Yiddishkayt is a cultural and educational center in Los Angeles that runs programs focused on Yiddish culture. It looks like they do interesting work, including the Helix project which sends young people to Eastern Europe to learn about the history of Eastern European Jewry beyond the Holocaust. The Helix website reads:
Currently, more courses at major colleges and universities throughout North America teach about the destruction of European Jewish culture than about the culture that was destroyed. As a result, young Jews (as well as many older ones) see the experience of Jews in Europe as a never-ending history of constant despair and sadness. Yiddishkayt sees this situation—so far from the truth of actual, lived experience—as a tragedy.
Sounds fascinating, if I was in L.A. I would definitely check them out. While educating Jews on the cultural legacy of life in Europe doesn’t sound like it should be particulary controversial in the Jewish community, evidently it is. Yiddishkayt’s Executive Director, Rob Adler-Peckerar, has an interesting blog post up on their site explaining how Jewish philanthropies have ignored the Helix program because it does not focus on the Holocaust or Israel.
Adler-Peckerar writes:
Even though philanthropies’ “giving priorities” are often slow to change, responses to our program have made clear just how tied the Jewish establishment is to a particularly parochial and insular view of Jewish life, so detached from the mainstream and from our history.
Over the past year:
• A major holocaust organization reported that even though their mission is to preserve the memory of European Jews so “that the world does not forget both how they lived and how they died,” our program did not include “enough death.”
• We were told that funding a program that explored Jewish history in Europe would be “improbable” if it did not include a visit to Israel.
• For our focus on the variety of Jewish life in the diaspora and claim that there had undoubtably always been a spectrum of religious belief among Jews — as among any people — we were called (in the Los Angeles Times), “just stupid” and “really sick.”
• Another funding organization responded to our statement that “the past 70 years of Jewish history needs to be placed in a context of a millennium of diaspora Jewish life,” by saying that it is too much to ask for such a major change in the way mainstream Jewish history is presented and to lower expectations about what Jewish educators can accommodate.
• We have received numerous angry emails, demanding to know why we were going to take students “to the land of killers,” often including — without any sense of irony — an urging rather to take students to the place that has “always been central to Jewish life, Israel.”
I just had to look up that Los Angeles Times article to get some context. Here it is:
“There are people who aren’t interested in the synagogue route, and they don’t connect to Judaism through religion, or they don’t connect to Judaism through Israel,” said Aaron Paley, who founded Yiddishkayt in 1995 and whose family is providing the seed money for the Helix program. “This is a different way to connect with who you are.”
Adler Peckerar, a former professor of Jewish literature and culture at the University of Colorado, goes further, arguing that the Jewish religion has never been central to Jewish identity.
“I think the idea that Judaism is equal to what a Jew is — that a Jew is someone who practices Judaism — is a totally new phenomenon,” he said in an interview at Yiddishkayt’s offices in the mid-Wilshire district. A poster of the Yiddish actress Molly Picon peered over his shoulder.
Statements like that can leave some people sputtering in exasperation.
“It’s just stupid,” said Allan Nadler, director of the Jewish studies program at Drew University in New Jersey and a former director of research for YIVO, a widely respected Yiddish research institution.
Before the 19th century, Nadler said, “everything one did was governed by the religion.”
Even in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Nadler argued, most Jews remained religiously observant. “There’s something really sick about the attempt to rewrite Jewish history and establish that this secular Yiddishkayt was ever a normative form of Jewish identity,” he said.
I’m not a historian of Eastern European Jewish life, so I can’t really judge Nadler’s claim, but I think the seed of some people’s anger toward the Helix program is revealed in this line from the same Times article:
“It just … sounded so different and so interesting that I just had to take advantage of it,” said Tessa Nath, a first-year student at UCLA who gave up plans to go to Israel so she could participate in the trip.
Adler-Peckerar concludes his blog post:
Today’s Jewish establishment, for reasons political, cynical, but more often thoughtless, has become fully devoted to a vision of Jewish history that attempts to unite under a banner of victimhood. Under this banner, it would seem, future generations can be bullied into supporting militarism and chauvinism, scared into religious observance, or guilted into acts of differentiation and group identity at the expense of understanding a common vision of humanity and of a better, more loving world.
wow, very interesting post adam, thanks.
it appears the gatekeepers are really not liking this version of exploration into jewish history. sad.
Setting aside the question of historical Jewish pluralism (going way back to those fights over Baal and Asherah, the various groups described by Josephus, etc.), the idea of “yiddishkayt” as culture rather than religion (although a religious component – if only historical – is obvious) is one of the central pillars of Bundist thought, along with “doikayt” (“hereness”) and “chavershaft” (solidarity/equality).
An organisation that stresses a particular Jewish culture (and yes, there are others – back to that pluralism thing) and refuses to focus on religion, Zionism or victimism, is decidedly subversive in contemporary Jewish life.
Wow, sounds like a great program. You’d think it would be a top priority. How do the “anti-assimilationists” feel about this? Seems like they’d be up in arms about letting such a unique cultural component and/or heritage pass into distant memory.
I’ve probably said this before, but Zionism corrupts everything it touches.
Thanks. Great article.
Religion is too important to be left to the pious or the rabbis, but Yiddishkayt believes that enough organizations cover the religion aspect of Jewishness and therefore they will focus on culture. Fair enough. But statements regarding religious pluralism two thousand years ago are barely relevant, Yiddishkayt, I assume, will be focusing on the last 150 years of Yiddish speaking Jewry, (1795, Czarist russia wipes the word Poland off the map, to 1945) where culture was religious and then the culture contained its opposite: anti religion. Pluralism is really not relevant to this part of the Jewish epoch unless one defines pluralism differently than this. There was great turmoil and intellectual effort devoted to conceive a Jewishness separate from religion. It was a movement. It was doomed to failure, some say. But in any case it was fated for liquidation.
Wow, I’m speechless. That’s just sad. For once, there’s an organisation that focuses on the important things, namely preserving the Jewish culture, but the donors are not interested. They only think about how Jewishness and Jewish history can be exploited for political purposes, namely preserving the Jewish state. It’s really no surprise when there are people who can’t tell the difference between Judaism and Zionism, and therefore become suspicious of anything Jewish.