Yidishkayt and the American Right: Jewish Safety and the Limits of Political Imagination in The Last Yiddish Speaker

Yidishkayt, in all its senses, anchors Chava’s lessons for Sarah and for us. And Laufer takes care with Yiddish. I will confess that, based on the play’s title, I braced myself for frustrating tropes of Yiddish as a tragically dying language. But in fact, both the play and the production are extremely dedicated to actual Yiddish. Chava speaks much of her dialogue in Yiddish, often untranslated. The posters in the lobby highlighting Yiddish etymologies in English carefully note accurate, YIVO-standard transliterations, telling the audience that “chutzpah” comes from khutspe and “schmear” from shmirn. Yiddish — not just the idea of Yiddish — lives on the stage.

Unfortunately, Laufer wields this careful Yiddish to advance her thesis of eternal, cyclical antisemitism. But Yiddish doesn’t have to lead us there. In fact, it is a longstanding question: What kind of present political commitments does a devotion to Yiddish language, culture, and history compel us to pursue? This question has taken on renewed urgency in the past year as Yiddishists have fiercely debated whether Yiddish past and present inspires a moral imperative to disavow Jewish exceptionalism and highlight the devastation that Jewish supremacy yields, or whether Yiddish culture should buttress Zionism in the interests of protecting Jews.

I badly wanted The Last Yiddish Speaker to be an American Jewish meditation on American Jewish safety that used Yiddish to pull our political imaginations toward new horizons. Yiddish history and living culture can indeed sharpen our understanding of precisely who contemporary American Christian nationalism targets – including, but not exclusively, American Jews – and how American Jews might turn to a shared political struggle in response. It is worth imagining, then, where else hearing Yiddish in the Tates’ kitchen might have led Laufer – and us.

Laufer joins a robust tradition of Yiddishists past and present asking critical questions about gender and patriarchy. The Tates’ living room provides a fruitful setting to explore both the limits and the possibilities of gendered domesticity, enforced and chosen. Sarah’s naïve but sympathetic rebellions against the misogyny and homophobia of the new government – edicts against women going to college, forced reproduction, the mob murder of a gay male couple – make it clear that MAGA-style fascism hinges on repressive gender and sexual politics. Meanwhile, Chava gifts Sarah knowledge of feminine, domestic Judaism, like shabes prayers. Perhaps most intriguingly, Laufer centers the relationship between Sarah and her father. After his wife’s death, Paul defies government pressure to relegate gendered domestic labor to Sarah. Unable to protect his daughter in other ways, he insists on cooking the family’s dinner and shopping for their groceries.

But Laufer’s astute vision of gender and sexuality narrows in scope at the play’s end. After her transformative Jewish education from Chava, Sarah rethinks her opening line — “I hate kids” — and proclaims instead: “Ikh vil hobn kinder a mol” (I want to have children one day.) Her new dream of children refuses a future of Jewish death and declares her intent to continue and transmit yidishkayt. But on the heels of Chava’s insistence that Jews can only rely on Jews, and amid Sarah’s newfound commitment to a Jewish present and future, Sarah’s triumphant reversal also carries disappointing echoes of Jewish continuity politics — the idea that Jewish women bear the responsibility to marry Jews, bear Jews, and raise Jews in order to ensure Jewish survival. Such a claim has long shored up American Jewish institutional misogyny and homophobia.

By contrast, the contemporary flourishing of queer and feminist yidishkayt uses Yiddish to imagine blueprints, community, and dreams for the transmission of the Yiddish language, Yiddish and Jewish cultures, and Judaism and religious practices far beyond biological reproduction and the heteropatriarchal nuclear family. Indeed, the character of Chava herself disproves the idea that biological reproduction is essential to di goldene keyt. She tells Sarah — her great-(great-great-…)niece — that she has outlived all her children. Sarah’s own mother, meanwhile, prioritized abstract political commitments during her life to the neglect of her own daughter, as Sarah realizes in one of the play’s most poignant moments. But Sarah does not need a biological mother or even a direct maternal lineage to learn from Chava in a beautiful intergenerational transmission of yidishkayt. In fact, Chava’s magical longevity could invite us to think expansively about where to find such Jewish ancestors beyond the ranks of the living. Sarah might, for instance, have resolved to use her new love of Yiddish to learn to read Yiddish literature or listen to stories like Chava’s in recorded oral histories, as many In geveb readers have doubtlessly done.

Rethinking insular frameworks of Jewish reproduction also broadens the limits of Jewish communities and Jewish safety. One of the key intellectual pillars of Jewish continuity politics is counting Jews. In other words, such queer and feminist yidishkayt helps us imagine the broadest possible answer to the questions: who counts as Jewish? Who counts as “us”? Who counts?

Unfortunately, The Last Yiddish Speaker instead uses Yiddish to constrict ideas of Jewishness and Jewish safety. Laufer deploys Yiddish as a historically vague shorthand for essential Jewishness defined by Eastern European antisemitism. Chava breezily sums up her millennium of life as “umetum […] nisht popular” (everywhere unpopular). Her magical age — which she shares with the Yiddish language — makes her the embodiment of the lachrymose history of the Jews, imagined as a single unit.

Laufer’s historical omissions are revealing. Among the litany of horrors she —that is, Jews as a group — has survived, she lists the Spanish Inquisition. A Jew facing the Spanish Inquisition would have spoken a local Iberian vernacular, not Yiddish or its Germanic antecedents. ^{1 1} These included predecessors of modern Ladino, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, and Judeo-Arabic. Remy Attig,“Did the Sephardic Jews Speak Ladino?,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 89, no. 6 (2012), 831–38. Compressing 1,000 years of Jewish diasporic history into Yiddish underscores the Eastern European events in Chava’s recital of tragedies: pogroms and the Holocaust. In popular memory (not to mention many American Jewish educational projects), these twin touchstones of tragic Jewish history exemplify quintessentially antisemitic violence, specifically targeting Jews because they were Jews. ^{2 2} Historical scholarship complicates this popular narrative. For instance, a wealth of new scholarship makes clear the multi-valent aspects of white supremacy that animated German fascism alongside – and entwined with– antisemitism, from the European genocide of the Roma and Sinti to the Namibian colonial genocide of the Herero and Nama. See e.g. Ari Joskowicz, Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023); Jürgen Zimmerer, From Windhoek to Auschwitz? Reflections on the Relationship Between Colonialism and National Socialism (De Gruyter, 2019); Eve Rosenhaft, “Blacks and Gypsies in Nazi Germany: The Limits of the ‘Racial State’.” History Workshop Journal, no. 72 (2011): 161-70. Thanks to Sophie Wunderlich for their expertise with this footnote. By contrast, popular histories of the Spanish Inquisition highlight two religious minorities simultaneously exiled by Christian supremacy – Jews and Muslims. ^{3 3} Here, too, scholars have pointed to the intertwined histories of the Spanish empire’s anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim racial logics in Europe and the anti-Indigenous and anti-Black imperial racial hierarchies the same empire developed in the Americas: María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008). In all of The Last Yiddish Speaker, Muslims get only a passing, token mention. Instead, Chava demands of Sarah, “Ver iz itst der balebos? (Who’s in charge now?) Nazis, Cossacks, KKK?” By centering Yiddish and its most tragic histories, Laufer implies that American Christian nationalism simply recycles well-worn nineteenth and twentieth century European templates of anti-Jewish violence.

But American antisemitism is not Nazism copy-pasted into upstate New York, nor is contemporary American Jewishness structurally identical to early twentieth century European Jewishness. Most Jews have historically had access to the dominant legal category of whiteness in the United States, in contrast to their legally subordinate status in Eastern Europe. ^{4 4} Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Shari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth Century America (New York: NYU Press, 2017), ch. 1. Unlike European mass antisemitic violence, therefore, American state-sanctioned legal and extralegal violence has overwhelmingly enforced white supremacy by targeting Black, Indigenous, and other non-white groups. ^{5 5} See In geveb’s special issue: Race in America, af yidish: https://ingeveb.org/issues/race-in-america. See also Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land : Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors : Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness : Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go : Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018). However, scholars have also emphasized that European antisemitism, too, has anti-Black and Orientalist roots: Devin Naar, “Our White Supremacy Problem,” Jewish Currents (Spring 2019), https://jewishcurrents.org/our.... Where anti-Jewish violence enters contemporary right-wing movements, its proponents frequently paint Jews as manipulative facilitators of Black and brown liberation movements and migrations. ^{6 6} For one contemporary analysis,s see Jews For Racial & Economic Justice’s “Understanding Antisemitism: An Offering to our Movement” (https://www.jfrej.org/assets/u...). To name just one example, the tragic shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh targeted HIAS’ work as an explicitly Jewish agency supporting non-Jewish, especially Muslim, migrants and refugees.

Yet people of color never set foot in the Tates’ living room. Laufer suggests that American Jews are unique in having “nowhere to go back to” under this fascist regime’s policy of exile. But imperial violence has severed homelands for numerous American diasporas besides Jews, including the descendants of enslaved people and refugees fleeing U.S.-sponsored violence from Afghanistan to Guatemala. Laufer’s characters briefly reference the murder or exile of immigrants of color – “farmworkers,” an Indian doctor, a Brazilian classmate – but they do not appear onstage. Only these white Jews, Laufer implies, are left alive in the country. This plot device bypasses complex and important questions. How do the manifestations of Christian supremacy that the Tates grapple with, like forced conversion and religious suppression, interact with white supremacy in contemporary American right-wing movements? Laufer could have explored this by introducing other characters alongside the Tates who passed in different ways than white, American-born, English-speaking Jews, such as Arab Muslims or immigrant Latinx Catholics. Or she could have paired the ageless character of Chava with some of the Tates’ American contemporaries who were similarly unable or unwilling to pass, be they Hasidic speakers of Yiddish, devout Hindus, Muslims, or Buddhists, or people of color.

Above all, these omissions limit the imagination of solidarity. The Tates are part of a vague “resistance,” but we don’t learn anything about its other members. Sarah remembers her late mother as fiercely devoted to rallies, protests, and editorials, yet we learn almost nothing about what – or with whom – she fought so hard for. The only glimpse we get of the substance of her politics is a pointed criticism, when Sarah and Paul agree that Sarah’s mother went too far in cutting off a cousin for his hardline Zionism. In this brief backstory, Laufer makes her thesis about Jewish safety crystal-clear: Jews must stick with Jews, at all costs.

But Laufer’s pat example too neatly serves her argument. For instance, what if Sarah’s mother had cut off her cousin over his persistent sexism, on which the play takes a clear stance? How much harm can intra-Jewish solidarity excuse? Moreover, what other solidarities might have beckoned Sarah’s mother? Laufer does not ask this question, but my own thoughts turned to the countless American Jews wrestling with similar bitter political disagreements in their families of origin at this moment. They are not choosing between Jewish solidarity and principled isolation, but rather an alternate comradeship with Palestinians, Jews critical of Zionism, and many others.

In fact, Laufer could have used Yiddish to foreground Jewish multiplicity and dissent rather than criticizing it. Just as she elides non-Yiddish-speaking Jews from her historical sweeps, she sometimes prioritizes familiarity over linguistic accuracy. For instance, I was startled to hear the Sephardi pronunciation of the Hebrew ha-olam, instead of the Ashkenazi pronunciation ha-oylem, as Chava teaches Sarah to bentsh the shabes-likht. Although Chava is to some degree placeless and timeless, a Yiddish speaker born in Europe prior to 1940 would have used the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew. After all, the prevalence of the Sephardi pronunciation of Hebrew, both as a modern spoken language and in American Jewish congregations, stems from disdain for Yiddish. ^{7 7} John Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). But ha-oylem would have rung unfamiliarly to most American Jewish ears onstage and in the audience. Laufer prefers to emphasize Yiddish’s familiarity to American Jews, highlighting Sarah’s ease at picking out words like tokhes and vaser in Chava’s speech.

This quibble over a diphthong points to a far larger tension. It serves Laufer better – but Yiddish worse – for Chava to teach Sarah and her father to pray in the ways they already know how, instead of inviting them to be curious about multiplicities of Jewish histories, experiences, and disagreements.

But what if Yiddish was strange and unfamiliar in this play? What if Laufer had sought political lessons from the unsettling, inconsistent, and outright disappointing corners of Yiddish history and culture? The fraught decades of the 1930s and 1940s, for instance, offer a host of complex Yiddish histories beyond the explicitly antisemitic murder ofEuropean Jews, from the debates, missteps, and insights of Yiddish anti-fascist solidarity politics, to far-right Polish Jewish youth, to the breadth of literature by survivors who continued to write in Yiddish. Such varied legacies of yidishkayt cannot be neatly wedged into a litany of Jewish persecution. Instead, they invite a more complex reckoning with Jewishness, fascism, and solidarity in our own political moment. Much like queer and feminist visions of Yiddish lineage beyond Jewish continuity, such unsettling and varied histories could point the way to a contemporary anti-fascist Jewish politics where we all count; where Jews have others and others have Jews; and where Jewish safety is inextricable from the safety and liberation of all. Instead of limiting Yiddish to a series of paradigmatic tragedies embodied in a sole surviving speaker, a capacious and cacophonous understanding of Yiddish pasts could lead us to a fuller vision of our shared future.