The Sung, Spoken and Written Yiddish Word: Student Projects from the 2024 Steiner Summer Yiddish Program’s Intermediate Class

I decided to present “Tsirkus dame tango” as a music video so that it could be shared digitally while preserving the dramatic spark of live performance. I also included English subtitles with my own translation so that the piece would be accessible to a wider audience. I plan to write more Yiddish music in the future, and especially to adapt more of Dropkin’s poetry.

This project would not have been possible without the support and guidance of my friends and mentors. I would like to especially thank Jeanne Azzouni for helping with composition and transcription, Bea Carlson for helping with transcription and playing the accordion part, Jason Ditzian for playing the clarinet part, Robin (Fayvl) Wyllie-Scholz for filming, and Bookends in Florence for providing the performance space.

Access the music video on YouTube.

Access the downloadable audiofile here.

Access the English translation.

Yentl’s “Tomorrow Night” in Yiddish (song)

Lindsey (Blume) Bloom

For my final project, I translated the song “Tomorrow Night” from the movie Yentl into Yiddish and made a recording of the lyrics. I first encountered Yentl in my “The Gender of Yiddish” class freshman year, and since then I have seen the story as a representation of queer Yiddishkayt and been interested in the ways and since then I’ve been interested in the ways it has been translated and adapted. In Barbra Streisand’s English version, the queerness is not as palpable as in Singer’s original Yiddish text. I often feel that when queer Yiddish mediat is translated into English, it loses some of its queerness, whether that be due to connotations and undertones of Yiddish that are hard to render in English or due to the translators’ personal biases.

A version of Yentl that I am fond of is Barbara Streisand’s film adaptation. This song in particular emphasizes the relationships between the three main characters: Yentl and Avigdor, Yentl and Hadass, and Avigdor and Hadass. Both relationships involving Yentl can be read as queer, or the possibility of queerness can be used as a comic device, as is sadly oftentimes the case in the movie. By translating the song into Yiddish, I hoped to be able to bring back some of the original feeling of the Yiddish story, and by recording it I hoped to make it more earnest while still hanging onto the comical situations that Yentl/Anshl finds themself in as they navigate through the upcoming marriage with Hadass and their feelings for Avigdor.

Access the song on YouTube.

Multilog: An Adaptation of Aaron Zeitlin’s Monolog in Pleynem Yidish (spoken word)

Andy Roshal

As a second-generation immigrant and the child of Jewish refugees from Belarus and Ukraine, I have always found myself drawn to Jewish narratives about immigration and the diaspora. When I read Aaron Zeitlin’s Monolog in pleynem yidish as part of the curriculum for Rivke’s intermediate class at the Steiner Summer Program, I immediately connected with the text. The narrator feels grief and anger, but especially fear – fear of losing his Jewish identity to twentieth-century American culture. Throughout my seven weeks at the Yiddish Book Center, ideas of music and community also resonated with me. For my final project, I combined these ideas of immigration narratives, music, and community into a weird and immersive audio project, titled Multilog / מולטילאָג. Using words from the second half of Zeitlin’s work as the foundation, I built overlapping and contrasting audio layers of voices and music.

I used the American national anthem (often out-of-tune and in a minor key) to emulate bitter, ironic patriotism, and to contrast with warmly recognizable Yiddish songs. These Yiddish songs are Tum Balalaika, a distinctly Jewish and Yiddish folk song, Belz, a song with words by Jacob Jacobs and a melody by Alexander Olshanetsky which deals with the nostalgia experienced by Jewish immigrants to the U.S. from Eastern Europe, and Morris Rosenfeld’s Mayn Rue Plats, which was used as a labor union protest song calling attention to some of the issues within America and the issues with industrialization, and has a beautiful melody. My friends and classmates–Ryken Farr, Raia Gutman, Alma Roggenbuck, Clara Shapiro, and Fayvl/Robin Wyllie-Scholz–lent their voices to me, allowing me to create consonance and dissonance not just through music but also through speech. I think my favorite part of this project is the last forty seconds, where our voices overlap to ask: Vos iz es geven azoynst, dos amerike? Vos hot es gemeynt, un vos meynt es? What was that thing, this America? What did it mean, and what does it mean?

Access the audio file on YouTube.

Yidisher yunion vegvayzer ייִדישעער יוניאָן וועגוווײַזער (zine)

Raia Gutman

For my final project, I created a Yiddish introduction to unionizing in the form of a zine. Having a strong interest in both labor history and radical Yiddish, I wanted to somehow represent the richness of the Yiddish labor movement. I find myself drawn to practical zines—zines that teach you how to do something big or small, one page at a time. I decided to create a zine that combines a Yiddish union glossary and a selection of Yiddish labor songs with a “Union 101” training, the kind you might encounter at your first union meeting. This guide gives the reader basic information about unions, inviting them to think about their own workplace; briefs the reader on common anti-union arguments used by management; shares a typical roadmap that organizers use to guide a union campaign; and instructs the reader in the most important skill in an organizer’s toolbox: the organizing conversation, or organizir-shmues.

The union information in the zine comes from trainings prepared by the Office and Professional Employees International Union (Local 153), parts of which I translated into Yiddish. I chose these resources because I learned from them while I was on the organizing committee of United Smith Student Workers, a union of student dining workers at Smith College and an affiliate of OPEIU. Translating these trainings was a way to connect my union work with my passion for Yiddish. While the two often occupy different places in my life, I have found them to be very compatible!

As I worked to produce the zine, it occurred to me that a potential audience audience might not just be Yiddishists like me who like reading zines but also Hasidic Yiddish speakers to whom the information on unionizing might be very relevant in their lives as workers. I do not know much about the status of labor issues in Hasidic communities, but I would be interested to learn if my zine could be useful to them. If this were the case, I would modify it to better suit a Hasidic audience.

I was inspired to experiment with Yiddish zine-making by the creators of the many Yiddish zines I love, especially those who have taught me in workshops and shared their zines with me—Ozzy Gold-Shapiro, Ariel Shapiro, Zuni Gonzalez, and Jess Goldman. I would also like to thank Sam Heyne, a staff organizer with OPEIU Local 153 who shared these union resources with me and my co-workers.

View the zine here.

Yidishe mit-doyres ייִדישע מיט–דורות (zine)

Nina Kapstein

For my final project, I created a zine on the concept of cohort generations/mit-doyres as popularized in Yiddish studies by Jeffrey Shandler. The term originates from queer theory: in queer communities, generationality proceeds through groups of people that come- of-age together (forming “cohort generations”), rather than through parent-to-child relationships. As I discuss in the Zine, Shandler applied this to Yiddishist communities by remarking that in Yiddishist communities, Yiddish knowledge is not shared through biological generations, but rather through cohorts of language learners. Groups of people that learn Yiddish in the same cultural and academic settings become a Yiddish cohort generation, coming-of-age within the community together.

I became interested in the concept of cohort generations/mit-doyres while doing a final project for a sociolinguistics class. I conducted a survey which included a question about who one was likely to speak Yiddish with, and most respondents said they were not speaking Yiddish with family members, but rather with classmates, Yiddish teachers, or Yiddish students if they were teachers themselves. In other words, people were speaking Yiddish with their cohorts rather than with their biological family. Yiddish was being transmitted from cohort to cohort, rather than from parent to child.

Shandler’s work and my survey inspired the zine I created for Steiner. I am constantly fascinated by the interaction between academic theory and lived experience, and my goal for the zine was to determine how people relate the theory of cohort generations to themselves and their Yiddish-speaking and queer communities. To do this, I interviewed six Yiddish learners about their thoughts on the term cohort generation/mit-dor and their experiences in the cohort generations they may be a part of. My zine begins with a translation of the description of cohort generations from Shandler’s Adventures in Yiddishland, followed by the questions I asked interviewees and some of the answers I received. The final page asks the reader whether they feel that they are part of a cohort generation in any of the community/ies they belong to, in the hopes that the reader will come away from the zine able to relate the concepts within it to their own positionality.

Download the zine here.

“Sfoysov-dovevos, to move the lips of the dead” (exploratory essay)

Alma Roggenbuck

“Sfoysov-dovevos, to move the lips of the dead,” recounts poet Yehuda Elberg at the 1972 yortsayt event for the murdered Soviet poets, “that on the death anniversary of a great figure, when one studies his teachings, his lips move in the grave and join in reciting. Who knows, perhaps we will hear their lips moving and discover where they lie. Meanwhile, we still don’t know.” Elberg alludes to the truly performative nature of poetry when read at the right time, in the right manner; as he describes it, yortsayt poetry recitation might indeed have the power to reveal the location of the poets’ remains. Even today, poetry readings are commonplace at anniversaries and memorial events in secular Yiddish culture.

For my final project, I examined recordings from the Jewish Public Library from the 1950s to the 1980s, tracing trends and developments in this tradition, and making note of the connections between these memorials and Holocaust commemorations, their politicized nature in the struggle for Soviet Jewry, and the role of poetry as secular tashmishe-kdushe (ritual objects). I described my findings in an academic paper, written in Yiddish.

Writing an academic paper in Yiddish was a challenge, but it was a meaningful statement of vernacularity, affirming Yiddish not only as the language I research but also as the language in which I conduct my research. In a field that relies heavily on translation to and from Yiddish, it was a new experience for me to brainstorm, outline, and cite sources entirely in Yiddish. As a freshman, I once asked Professor Daniel Boyarin how we might overcome the epistemological limitations inherent in writing in colonial languages, after a discussion on Walter Benjamin’s unconventional theory of translation. He replied, “Write in Yiddish!” And so, almost a decade later, I did. I am grateful for the support of Rivke Margolis in this endeavor, and to Rivke Augenfeld, a reciter of poetry at many of the events I studied, who helped me discuss my arguments and provided context to the voices on the tapes.

Read the essay here.