Mar 24, 2025
“In these terrible times, when everyone goes around all full of worry and woe, it is simply a lifesaver to have the chance to drive one’s concerns out of one’s mind. So I anticipate that those who encounter this little story will thank me as they read it. They will forget their worries while having a good laugh.” (Shomer, translated by Saul Naom Zaritt)
So begins the introduction to Eyn man mit dray vayber, adapted by Shomer (Nahum Meir Shaykeyvitsh) from the original German in 1886. As Saul Naom Zaritt pointed out in his keynote speech at this year’s Farbindungen conference, the “terrible times” Shomer referred to were the pogroms decimating Eastern Europe’s Jewish communities. Today, though I am lucky enough not to worry about pogroms, I am indeed going around all full of worry and woe—endlessly scrolling through headlines (each one more depressing than the next), fretting about the looming post-graduate future (I graduate in May), and checking and double-checking my syllabi to make sure I didn’t forget to do any assignments amidst the chaos (I did). And I don’t think it’s just me, I think it’s everyone. Certainly we don’t all have the same exact problems, but it feels like everyone I meet is trying frantically to adjust to a world that demands too much attention from us. Even as I write these words, I find myself fighting the urge to check the news. Indeed, as Shomer put it over a century ago, “it is simply a lifesaver to have the chance to drive one’s concerns out of one’s mind.”
Farbindungen was my chance to drive my concerns out of my mind, and it magnificently rose to the occasion. Consisting of seven panels, two workshops, and a keynote panel featuring Saul Noam Zaritt and Natan Meir, the topics ran the gamut from Yiddish lesboerotica to Yiddish linguistics. One of the workshops and one of the panels were conducted entirely in Yiddish, whereas the rest were in English. Unlike some other academic conferences, Farbindungen is held virtually via Zoom. Although there are certainly drawbacks to virtual learning, I found that the conference’s virtual setting made it far more accessible for me as a busy student. Although I initially had fears that I would have trouble paying attention to a two-day Zoom conference, these fears were quelled instantly. Having sat through my fair share of passionless, dry Zoom lectures, I can attest that it takes a very special skill to engage a virtual audience.
It is a true testament to the triumph of Farbindungen that I was engaged from start to finish, and this was due in large part to the Farbindungen community. Every panelist seemed genuinely thrilled to be presenting on their work. Every moderator asked thoughtful, probing questions connecting seemingly disparate topics. Participants were constantly sending virtual naches to the presenters and seeking more sources so they could learn more. Farbindungen co-founder and organizer Sarah Biskowitz explained to me that the supportive community of the conference is part of what makes it special. “You can see things at Farbindungen that are not going to be published for several years,” she said. “So it’s really a place where people can bring new ideas and experiment, and feel more free and open to receive support and questions and be inspired to move further with their research.” My absolute favorite part of Farbindungen, though, was the theme—Bad Yiddish.
As I am a beginner Yiddish learner, I was extremely nervous about attending an academic conference centered around Yiddish, even one like Farbindungen that advertises itself as accessible to a wider audience, including undergraduate students like me. After all, I am the epitome of a Bad Yiddishist. Even though I have been graced with incredible teachers at YIVO and Columbia, I continue to struggle with Yiddish. I still can’t quite grasp the case system. I do not have a full understanding of converbs. I have to look in the dictionary for basic vocabulary that I definitely should know, like “shoe” and “photographer.” Most egregiously, I have to pull up the Yiddish Book Center’s Alef-beys Chart every time I have to write a langer fey or langer tsadek, because for some reason, I just can’t memorize the proper squiggle. All of this is to say that, even before hearing the panels, the theme “Bad Yiddish” spoke to me deeply.
I was not alone. I found that the theme “Bad Yiddish” provided an avenue for speakers to share their struggles with Yiddish and embrace their insecurities in a public forum, engaging with the theme on a personal level instead of merely an academic one. Natan Meir, one of the keynote panelists, spoke about his time starting out in the world of Yiddish studies. He took Yiddish classes and loved reading in Yiddish, but couldn’t converse fluently. “I felt looked down upon by Yiddishists for instrumentalizing Yiddish for studying history,” Meir said. “Instead of Yiddish for the sake of Yiddish.” Perhaps, he noted, he was projecting his own insecurities and shame. Whatever the reasoning was, he felt like a fraud. To me, though, listening to Meir speak animatedly about his work in Eastern European Jewish history, I felt he was anything but. He covered a treasure trove of folklore-related subjects—the “town fool,” cholera weddings, amulets, death rituals, female spellcasters, and other forms of “embodied Judaism.” I came away wanting to know more about literally everything he talked about. And, notably, I remember thinking to myself, if this incredible scholar felt like a Bad Yiddishist, then it’s okay that I do too.
According to Biskowitz, exploring self-doubt in the Yiddish world was one of the goals of choosing the theme. “[The organizers] just thought it was really interesting and somewhat controversial and spoke to a lot of peoples’ insecurities,” she said, “in this era of people learning Yiddish from a variety of sources and not being native speakers. We wanted to explore that and give people a platform to learn and grow.” Biskowitz explained to me that having candid conversations about how Yiddish is taught, including Hasidic Yiddish and “artificial Yiddish,” can be hard for people. She continued, “there’s kind of a taboo in the Yiddish world of talking about insecurities…We wanted to talk about it in an interesting and respectful way.”
With this in mind, I want to return to Shomer. To be precise, I want to bring in his most spiteful critic—Sholem Aleichem. In 1888, Sholem Aleichem published The Judgement of Shomer, a satirical work framed as a mock trial of Shomer’s melodramatic novels. As Zaritt explained in his keynote talk, Shomer is on trial for crimes against Yiddish literature for lack of authenticity and quality. In the book, an investigative commission comes to eleven conclusions about Shomer’s body of work. It is these eleven strikes against Shomer, as translated by Justin Cammy, that I want to use as a framework to explore some of the Farbindungen panels more in-depth.
1. Almost all of his novels are, pardon the expression, stolen from foreign literatures.
“Foreign literatures” abounded at Farbindungen. I especially loved the workshop hosted by Giuliana Gotesdiner and Yazmín Kleiner from Fundación IWO (Yiddish Research Institute of Buenos Aires) titled “A Glimpse of Castídish through the IWO Historical Archive.” Going into the workshop, I had no idea what Castídish even was. As Gotesdiner and Kleiner explained, Castídish is a linguistic mishmash of Spanish and Yiddish that was born out of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Argentina. Participants were split into breakout rooms, where we looked at Castídish documents from the IWO archive and tried to pick out which words were borrowed from Spanish.
2. All his novels are of the same cut.
As I’m sure Grisha Leyfer would agree, emulating the structure or content of a work is not merely making a copy. In “Fan-taytsht un Fan-besert: Exploring Yiddish through a Fan-Studies Framework,” Leyfer delves into the world of fanfiction and fan culture through a Yiddish lens. His framework, “Affective Yiddish,” offers “an alternative to Post-Vernacularity.” When we write fan fiction in Yiddish and embrace the fan-studies framework, we can “de-center tragedy and highlights continuity, center personal relationship to the language rather than performance, and remove stigma of implied non-vernacularity.” The beauty of fan-fiction (as any former Wattpad reader can attest) is that it’s messy, imperfect, and sometimes (well, often) risque. But works of fan-fiction are also steeped in imagination and passion and a deep appreciation for the original text. The proof? Leyfer’s very own retelling of Yentl, except there are zombies, which you can find on the fan-fiction hotspot Archive of Our Own.
3. This so-called novelist does not provide a realistic, authentic picture of Jewish life.
What does it mean to provide a “realistic, authentic picture of Jewish life” when “Jewish life” has infinite iterations? One topic discussed at Farbindungen offered a new perspective on this question. In “‘I Have Received a New Name. They Call Me Prisoner’: The Role of the Prison Underworld in Bundist Organizing,” oral historian Eve Glazier presented their work on incarcerated Bundists in Czarist Russia. Glazier pointed out a gap in the literature that they hope to alleviate using critical prison studies—in many sources on Bundist history, prison is perceived as the sidelines of the movement, whereas the “real action” was on the streets. They drew largely from a Bundist songbook titled Arbeyt un frayhayt in which prison loomed large to illuminate a fuller picture of Bundist life, beyond the streets and behind the bars of the prisons.
4. As a result, his novels have no connection to the Jews whatsoever.
At Farbindungen, anything could connect to Yiddish, even the New Testament. In “Yoshke in Crown Heights: A Yiddish-Yeshivish New Testament for the 21st Century,” Pamela Brenner walked us through a translation of the New Testament into Yiddish with a heavy dose of Yeshivish. The translation, affiliated with the Messianic Jewish movement, attempts to reach a Hasidic Jewish audience and proselytize them. As Brenner explained, the translator had to change certain elements of the original New Testament to make it more palatable for a Hasidic reader. For example, Jesus Christ is dubbed “Rebbe Melech ha Moshiach,” emulating the language of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement.
5. These romances ignite the imagination, but provide no ethical direction, no moral.
Who says that romances provide no moral direction? Rebecca Turner begged to differ in her presentation “‘Is “A Woman’s Past Her Past?’ An Analysis of Jane Rose’s ‘Nit mit alemen.’” “Nit mit alemen” is a 1918 play about a troubled Jewish immigrant family’s run-in with the ethics of contraception. The protagonist is Roza, the unmarried eldest daughter, who resents her family’s relieved reaction to her miscarriage of twins. Her sister, Mina, thinks Roza should be grateful for her miscarriage because of the financial burden that children bring; Turner aptly described this attitude as “classism with a splash of eugenics.” Roza’s mother, on the other hand, is far more concerned with policing her daughter’s sexual purity and protecting the family image from disgraceful acts like sex out of wedlock. “The hypocrisy of the early 20th century contraceptives movement is not in its advocacy for contraception itself but in underlying ideologies and rhetoric―where reproductive control is wielded as a tool of social and economic policing rather than true bodily autonomy,” concluded Turner. “It asks us to be like Roza—not to judge the worth of people, but to judge the ideologies that shape their fates. Clearly, works that would have been relegated to the trash by critics of Shomer have many philosophical musings to offer us.
7. They contain obscenity and cynicism.
Mickey Katz exemplifies obscenity. In his presentation “Mickey Katz, Postwar Yiddishism, and the Vulgar Postvernacular,” musicologist Uri Schreter brought Katz’s enormously popular vulgar comedy back to life. Although his many critics in the Yiddish world would say otherwise, Schreter posited that Katz did not sacralize the Yiddish language in his satirical performances. Rather, he appreciated vulgar comedy, and performed it without ideological pretensions, seeking to bring Yiddish to the common people.
8. They are very poorly constructed.
How can we reconstruct historical phenomena with limited archival fragments? How can we learn from constructing something poorly and then trying again? I loved the speculative archival research Yael Horowitz included in their presentation “They Would Hum it Through the Streets of Warsaw: Restaging the Azazel Shimmy.” Horowitz attempted to reconstruct the cabaret performances of the Azazel theater troupe, which was active in 1920s Warsaw, by using textual analysis, performance theory, and embodied practice. Rachel Greiner offered a different methodology of understanding historical documents in “Krisko resepyes far der idisher baleboste: A Short Yiddish and Cooking Experiment.” Greiner attempted recipes from a twentieth century Yiddish cookbook, and when the end result was not up to par, she tried again, experimenting with the recipes and seeking outside advice. Horowitz and Greiner offer us two road maps for understanding the Yiddish past through reconstruction. Both scholars remind us that historical reconstruction is not about achieving perfect fidelity to the past, but rather about grappling with its gaps, making educated guesses, and refining our methods over time. Through their work, we see how speculative and experimental approaches to Yiddish studies allow us to reanimate histories that might otherwise remain inaccessible.
9. The author appears to be an ignoramus.
To my knowledge, there were no ignoramuses present at Farbindungen. Maybe next year.
10. Under no circumstances should such novels be given to our schoolboys or teenage girls.
At the final panel of Farbindungen, Lern-ing Yiddish: New Pedagogical Perspectives, presenters delved into the current landscape of Yiddish education. I particularly resonated with Nathan Bernstein’s talk, Artistic Expression as a Pedagogical Tool for Promoting the Continuation of Yiddish Language and Culture. Bernstein explored how artistic practice can serve as both a pedagogical tool and a means of cultural transmission. He shared his own work combining visual art with Yiddish poetry translation, demonstrating how interdisciplinary approaches can make Yiddish literature more accessible. I have found in my own Yiddish learning journey that collaging with Yiddish poetry and literature has totally expanded my relationship with the language. Bernstein’s talk reinforced my belief that creative, hands-on engagement with Yiddish helps sustain the language in new and meaningful ways.
11. It would be a great act of charity if he and all of his fantastic and uncouth novels were expunged from our literature by means of serious, clear-headed criticism.
Although all the sessions I attended were incredible, my absolute favorite was Hinde Ena Burstin’s “‘I want her so bad…’: Writing Yiddish Lesboerotica.” Burstin, a self-described “dykele shanda from down unda,” is a long-time writer of queer Yiddish erotica. She read us the most incredible poems about the sexuality of baking bagels and a forbidden, passionate love affair with the biblical Miriam. And, although the poems were wonderful—I believe I commented something along the lines of “this is life changing”—my favorite part of “Writing Yiddish Lesboerotica” was when Burstin simply talked about her life. Growing up in Australia, she didn’t feel like she could be lesbian and a member of the Yiddish-speaking community. When she came to New York City, her world was opened, and Burstin found a thriving Yiddish queer community that inspired her to write the very poems she read to us.
I am certain that Sholem Aleichem would have characterized Burstin’s work as “uncouth.” What he fails to understand is that writing erotic literature, especially as a queer person, is an act of defiance. As Burstin puts it, it challenges the notions of shame towards ourselves, instead enforcing the “beauty, power, and desirability” of all of our bodies. “We must withstand efforts to squash our literature and our lives,” she said. “We live in dangerous times.”
Farbindungen 2025 was a celebration of Yiddish in all its messy, defiant, and ever-evolving forms. If Sholem Aleichem’s mock trial of Shomer was an attempt to canonize “good” Yiddish and discard the rest, Farbindungen did just the opposite—it embraced the so-called “bad,” the imperfect, the overlooked, and the experimental. From Castídish to Yiddish lesboerotica, from Bundist prison songs to Yiddish fanfiction, the conference proved that Yiddish thrives not in rigid purity but in creative reinvention. The anxieties of feeling like a fraud in the world of Yiddish studies, of not knowing enough, of not being fluent enough, were not only acknowledged but embraced as part of the journey. Perhaps we are all struggling—against shame, against erasure, against the limitations of what we’ve been told Yiddish should be. I believe that struggle is where the most meaningful work begins. And who knows? Maybe next year I’ll apply to present on my own paper.
