Jan 25, 2023
Honoring the vibrant legacy of Yiddish print culture, Middlebury students create a hand bound translation zine focusing on archival sources of interest.
Weaving between cars sounding their horns and slamming their breaks, we darted through the tunnel behind Grand Central Station head on into Park Avenue traffic. I juggled the camera that an international student, unable to risk arrest, had checked out of his college library downtown and given to us with his blessings to document the action.
Just as we approached the VIP entrance to the Grand Hyatt Hotel, we formed a blockade, sitting with our arms wrapped around each other in the street. Our voices rang out together as we stopped traffic, preventing GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s limousine from pulling up to the New York State Republican Gala. Thousands chanted from the streets below as the cops descended upon us and whisked us into their wagon.
The NYPD hauled us downtown to the holding cell at One Police Plaza, where we reunited with those who disrupted the event inside. The police had beaten a teenager, a high school student with class the next morning. They smashed his glasses and swept him off the street. He sat there on that cold bench behind iron bars with us shaking uncontrollably. We consoled him together.
Back on April 14, 2016, Trump was still a fringe candidate no serious political pundit believed had any chance of ascending to the presidency. Those of us who showed up to protest that evening had a different perspective. We believed that if we did not do absolutely everything in our power to stop him, Trump would not only rise to power himself, but embolden white supremacists across the globe, which would only lead to very preventable tragedies.
To our great dismay, we couldn’t have been more right. The arrogant laughter of dismissal dried up that next summer as Nazis took the streets of Charlottesville for a deadly demonstration defending their Confederate heroes. The following fall, a Nazi, disturbed by Jewish support for refugees, walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, during a baby naming ceremony, and opened fire.
I made my way to Union Square to mourn collectively that evening. The heavens cried and soaked us with their tears. Try as white supremacists might to defeat us, I thought, their hate would only backfire. After the rain passed, flowers began to blossom. Trump and his supporters radicalized an entire generation of Jews in a way not seen on these shores for an entire century, at a time when Yiddish was a central tongue of our agitation.
Among Trump’s most popular tweets while president was an indictment of antifa as a terrorist organization. Trump’s disdain for antifascists brought talk of the movement to kitchen tables across the country. While I was delighted to see the movement gain supporters, I was disheartened witnessing its history erased. To me, you cannot talk about antifascism without talking about the Jews, and especially Jewish women, who gave their lives to fight the Nazis.
On the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, I launched an art project to address the gap. I started the Instagram account womenkillfascists. I contributed a chapter on my papercuts of Jewish women in the resistance, “Fighting Fascists with Folk Art,” to Cindy Milstein’s There’s Nothing So Whole As a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists. Dagesh, a Jewish arts organization in Berlin, invited me to travel to Germany to continue the project as artist in residence at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt for their exhibit Revenge: History and Fantasy, inspired by Max Czollek’s De-Integrate!
I witnessed the generation of Jews radicalized by Charlottesville and Pittsburgh thirsting for these histories of resistance, to embolden us as we unpeeled layers of internalized assimilation and antisemitism to loudly and proudly embrace our subversive and defiant Jewish identity that made these white supremacists tremble. We wanted to learn about radical Yiddish pasts. Anchoring ourselves more fully in our own lineages of resistance helped us show up in the streets more fully in solidarity with all the communities under attack, in a genuine commitment to collective liberation.
The crowds continued to grow for my radical Jewish walking tour of Greenwich Village. Organizers across the country invited me to write zines and print posters engaging Jewish movement history to support their organizations, inspiring me to launch Pashkevil Press. Activists and artists kept asking for more. So I dreamt up a class and opened up my living room to those who wanted to come.
Yiddish is a deeply personal way for me to honor my Grandma Thelma Cardon Saper who grew up speaking it in her family home in Queens and New Jersey where she lived above her parent’s Five and Dime. Yiddish is also a deeply collective commitment for me to honor the memory of those who rose up in the ghettos, exploded crematoriums in the camps, and set dynamite to train tracks along the forests.
My course, “Antifascist Yiddish for Beginners,” was born in this context. It grew explicitly out of my personal, political, and artistic commitments. I created it for the community I call home: an intergenerational group of artists and activists, mostly queer and trans leftist Jews. I do not take this precious community for granted. I welcome and affirm my students, who find themselves so often on the margins, to bring their whole selves to class. Without fail, every time I have taught the course, one of my students has come up to me and shared, “This is the first Jewish space in my life where I have actually felt welcomed, where I’ve felt proud to be a Jew.”
I have two other main goals when working with beginners: supporting my students in developing a sense of confidence in their own ability to learn the language and helping them make a connection between their preexisting passions and the world of Yiddish. Whether they are Jewish or not, whether they have struggled with language learning in the past or not, I want them to feel deep in their bones that Yiddish can be theirs.
Remi’s illustration for class zine of twin sibling and grandparents from Przytyk, Poland, and Lunna, Belarus, who survived the ghettos and multiple camps, and eventually met at a displaced persons camp. “I came to know Yiddish not as a language I could speak, but as a language through which I could understand their love for me. Throughout my life, I have carried Yiddish with me so that I always feel their presence.”
I begin each class, as I learned from Reyze Turner, with a go around question. This powerfully brings every voice into the room. Asking a question and repeatedly hearing a specific sentence starter makes it accessible for all students to participate from day one, and get a feel for Yiddish not just in their hearts, but also on their tongues.
After that we turn to an authentic text connected to the radical history we want to explore. From a Warsaw ghetto song singing of the day we’ll sit shiva for Hitler, to a poem by a Vilna partisan who leapt from the death train to Ponar to take up pistol and pen against the fascists. From a tale of dancing with joy as Nazi tanks went up in flames, to a poetic commemoration of the uprisings. From stories of Jewish women leading rent strikes and hurling stones at the police who tried to evict their families, to advertisements pleading newspaper readers to buy baked goods stamped with the union seal. From testimony about the power of collecting the stories of everyday people, to an interview with activists in the streets today, practicing lessons from the past in the present.
We take turns reading through these texts, listening to the audio, making sense of it all together. We develop a basic understanding of grammar and vocabulary from this material. We explore our own identities and stories in relation to this past. We discuss connections to our present moment and the social movements of today.
It was in my class that I first shared the work of Vilna partisan poet Rikle Glezer. My students were so intrigued by her words that it inspired me and my friend Corbin Allardice to translate her book of poetry, which will be the first to appear in English by a Jewish woman partisan. We would not have received the Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowship and Lithuanian Culture Institute grant to support the project if it weren’t first for our students’ enthusiasm.
While I have enjoyed teaching Antifascist Yiddish for Beginners at a community-based level in New York, I was excited to be asked to return to Middlebury College to teach the course to undergraduate liberal arts students as part of their intensive January winter term in Vermont. A decade ago, Middlebury tried to expel me for my student activism. One of the largest auditoriums on campus was packed for over six hours as the school put me and four of my closest friends on trial.
Years later, as a result of the movement our controversial action ignited, the college divested its endowment from fossil fuels. And now I have been welcomed back too, getting to fold my commitment to justice, which flourished while I was a student there, into a politically subversive Yiddish course. It feels incredibly special, healing even, to get to cultivate a classroom community I had always yearned for, but never got to experience myself. Students linger after class, sometimes with tears in their eyes, to share how much it means to them as well.
As part of the class, we visit the Middlebury College Special Collections, where director and curator Rebekah Irwin pulls old Jewish books, scrolls, and art for us to peruse. She shares with us how the culture infused in each of these rare objects is enmeshed in the life of the Yiddish language. The day before our final class, we return together. Bone folders, needles, and thread sit on the tables for students to use to bind their final project, a collectively created translation zine. Students not only take inspiration from the archives, they create an artifact worthy of residing upon those same shelves.
I am proud to see my students so enamored by their work, knowing our class only represents the beginning of their journey. It has been inspiring to see so many of them develop a sense of their own activist identities as well, and witness several of them lead a successful campaign to get queer Jewish feminist history professor Lana Povitz a tenure-track position at the school.
Whether I’m at services at Brooklyn’s Kolot Chayeinu, in the streets of a protest in Manhattan, on the Vermont campus, or at dinner in a friend’s apartment, I’m always delighted when a former student comes over to say hello. Once when this happened, another friend asked how we had known each other.
“I taught her Yiddish,” I said.
But in the spirit of the agitators we studied, Kristen protested.
“No you didn’t,” she said. “It wasn’t a Yiddish class. It was everything.”
We love Yiddish not because it is Yiddish. We love it because it can fortify us moving forward through difficult times, help us build vibrant diverse life-affirming diasporic artful culture. We love and teach Yiddish not because it is Yiddish. We love Yiddish, as Kristen reminded me, because it is everything.
Sydney’s collage from archival research about a family member who was a survivor and posted a notice in a Yiddish newspaper looking for family and friends. “Just as my Grandma’s favorite Uncle Norman searched for his lost family and friends, I have found mine. Although he passed away the year before I was born, deciphering the words that he wrote in a foreign tongue has made me feel as though I know my great-great uncle personally. I have grasped from his article the desperation and hope that he undoubtedly felt while writing it.”
