and a few more case studies. And yes, that’s not the whole story. Nonetheless, given the limitations of space in this single panel of our exhibit, as in every section only a small representative fraction could be included. What we chose seems to me valid as a key message. As the work of scholars like Rachel Rubinstein, Amelia Glaser, Eric Goldstein, Alyssa Quint, Dovid Katz, and many others has shown, Yiddish culture is full of powerful and inspiring examples of solidarity and a deep engagement with the plight of the oppressed and marginalized. I would gladly have included more if we could, such as the powerful responses by Yiddish writers to the plight of the Scottsboro Boys. As for the Sholem Aleichem quote that Larry references — one that enshrines stereotypical racialized caricature into classic Yiddish literature — I’d want to think long and hard before including that on the wall of an exhibition. It would, I think, need very careful contextualizing and a much broader discussion of the sort that one can do in a resource guide, or a monograph, but is much harder to do in the context of a public display, especially in a single panel on the topic of the representation of race.
A view of the exhibition panel “Representing Race.”
Introduction to the section “Representing Race.”
A detail from the exhibition panel “Representing Race.”
One final thought: this exhibition will be up for many years, but that doesn’t mean our work is done. It’s very much the start of a process rather than the end of one. We plan to explore additional aspects of our story via education workshops, thematic tours of the exhibition (a Pride tour in 2024 was our first), and adding content to our website and the Bloomberg Connects app. We’re hard at work on a catalog of the exhibition, an online version, and an introductory “What Is Yiddish?” gallery. Our temporary exhibit galleries will also enable us to amplify the exhibition and explore some of its gaps. Here, Larry’s point about ways of seeing, and different vantage points, offers a blueprint. A broader look at Yiddish, race, and ethnic identity, for example, would explore the complexities of the Yiddish literary gaze, yes, but also the myriad ways Jews and Yiddish culture have been seen, depicted, and interpreted by others. Larry’s nuanced and generous commentary will be an invaluable aide-memoire as we chart these next steps.
