Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 23, 2020

A prominent Middle East news correspondent got my attention a few years ago when, on a news panel, she articulated a thought I had pondered for years. Responding to another journalists contention that a terrorist, I think it was the PFLPs George Habash, needed to be taken seriously because he was a doctor, she observed that the news media had a tendency to respect terrorists with degrees in the exact sciences, missing the fact that those disciplines do not develop empathy. It is the arts, she said, that teach our common humanity. Its easy to find terrorists who have engineering or medical degrees, but perhaps it was telling, she suggested, that terrorists dont get degrees in comparative literature.

Why hold novelists to a lower standard than terrorists? Acknowledging the worlds only post-Holocaust Jewish state is not an unfair standard by which to measure authorial empathy. But since understanding and acceptance of Zionism might seem an odd axis on which to measure the integrity of Arab novelists, particularly the subset of politically active Arab authors I have translated, lets add, at a 45-degree angle, another axis: the extent to which authors are embraced by mainstream publishers in the United States. This will enable us to look not just at the authors, but into the mirror.

One icy night in February 2007, I traveled to New York to honor the great communist, Israeli writer and statesman Emile Habiby, who had died about a decade previous. The panel event at Columbia Universitys (since renamed) MEALACDepartment of Middle East and Asian Languages and Culturesmarked the publication of Habibys novel Saraya, the Ogres Daughter in my English translation. Panel members included me, the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, and two professors whom I hesitate to name for reasons that will be clear a little later on.

The author with (from top to bottom) Sasson Somekh in Tel Aviv, 1994; Emile Habiby (with his assistant Siham Daoud in the middle) in Haifa, undated; Abdelrahman Munif in London, undated; and again with Abdelrahman Munif (and Suad Munif) in Malibu, California, in 1993 (Photos courtesy the author)

Habiby was the most endearing of menfunny, savvy, and brilliantly versed in centuries of Arabic literature. He had dedicated his life to Arab-Jewish coexistence in his native land and even named his eldest son Salam so that he might be known as Abu Salam, Father of Peace. He explained his lifelong communism to me as follows: In the 1940s, if you opposed British colonialism, Nazism, and religious extremism, and believed in equality and womens rights, and if you actually toiled for a living, you were an instinctive communist.

Habibys workers movement included Jews from Ashkenazi and Sephardic backgrounds, Arab Muslims, and Christians, including our mutual friends Tawfiq Ziyad, a poet whose father was an illiterate camel driver and who became mayor of Nazareth, and the great Baghdad-born Israeli scholar Sasson Somekh. Outside Israel, Arab intellectuals who leaned left tended to be the most hostile to Israel, but inside (al-Dakhel, the Inside, a common Arabic euphemism for Israel excepting Gaza, Judea, and Samaria) being on the left meant being secularistproviding much common ground with the majority of Jews who disdained both Jewish and Islamic extremism.

While most of my time with Habiby had been spent in Nazareth and Haifa, the last time I would see him was in Morocco. In the optimistic mid-1990s, King Hassan II was sponsoring a conference on Jerusalem and its cultural heritage at the Hyatt Regency in Rabat. Yasser Arafat had recently moved from Tunisia to Gaza. In fact, Habiby had just visited Arafat there as part of an Israeli Arab delegation.

I told Arafat a joke! Habiby enthused. Here it is. The Gazans are getting ready for Arafat to arrive and an officer is explaining to a soldier how to fire a 21-gun salute to welcome Arafat. Not 20 or 22, but exactly 21, you understand, the officer orders. Dont worry, the soldier replied, Ill hit him with the first shot. Habiby roared with laughter.

Arafat said I dont get it! Ha! Not much he didnt.

Habiby got an even better laugh in Rabat, he said, when King Hassans speech, read by royal adviser Abdelhadi Boutaleb, greatly irritated much of the Arab audience with its moderation. The speech condemned religious fanaticism and explicitly mentioned the rights of Jews as well as Christians and Muslims in the holy city. Most of the Palestinian audience declined to applaud. I clapped as loudly as I could! Habiby recounted happily. To enrage them!

Meanwhile, back in New York, I was about to have my own experience of an audience not quite in sync with the speaker: me. The audience of students, faculty, and locals listened politely, or at least silently, as I described Habibys complex and beautiful Saraya, which Somekh had characterized in the pages of Haaretz as the first work of Palestinian postmodernism. I told some anecdotes about Habiby and his family, and his fishermen friends in Haifa, and noted his political activism over nearly 20 years as a member of the Israeli Knesset representing the Israeli Communist Party.

Then it was professor As turn. She noted Habibys literary achievements and attachment to Palestine, though she faulted his acceptance of the Israel Prize for Literature in 1992, which advanced the Zionist project. She went on for a little longer in the same vein, before concluding to loud applause. Khoury thumped the table with the palm of his hand in approval.

Professor B announced that he would read aloud from something he had composed on the red-eye flight from the West Coast the night previous. He denounced the U.S. governments detention and alleged torture of al-Qaida terrorists in black sites, as well as the practice of translating foreign works into English (referencing colonialism and, in an anguished tone, English, the hegemon). My recollection is that he did not mention Habiby at all. The audience applauded him noisily, and Khoury thumped the table even harder. In fact, Khoury approved so enthusiastically that he did not take his turn to offer remarks, since he said, the last two speakers had spoken for him.

At that time, I was in the middle of translating one of Khourys novels for a publisher in Brooklyn, so I knew who he was, but I sat there wearing a wan smile and thinking How fast can I get out of here? Half of the speakers on an academic panel honoring Emile Habiby did not mention his name, and the word Israel went nearly unspoken, except by me.

***

Elias Khoury, despite being Lebanese, joined the PLO as a very young man. He also edited a magazine in Beirut called Palestinian Affairs. Khoury hates Israel, but to his credit he at least uses the word, and has not shied away from meeting Israelis or being published in Hebrew. He supported the violent intifadas (PLO creations) against Israel.

A man of the left, Khoury opposes dictatorship and colonialism, and in his writings he often displays great nuance and objectivity when reviling the state of the Arab worlds own governments. To his credit, he joined a group of Arab and Arab American intellectuals opposing the great embarrassment of a Holocaust-denying event planned for Beirut in early 2001. To his discredit, he wrote a revealing riposte to Israels ambassador to France, Elie Barnavi, who had published a piece in Le Monde saluting these intellectuals and expressing his gratitude.

In his response, titled The Insolence of an Ambassador, Khoury briefly occupied some moral high ground denouncing not only the Holocaust but anti-Semitism generally, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, before ceding it as follows:

We are in no way concerned in denying the Nazi Holocaust, or in diminishing the number of the victims. These are issues directly connected to European racism, which produced the horrors of the Second World War, and which is now manifesting itself in different forms, through the enslaving of the Third World, the systematic theft of its wealth and the direct occupation of its lands. The most dangerous manifestation of this racism is its position towards the Palestinian people.

So Israel is erased, being not a country nor a people but an expression of European racism with (he writes a few lines on) a hunger for someone elses land.

Khoury is well published in the United States, with seven or eight books in print. His novel Yalo, published in my English translation in 2008, was reviewed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

***

One of the Arab worlds best-known authors, the Saudi Arabian Abdelrahman Munif joined the Arab Socialist Baath Party in Iraq as a young man, quit it in his 20s, albeit to resurface (due to his work in the state oil sector) within the structure of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council in the late 1970s. Like Khoury, he was a man of the Arab left who distanced himself from politics in favor of literature. The U.S.-led wars against the Saddam Hussein-led Iraqi Baath regime rekindled his radicalism late in life. Our [Arab] crisis is a trilogy: oil, political Islam, and dictatorship, he once told an interviewer. Despite his birth in Amman, he concentrated his political and literary efforts very much eastward, in both his politics and literature, on the oil-rich Arabian Gulf countries.

Notice the absence of the Israeli-Palestinian issue from his trilogy of ills facing the Arab world. Unlike Khoury, he did not even try to sneak it in under the guise of European colonialism. Unquestionably, as a leftist of the Baathist castwho laudably left the party due to Saddams rising and murderous cult of personality, but not for ideological reasonshe opposed Israel, but not vocally. He told me that as a student in Baghdad he not only had Jewish friends, some of them were Baathists.

Munif very much shared Habibys and Khourys left-wing secularism, assuring me in the mid-1990s that the yardstick of whether an Arab society was healthy or not was how well political Islam was faring. A healthy society fights it off like a virus. In the early 20th century, Egyptian society was strong, and rejected the Muslim Brotherhood. Now Egypt is sick, so Islam is raging again.

Munif displayed a profound Arab socialist naivet when, in the mid-1980s, I approached him about translating his novel cycle Cities of Salt, into English. Youre a risk-taker, he said. Would American publishers or readers be interested in an Arab work that was so critical of the United States? he asked, referring to the major U.S. support for the Saudi ruling family and its oil fields. He strongly doubted it. I think youll have better luck in Europe, he advised. (This snobbish strain of Old World solidarity between the Arab and European left and right is not rare.)

Cities of Salt remains in print more than three decades after that conversation.

It probably is no surprise that acceptance, or not, of a secure Israel brought out the best or worst of these political Arab men of letters while providing a kind of quick X-ray of the inner integrity and therefore the lasting qualities of their own work. What gives me pause is how America has embraced them in inverse proportion to their openness toward the Jewish state. Khoury and Munif are Amazon celebrities. Habibys great Saraya, the subject of the memorable panel in the Upper West Side? The English translation celebrated that evening was published in Jerusalem, not New York.

***

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Peter Theroux is a Los Angeles-based writer and translator.

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The Zionist X-Ray: How a Secure Israel Brought Out the Best and Worst of Political Arab Men of Letters - Tablet Magazine

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Posted By admin on January 23, 2020

JANUARY 21, 2020

The following essay appears as the preface to How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish, edited by the authors and published today by Restless Books.

We have to believe in free will. We have no choice.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

CELEBRATED AND MARGINALIZED, lionized and trivialized, Yiddish is so deeply woven into the fabric of the United States that it can sometimes be difficult to recognize how much it has transformed the world we live in today. Its a language and culture thats as American as bagels and Rice Krispies, Hollywood and Broadway, Colin Powell and James Cagney (and connected to all of these, in one way or another). Yet many Americans think of Yiddish, when they think of it at all, as a collection of funny-sounding words. Oy gvald, indeed!

The aim of this book is to present a very different picture of Yiddish, true to its history, as a language and culture that is like the Americans who spoke, read, and created in it radical, dangerous, and sexy, if also sweet, generous, and full of life. Its inception is embedded in a radical shift. Some see Yiddish not only as a language but as a metaphor. They note that unlike most other tongues, it doesnt have an actual address a homeland, so to speak or claim, as Isaac Bashevis Singer did when accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, that it doesnt have words for weapons. And because of its history, it awakens strong feelings of nostalgia. But others see this as an ongoing problem. In particular, it irritates Yiddishists that the language is fetishized, especially by people who dont speak it.

Since the Second World War, many valuable anthologies have helped American audiences understand the gamut of Yiddish possibilities. Arguably the most influential has been A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954), edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg. It concentrated on the Yiddish literary outpouring from figures like the three so-called classic Yiddish writers, Mendele Moykher Sforim, I. L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem, and served as a conduit to connect an American Jewish audience to the pre-Holocaust civilization. Its publication was certainly a watershed: the volume was the manifestation of a collective longing. That anthology looked at the shtetlekh, or small towns, in which Ashkenazi Jews lived for centuries through an American lens, as noble, even idyllic, and with a sense of homesickness, but also as a site of contradictions, violence, and unfaithfulness. Readers simultaneously idealized what Israel Joshua Singer called a world that is no more and sought to understand themselves as a continuation, as well as a departure, from it.

Other anthologies of Yiddish literature in translation followed suit. Each concentrated on either a region (the USSR, for instance) or a particular literary genre (such as poetry). These volumes include Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet-Yiddish Writers (1977), also edited by Howe and Greenberg; The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (1987), edited by Howe, Ruth Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk; Benjamin and Barbara Harshavs American Yiddish Poetry (1986); and Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Yiddish Writing (2003), edited by Alan Astro. To various degrees, the objectives of these anthologies remained the same.

But in the last few decades, the position of Yiddish in the zeitgeist has dramatically changed. The study of Yiddish thrives in America, among teenagers and senior citizens, the religious and the secular, and everyone in between. Technology has made the language and culture available in wider ways. Young people are studying it. Scholarship related to it is prolific. Its musical rhythms and motifs have been borrowed by other traditions. It is part of movies, television, and radio. And the internet serves up lexicons, memes, recipes, and all sorts of surprising artifacts. Assimilation in the United States has indeed presented Yiddish with challenges, and it has responded impressively, dynamically, demonstrating its flexibility, complexity, and strength.

So what is Yiddish, exactly? First and foremost, its a language, a Jewish one. Throughout the thousands of years of their history, Jewish people have spoken many languages, their own and the languages of the majority cultures in which theyve lived. Hebrew, the language of the Torah (what Christians call the Old Testament) and an official language of the contemporary State of Israel, is one such Jewish language, and many others have arisen in other places and times as means of communications for Jewish communities. For example, Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, has been spoken by the descendants of the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and Judeo-Arabic has been spoken by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Yiddish, meanwhile, was the primary Jewish language of Ashkenaz, which is what Jews called northern Europe.

During much of its existence, Yiddish was dismissed as a zhargon, not quite a language at all; this was the common fate of many vernaculars, which were seen as less prestigious than scholarly languages like Latin, and the major European languages like French, English, and German, which had state power behind them. But Yiddish was absolutely a language, one that originated somewhere in central Europe about a thousand years ago, with the oldest extant example of a printed Yiddish sentence dating all the way back to 1272. Written in the Hebrew alphabet, and drawing for its grammar and vocabulary on Germanic, Slavic, Romance, and Semitic languages, Yiddish soon became the vernacular spoken by the majority of the worlds Jews for more than seven centuries, and over those centuries, a language of increasingly popular books and prayers.

In the 19th century, around the same time that languages like Italian and Norwegian evolved into their modern forms, Yiddish hit its stride, flowering into a language not just of commerce and community but of modern theater, journalism, literature, and even national aspiration. At that time, speakers of the dialects of Yiddish sometimes referred to as Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian Yiddish constituted large minorities or even majorities in many European cities and in hundreds of European small towns and villages, while many more Yiddish speakers had relocated from Europe to other parts of the globe. The worlds total Yiddish-speaking population just before the Second World War is estimated by scholars to have been about 13 million people.

The languages fate would be entangled with one of the worlds most brutal tragedies millions of those Yiddish speakers were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust during the Second World War but it also flowered almost everywhere that Jews settled, before and after the war: Yiddish newspapers and books were published in Montreal and Montevideo, Cairo and Melbourne, Paris and Cape Town (not to mention Warsaw and New York). While mostly the language has had to survive, unlike most major languages, without a governments backing, Yiddish was briefly an official language of the Soviet Union and today it is one in Sweden. It is currently spoken, at home and in the street, by more than 400,000 people around the world.

We might never know when the very first Yiddish speaker arrived on American shores, but its clear that a substantial number of speakers had already arrived by the middle of the 19th century, and that they quickly found their way to almost every corner of the developing nation. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an enormous wave of European immigration brought hundreds of thousands and then millions of Yiddish speakers. Free from some of the strictures imposed by European governments, American Yiddish speakers created newspapers and theaters, and before long they had built one of the most vibrant centers for Yiddish culture in the world.

At the height of the languages American popularity in the 1920s, a handful of different Yiddish newspapers circulated hundreds of thousands of copies every day, and Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue, in Manhattan, seated thousands of spectators every night. Also, as the primary language of a vast immigrant community of poor laborers and their upwardly mobile children, Yiddish became a crucial part of American politics at a moment when socialism, anarchism, and communism competed for Americans votes with more familiar political orientations and of American business, entertainment, cuisine, and speech.

In short, America, famously a nation of immigrants, was the site of many of Yiddishs greatest triumphs a Nobel Prize, best sellers, and theatrical smashes, as well as political movements that changed the way people everywhere work. As specific as its history might be, like any language, Yiddish is, for all intents and purposes, infinitely capacious: you can say anything in Yiddish that you want. And of course, in America, all kinds of people have done so: factory owners and communists, Hasidic Jews and Christian missionaries, anarchists and political fixers, scientists and quacks. To dive into the diversity and complexity of American Yiddish culture, as this book invites you to do, is one wonderful way to appreciate the wild possibilities of life in the United States.

This anthology showcases the rich diversity of Yiddish voices in America, and of the American culture influenced and inspired by Yiddish. It is made of poems, stories, memoirs, essays, plays, letters, conversations, and oral history. Many of the authors represented here were immigrants themselves who remained loyal to Yiddish in the new land. Others are their offspring, the so-called kinder for whom the language was a link to ancestors and a source of inspiration and provocation, or people from a variety of backgrounds, Jewish and not, who learned the language and made it their own.

Much of the material included here comes from the publications or collections of the Yiddish Book Center, a nonprofit organization working to recover, celebrate, and regenerate Yiddish and modern Jewish literature and culture, which was founded in 1980 by Aaron Lansky, then a 24-year-old graduate student of Yiddish literature (and now the Centers president). In the course of his studies, Lansky realized that untold numbers of irreplaceable Yiddish books the primary, tangible legacy of a thousand years of Jewish life in Eastern Europe were being discarded by American-born Jews unable to read the language of their Yiddish-speaking parents and grandparents. So he organized a nationwide network of zamlers (volunteer book collectors) and launched a concerted campaign to save the worlds remaining Yiddish books before it was too late. Since its founding, the Center has recovered more than a million books, and published Pakn Treger (The Book Peddler), the Yiddish Book Centers English-language magazine that features articles, works in translation, profiles, and portfolios about Yiddish culture. Not exactly the best of Pakn Treger, but drawing on its rich archive and the Centers other collections, this anthology offers landmarks and sidelights of American Yiddish culture to give readers a spirited introduction to what Yiddish America has been and can be.

The book does not attempt to present this material in chronological order or to make a single argument. Like many anthologies, this one wants to be a smorgasbord. We offer the nexus between American and Yiddish culture, in English translation with full knowledge of how complex, and also generative, translation can be. This anthologys animating hope is that its readers will make connections between its heterogeneous content, browsing and skipping and finding surprises everywhere.

To that end, the 63 entries have been organized into six distinct parts. The first, Politics and Possibility, explores immigrants initial encounters with America. It features scenes of ritual and tradition in the Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side and explores the ways children of immigrants ventured out into Harlem, the Bronx, and well beyond. The selections reflect how, around the turn of the 20th century, Yiddish culture in New York emanated from a community whose first concern was survival, and who had to decide what that struggle for survival implied about politics, ethics, and culture. For example, a watershed moment in the history of Yiddish in the United States took place in 1923 when Sholem Aschs play God of Vengeance (written in Yiddish in 1906) opened, in English, on Broadway. The play represents a setting that was as shocking to audience members then as it would be today: a brothel operated by a Jewish pimp and offering the services of Jewish prostitutes.

The realities of Jewish participation in sex work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are complex and tragic, and what Aschs play captures, with stark symbolism, is the tension between the noble aspirations of Jews of that time to holiness and purity, and the degradations imposed on them by the struggle to earn a living under discriminatory regimes. The play included much that shocked its audiences, including a scene in which a young, supposedly innocent girl is seduced by an older, female prostitute posing the question of what would happen and what would change when the old authority structures, derived from the rabbis and from Christianity, crumbled away. The second act of God of Vengeance appears in this part. So does a letter written in 1936 about a female athlete who successfully transitioned to male, written to the editor of Forverts, arguably the most important immigrant publication in the United States, in which readers looked for answers to daily questions about becoming American: In what way is this nation also mine? How much tradition am I ready to sacrifice on the road to gaining new rights?

A central question for Yiddish speakers in America, as for most immigrants, was precisely a question about language. Each one had to answer for herself how much she should depend upon and defend the language of her childhood and tradition, and how much she should embrace a new language English with its strange possibilities. Such questions had especially large stakes for writers, artists, and politicians. The Mother Tongue Remixed, the second part of this anthology, concentrates on the vicissitudes of the Yiddish language as it adapted to the new territory. It features reflections on what happens in the classroom to make Yiddish survive, and the role dictionaries and other authoritative entities play in the continuation of life for the language.

Part two also includes appreciations of figures like Leo Rosten, a humorist who became famous for his efforts to codify Yinglish the blend of Yiddish and English that became common in midcentury America and some concrete examples of the playfulness with which Yiddish can be deployed, as in the case of Stanley Siegelmans poem The Artificial Elephant. People often get defensive or prescriptive about the right ways and wrong ways to speak a language (and of course that kind of attitude has its value), but very often the story of Yiddish in America, even linguistically, has been a story of playfulness and irreverence.

The third part of this volume, Eat, Enjoy, and Forget, focuses on one of the avenues through which the culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews has had the broadest impact in America: food. In an immigrant culture, assimilation in the culinary dimension is about experimenting with flavors and ingredients in order to satisfy evolving palates. Those experiments quickly moved from Jewish homes out into restaurants. In the 20th century, delicatessens became staples of every major American city, and bagels triumphed across the country. American companies like Maxwell House and Crisco understood that they could profit by serving a hungry Jewish market. More recently, as nostalgia for Jewish cooking has found its way into haute cuisine, dishes such as latkes have fused with other ethnic favors (say, chocolate-based Mexican mole) to create new tastes that reflect the complex families and histories of Jews in America. Over the decades, classic Ashkenazi dishes have undergone changes in the way they are cooked, in how they are presented, and in what they are accompanied with during a meal. In a 1988, 14-minute short film by Karen Silverstein called Gefilte Fish, three Jewish women of the same family, an immigrant grandmother and her American daughter and granddaughter, explain how each prepares the dish. The first describes the labor-intensive process of cooking it, which she learned from her own mother, starting with the purchase of a living fish to make sure it is fresh. The last just acquires a bottle of the Manischewitz brand before serving it on the table.

The fourth part, American Commemoration, focuses on the wide array of Yiddish literary voices in America. It includes translations from the Yiddish of a short story and a lecture by the American Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, still the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and examples of poetry, fiction, and literary essays by many equally talented but less widely celebrated Yiddish writers, including Chaim Grade, Jacob Glatstein, Anna Margolin, Blume Lempel, Peretz Fishbein, and Celia Dropkin. Almost all American Yiddish writers of that generation were born in Europe, and they naturally drew upon European models as well as Anglo-American ones in developing their verse and prose. Its not surprising that their narratives frequently take up the experience of dislocation, whether by explicitly telling stories about being an migr in a land with little patience for the past, or more implicitly by exploring the complications faced by Jews and others in the 20th century.

The fifth part of this anthology, Oy, the Children!, considers the descendants of Yiddish speakers, who went on to roles of increasing prominence in American culture. Inheritors of the immigrants pathos, their offspring built upon that legacy to make their own marks. In many cases, like Cynthia Ozicks story Envy: or, Yiddish in America (1968) or Joan Micklin Silvers film Hester Street, they did so by depicting the experiences of Yiddish speakers; artists who did so include novelist Michael Chabon and playwright Paula Vogel, both of them winners of the Pulitzer Prize. In other cases for example, Hollywood actors Leonard Nimoy and Fyvush Finkel they distilled the humor or charm of their Yiddish-speaking families and milieus and transformed them in one way or another for wider consumption. Among many other celebrated artists of recent decades, this section also includes graphic artists and storytellers whose drawings depict an older, Yiddish-speaking generation in unexpected and moving ways.

Finally, the sixth and last section of the anthology, The Other Americas, explores Yiddish as it flourished not just in the United States but through the American continent, from Canada to Argentina. (The word America comes from Amerigo in Latin, Americus Vespucci, the Italian cartographer, navigator, financier, and explorer who in 150102 sailed to Brazil and the West Indies.) The language thrived in these regions, too, and continued to link Jews who had come from the same communities in Europe but found themselves in very different situations after immigration. These selections help to suggest some of the ways in which the story of Yiddish in the United States wasnt unique but rather part of a larger set of phenomena that involved the establishment of Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora.

Each of the entries is introduced with a brief contextual headnote, and a timeline presents some fascinating and representative historical events but, again, this isnt a history. Its most of all meant to be a grab bag, an opportunity for readers to get a little lost and to discover something that they werent expecting. It showcases the rich diversity of Yiddish voices in America and of the American culture influenced and inspired by, and created as a result of, Yiddish and its speakers and their descendants. They pushed Yiddish its sound, its sensibility to utterly unexpected regions in the continuation of its epic story. By doing so, they have changed America.

Ilan Stavans is a Mexican-American author and translator, the publisher of Restless Books, and Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College.

Josh Lambert is the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center and visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Hes the author of American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide (2009) and Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (2014).

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The Old in the New: Introducing How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish - lareviewofbooks

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Posted By admin on January 22, 2020

The NYPD has released additional footage in an anti-Semitic attack on Chanukah i9n Boro Park.

As YWN had reported, on Wednesday, December 25, at approximately 1:00AM, a 40-year-old Hasidic man was walking in front of 4723 13th Avenue, when an unknown individual approached him and blocked his path.

The victim attempted to let the suspect pass and proceeded to walk around the suspect, when the suspect punched him in the face before fleeing on foot, eastbound towards the intersection of 13 Avenue and 48 Street.

The victim sustained a laceration to his lip but refused medical attention.

The suspect met up with two of his friends who were waiting and who were watching the attack.

The unidentified individual is described as an adult male, with dark hair, light complexion, medium build, approximately 58 tall. He was last seen wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt, jeans and black sneakers.

(YWN World Headquarters NYC)

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WATCH: NYPD Releases New Footage Of Hasidic Man Punched In The Face On 13th Avenue - Yeshiva World News

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Posted By admin on January 22, 2020

Dear BK Readers,

Lets talk about hate.

I know its an uncomfortable topic for some as uncomfortable as it is for those that benefit from racism to talk about race. But the subject of hate is a matter of fact in America right now and deserving of a little examination by just about everyone.

Truth is, more than 50 years after Kings iconic I Have a Dream Speech, hate and racial violence in America is more pervasive and more pungent that it has ever been since his death.

In addition, with the recent and unfortunate incidents of hate crimes taking place right here in Brooklyn against our Hasidic Jewish residents, the topic has been especially heavy on my heart.

So why is there so much hate anyway? (If the word had a hashtag, itd be trending). We hate what we fear or do not understand.

When I first arrived in Brooklyn, almost 25 years ago, I knew nothing about Hasidic Jews. In fact, I steered clear of them and began to form my own opinion of them.The first time I ever really spoke to one face-to-face was a few years after I was in New York and found myself in housing court. My boyfriend who I had been living with at the time and I had split up. He left me to pay the entire rent and within months, I was being evicted.

The social worker from the housing court gave me a list of organizations to call who might help. I started calling and showing up at all of these organizations doors, but they were so burdened themselves with trying to help others, I was placed on several waiting lists. The last one on the list the one I was trying to avoid, really was an Hasidic Jewish organization. Finally, I mustered up the courage to go to them.

A bearded Hasid, a rabbi, sat down with me. He was the first to listen to my entire story. He was very kind and spoke perfect English with no accent I dont know why that surprised me so much at that time and he leaned into my story in a way that I could tell he was really listening. We even laughed about a few things. When I finished speaking, he pulled out a regular, old-fashioned checkbook and wrote a check for me totaling three months of rent. That was enough money to pay up my arrears, find a new apartment and move.

Moral of the story: Dont judge or fear your fellow man. They may be the very one to offer you that helping hand when no one else can.

Some feel were regressing backwards, socially. But I prefer to call it a solar social retrograde: When a planet in our solar system retrogrades, it is not actually going backward; its still moving very forward. But as one planet passes the other, it creates the illusion that one is moving backwards.

During this relatively brief retrograde period between these two planetary forces, on the surface there appears to be chaos and confusion. Whats really happening, though, is an opportunity for introspection and self-correction, before the two powerfully energetic forces once again head direct.

That fact is, to fix something that is broken, sometimes it first has to be pulled completely apart. Sometimes you gotta remove all those couch cushions and deal with all of the stray pennies, crumbs and missing pens, if you really want to clean it out.

So, for this letter, and in honor of MLK Day, Id like to offer four quick and practical love hacks to help clean out your emotions the next time you find yourself motivated by hate.

They can be used a la carte or in this order:

As for the direction of this nation, what may feel like backwards motion is the country reviewing for the final exam: the November elections.

Let us use MLKs birthday as a starting point to finally crack open those books and begin studying. This next test is a big one, so lets get to work, Brooklyn!

Because, what we put in place now most likely will serve as the blueprint for who we will be as a nation for the next 50 years.

Sincerely,

C. Zawadi Morris, Editor and Publisher, BK Reader

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Letter from the Editor: Four Love Hacks in honor of MLK Day! - Brooklyn Reader

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Posted By admin on January 22, 2020

Sometimes even a publication youve long admired gets things horribly wrong. In this case, its National Review, which just published an incredibly problematic article, Anti-Semitic Attacks Shine Spotlight on Long-Simmering Tri-State Tensions, written by Zachary Evans, attempts to explain rising antisemitism in the New York area.

Its a question demanding answers, especially in light of Decembers antisemitic attacks in Jersey City, which left three dead at a kosher grocery, and in Monsey, which left four injured and one man facing permanent brain damage and partial paralysis. Instead of contributing to a greater understanding of the issues at hand, however, the article dives deep into the communal tensions narrative that both David Harsanyi(writing forNational Review)and Ihave criticized for its fundamental victim-blaming.

The notion that tensions have existed for decades in the Jewish enclaves that surround New York City is a non-sequitur if were trying to understand what happened in Jersey City and Monsey. No news report has described Jersey City attackers Francine Graham and David Anderson as neighborhood residents. The idea that they experienced long-simmering tensions with the yeshiva children theyd initially planned to attack, or with the couple at the kosher grocery store they actually attacked, makes zero sense. This narrative also glosses over the insane idea that murder would be a rational way to handle neighborly disputes.

Grafton Thomas, who attacked the Hanukkah gathering in Monsey with an 18-inch machete, was likewise not a neighbor. The National Review article describes Thomas as a Crown Heights native, neglecting to mention hes more recently residedin Greenwood Lake, New York, which is about 20 miles away from Monsey. In other words, Thomas like Graham and Anderson had to go out of his way to attack Jews, who were minding their own business.

As for the outmigration from New York City referenced in National Reviews article, Monsey is not a new center of observant Jewish life. That Jewish community has been there for decades, but even if it hadnt been, that shouldnt matter. Americans should be able to move without strangers second-guessing their housing decisions.

Then, of course, theres the anonymous allegation in the article that Hasidim are like locusts, who go from community to community just stripping all the resources out of it. The anonymous interviewee, described as a Jewish, but not ultra-Orthodox, resident of upstate New York, sounds shockingly unfamiliar with the history of insect analogies used to dehumanize Jews. Those include Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson comparing some Jewish Israelis to termites in 2016, and U.S. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan tweeting, Im not an anti-Semite. Im anti-Termite in 2018.

In afollow-up article, Evans notes that including this grotesque comparison obviously does not constitute an endorsement of its language or its argument, but for that to be obvious, there must be a sharp rhetorical divide between this interviewee and the rest of the article. There is not.

Consider the uncritical comment about the perception that many of the men either dont work or make low salaries, choosing instead to devote their time to studying religious texts. The Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council (OJPAC) foundthat 69.9% of males age 20-64 in Kiryas Joel [another heavily Hasidic area north of New York City] were employed during the 2013-2017 Census survey years. This tracks closely with the 75.8% males across New York in the same age group that were employed.

While this data is not specific to Monseys Hasidim, it illustrates why the perception that Hasidic men dont work is false. And as OJPAC hasalso noted, this narrative of Hasidim as a financial burden is swiftly contradicted by the many articles blasting Hasidic Jews as wealthy gentrifiers in Brooklyn and Jersey City.

All these criticisms of New Yorks Hasidim, and Jews more broadly, underscore that antisemitism is fundamentally illogical. Depending on the speaker, Jews are told to go back to New York or Israel or Poland where most Jews never lived. Jews are regularly criticized as both communists and capitalists. Jews are called both white supremacists and the authors of white genocide. The only through line is projection, revealing more about the bigots hurling these insults than about Jews.

If the goal of publishing Evanss article was to better inform or even fight antisemitism, it was not helpful. When vulnerable minority groups are physically attacked, mainstream as in non-extremist publications typically excoriate the attackers. However, too many articles about antisemitism, including this one from National Review, explain away recent attacks with context the writers would never offer in discussing any other racial, religious, or ethnic minority group.

Editors of all publications would be wise to adopt a litmus test: If you wouldnt assign or accept an article pursuing a particular angle about any other vulnerable group, dont do it for American Jews, who are facing a troubling uptick in antisemitism. Abolish the double standard.

Normal people dont nod along when wife-beaters or rapists insist their victims deserved it. Nor should anyone of goodwill ever provide cover for antisemites, who similarly blame Jews for their own antisemitic misdeeds. Regardless of any justifications offered, the truth remains: Jews are not to blame for antisemitism; antisemites are.

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National Review Shouldn't Join The Left In Blaming Jews For Antisemitism - The Federalist

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Posted By admin on January 22, 2020

NEW YORK (JTA)-Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg, whose home was the site of a stabbing last month on the holiday of Chanukah, delivered an invocation at Governor Andrew Cuomo's State of the State address.

Joseph Gluck, the man who stopped the attacker by throwing a coffee table at his head, was also in attendance and received a standing ovation.

The attacker injured five people at Rottenberg's home in Monsey, New York, on Dec. 28, including the rabbi's son. One of those wounded, Joseph Neumann, remains in critical condition.

"May it be your will that we all join together in the struggle to see divine dignity in all of humanity," Rottenberg said Wednesday, ahead of the governor's annual address in Albany. "Father in heaven, bless and heal us. I will never forget the horror of that night. But I will also never forget how we continued to celebrate after the attack, how we continued to rejoice in the miracle of Hanukkah. I will never forget the resilience on display that night and in the following days, the resilience of Jewish people and the resilience of New York."

Rottenberg also advocated for protection of the Hasidic way of life. In particular, he spoke out on behalf of Hasidic private schools, which may be forced to devote more hours to secular subjects like math, science and English pending a proposal now under consideration by the state Department of Education. The proposal has met intense resistance from Hasidic leaders.

"We pray that divine providence should continue protecting us from evil forces who are out to harm us physically or from those who are out to attack our Hasidic traditional way of life and system of education," he said.

Later, referring to Cuomo, he added, "Help him promote and instill the values of tolerance and appreciation among all our neighborhoods and communities who may look different, talk in a different language or raise and educate their children according to their unique ancestral traditions."

Cuomo condemned anti-Semitism near the beginning of the speech and praised Gluck, calling him "the definition of New York bravery." Near the end of the speech, he called on New York to end the national rise in anti-Semitism.

"There is no place for hate in our state, period," he said. "What happened in Monsey is intolerable and we will not allow it to happen in this state."

Cuomo proposed a series of measures to prevent anti-Semitism. Against the backdrop of a photo of the recent march against anti-Semitism, he repeated an earlier call to define hate crime attacks as domestic terrorism, promised to increase the capacity of the New York state police hate crimes task force, and provide additional funding for security to schools and houses of worship.

He also called for adding classes about bigotry and religious freedom to the educational curriculum. He recounted George Washington's letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, in which he wrote that Jews would be able to practice their religion freely in America, and he called for clergy to preach against hate crimes.

Cuomo also proposed an expansion of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a Holocaust museum in Lower Manhattan, and called for schools across the state to visit the museum.

"Let's make sure our schools are teaching our young children, who are frighteningly involved in so many of these incidents, let's teach them what America truly stands for," he said. "I want our schools to add to their curriculum a lesson that teaches our young people our civic values and our history on diversity, and that a fundamental premise of this nation is religious freedom."

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Monsey rabbi who survived stabbing attack gives invocation at New York State of the State address - Heritage Florida Jewish News

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Posted By admin on January 22, 2020

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) As the city and nation celebrate the life and legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., many are marking the occasion with a day of service.

Here are just a few events taking place Monday:

New York City

Volunteers at Food Bank for New York City will distribute some 1,500 meals and other essentials to people in Harlem and the Bronx. Volunteers will also prepare and pack food for distribution across the five boroughs. They will be working at 252 West 116th Street. For more information, click here.

Volunteers for Hunger Free America will be helping out at various locations including soup kitchens and food pantries. Events will be held at University Settlement Campos Plaza, 611 E 13th St; The Salvation Army: Port Richmond, 1295 Forest Ave, Staten Island; Broadway Presbyterian Church, 601 W 114th St; and St. Marys Episcopal Church, 521 W 126th St.

Hasidic Jews and African-Americans will come together to volunteer for local communities and Puerto Rico at a kosher food pantry in Brooklyn. Its happening at Masbia of Boro Park, 5402 New Utrecht Avenue, Brooklyn. For more information, click here.

The UJA-Federation of New York is holding events all across the Tri-State Area with more than 5,000 people. To find an event near you, click here.

Long Island

The Village of Hempstead will host its annual parade, which kicks off at 335 Greenwich Street. For more information, click here.

Molloy College is holding a day of service at 1000 Hempstead Turnpike in Rockville Centre. For more information, click here.

More than 4,500 coats will be sorted and distributed to people in need at a Fill-The-Bag event at Mid Island Collision, 20 Lakeview Avenue, Rockville Centre. For more information, click here.

New Jersey

Gov. Phil Murphy will speak to volunteers at the Center for Food Actions MLK Day of Service event in Englewood.

The Newark Museum of Art is hosting a free, day-long celebration called Lift Every Voice. For more information, click here.

More than 800 Bergen County students will work on community service projects in Paramus. Theyre gathering at Bergen Community College, 400 Paramus Road, Paramus. For more information, click here.

Everywhere Else

There are far too many MLK Day of Service events to list here, but for many more opportunities to volunteer in an area near you, click here.

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Looking To Volunteer On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Of Service? Here Are Some Options - CBS New York

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Posted By admin on January 22, 2020

Dear Editor:

I would like to make a few comments about the horrific shootings at the Jewish deli in Jersey City a few weeks ago.

First, my sympathies to the victims. This should never have happened. Number one, it proves once again we have to ban assault weapons. But I would take a further step. I say we should make it so anyone who commits a crime with a assault weapon be sentenced 20 years without parole, I repeat without parole.

I am for releasing non violent folks from prison but feel our penalties for violent criminals too lenient. I know of a case where a man strangled his wife to death and got only seven years in prison. Yes,my friends this happens. For a crime like rape, I would sentence the criminal to 20 years without parole; if he beats the woman during the rape, 30 years. Again without parole.

I think it takes that long to rehabilitate anyone who would commit such a horrific act. Now I would like to address the few, I repeat the few folks in the black community, who defended a Board of Ed person who in her Facebook post made it sound like the shooters were freedom fighters. I quote: Mr. Anderson and Ms. Graham went directly to the kosher supermarket, I believe they knew they would come out in body bags. What is the message they were sending? Are we honest enough to explore the answer to their message?

This is a insane statement. Innocent people were killed. How is this any different then statements by Donald Trump? I truly believe all people .white, black, Asian, Native American, etc. are all part of the same race: the human race. Even as a secular humanist I believe we humans have sin or self-centeredness but are capable of compassion. I believe the cult that these folks belonged to, the Black Israelite Hebrew group, is a hate group as much as the KKK.

I defend their freedom of speech, but when they commit acts like this I believe we should lock them up and throw away the key. I am glad the perps got killed. I have a hard time loving my enemy. I agree that some of the Hasidic communitys tactics in buying property may be over the top. But how does that justify killing innocent people who have nothing to do with that?

I defend that Board of Ed persons freedom of speech but anyone with that much bigotry against any group of folks should not be on the Board of Ed. We should not tolerate these horrific acts by hate groups.

Finally, I say to all people, unite. Unite and fight the real enemy, the multi-national corporations that really run this country. And they are personified by Donald Trump, who is the king of corporate exploiters of workers. People of the world, unite!

Gil Corby

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People of the world, unite! - The Hudson Reporter

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Posted By admin on January 22, 2020

As we approach Martin Luther King Jr. Day, race relations are in the consciousness of every thoughtful American. What can Torah teach us about race relations in America?

I had a teacher, Rabbi Richter, who told our seventh grade class about an amazing audience he once had as a young man with the Hasidic scion of New Square, New York, Rabbi Yaakov Yoseleh Twerski, known as the Skverer Rebbe, back in the early 60s. People from all walks of life used to line up and wait hours for a private audience with the Rebbe Skverer Hasidim, hobos, hippies, spiritual seekers of all types. You see, the Rebbe was renowned for his freakish ability to spend but a moment with you and offer you very relevant, very specific advice for what was on your heart. The young Rabbi Richter left the audience quite shaken; and although he never divulged to the class the substance of their discussion, he always spoke of the meeting reverently, and said that it changed his life.

How could the Skverer Rebbe get a handle on a persons true essence in a matter of seconds? Rabbi Richter said that he had a penetrating gaze, almost like he was looking directly into your soul. In other words, he had X-Ray vision.

Do you remember Supermans X-ray vision? That guy could see through solid stone walls. I wish everybody had Supermans X-ray vision. Not to see through solid rock, or to sneak a peek under Lois Lanes clothing. But rather, to have that ability, the Skverer Rebbes ability, to see past the externalities, right into a persons soul.

The Torah is a book of distinctions. The opening verse states that the first thing the A-lmighty created was difference, distinction, discernment. Heaven and earth. The Torah goes on to speak of many types of distinction between light and darkness, between good and evil, between the Sabbath day and the six weekdays, and between the unique mission of Israel in the world and the mission of the Nations. But nowhere nowhere in the A-lmightys Book does He distinguish between people based upon skin color.

Most non-black Americans strive to treat their black neighbors with the same respect and consideration they expect for themselves. Many people of good will, and not a few prominent Jews, advocated equal rights for blacks. But that is not enough. The Torah holds us to an even higher standard the Gcdly standard the ability to see past the externalities of our neighbor and see his soul. We dare not see a black man or a white man before us we must see our brother, we must see his or her soul. Because that is the way Gcd sees us.

If we relate to our fellow, either for good or for ill, primarily on the basis of skin color, we have already lost. Black supremacists are as misguided as white supremacists. Common references to the Black Community versus the White Community or Black voters and White voters are demeaning and counterproductive.

This is the Torahs secret: there is no such thing as a black person or a white person. Black people dont exist, white people dont exist. It is but a chimera. The only race is the human race. I am a person, we are people, you and me, created in the image of Gcd, a soul put on earth by the A-lmighty to fulfill a specific mission, in a specific place, at a specific time.

We must cultivate that intangible faculty, that sixth sense, to see the true essence of our neighbor, to transcend the veils that conceal the soul. What is their character? Are they honest? Are they kind? Are they learned? Are they wise? No physical characteristic can predict these soul traits. As the footsteps of the Messiah approach and as the human family matures spiritually, it is more important than ever to have X-Ray vision.

It is my hope and prayer that America rises to the Torah standard, to X-ray vision, to the Skverer Rebbes penetrating soul gaze; so that we may finally emerge from the long shadows that slavery has cast on this land, and grow together as brothers, as neighbors and as friends.

Rabbi Yehoshua Mizrachi is affiliated with Congregation Sukkat Shalom. Living & Growing is a weekly column written by different authors and submitted by local clergy and spiritual leaders.

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X-ray vision: What the Torah can teach us about race relations in America - Juneau Empire

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Posted By admin on January 22, 2020

I learned a lesson when conducting research for my recently published book, Family Papers: a Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century. I had discovered the story of a young Jewish man forgotten to history until now, a story that taught me that neither cultural affiliation nor family history is a reliable predictor of future behavior. In short, identity is not destiny, and all of us can fall prey to the tides of history.

Vital Hasson was a native of Thessaloniki, Greece, a cultural capital of the Sephardic Jewish world and a city that once boasted a majority Jewish population, who knew their home as Salonica. He came from an educated, middle-class family of journalists, writers, educators and political leaders.

But Hasson diverged, fatally, from his familys enlightened values.

Hasson became intoxicated by a populist regime and chose to be swept up by its violence, its false promises, its hatred. He used a position of power to degrade the vulnerable. He was publicly denounced by family for his excesses. After the Second World War, Hasson was the only Jew in all of Europe to be tried and executed by a state, Greece, for collaborating with the Nazi occupiers.

Hassons family, like most of the Sephardic Jews of Salonica, were descended from Jews expelled from Iberia in the 15th century who spoke and wrote in a Judeo-Spanish language known as Ladino. For five centuries, they called the Ottoman Empire, southeastern Europe and Salonica home.

But before the war he was not important, less than nothing, according to one of the dozens of Jewish survivors who would subsequently testify against him.

When his city was still Ottoman, in the 1870s and 1890s, his great-grandfather introduced the first French- and Ladino-language newspapers to Salonica, chronicling and shaping modernity as it was experienced by southeastern European Jews.

In time, war redrew borders around the family, transforming them from Ottomans to Greeks. Emigration pulled them in many directions, with cousins relocating to England, France, Spain, Portugal, India and Brazil. Hasson himself moved to Palestine for a time, returning to his native town in 1933.

Then, war came, transforming Hasson from a nonentity to an important person.

Four generations of Hassons family were living in Salonica when German forces occupied the city in April 1941. Two years later, Hasson assumed the position of head of the Jewish police of Salonica under ambiguous circumstances.

The position gave him authority over about 200 unarmed men, all local Jews. Among Hassons first acts was to volunteer himself as a human bounty hunter, exceeding his charge.

In May 1943, he crossed from German-occupied Greece into Italian-occupied Greece in pursuit of Salonican Jews fleeing the Nazis, whom he was uniquely qualified to identify. His efforts were thwarted, but it hinted at the lengths he was willing to go to satisfy those in power.

When a ghetto was created within Salonica by the Nazis, the depth of Hassons depravity made itself known. The Baron Hirsch ghetto, one of two areas in which all Jews were concentrated, existed from March to August 1943, by which time Nazi officials completed the deportation of Greek Jewry.

Within the ghettos wooden walls, which were surrounded by barbed wire and control towers, more than 2,000 Jewish women, men, and children were crammed into 593 rooms. Disease and crime were rampant.

A 23-year-old German SS officer was technically in charge of the Baron Hirsch ghetto. But Hasson appears to have been granted great latitude to execute Nazi orders on the ground. Recollections of Hassons actions, which swirl through Greek-, Hebrew-, Ladino- and English-language survivor testimony, are nightmarish.

Hasson, it was said, raced through the ghetto in a horse-drawn carriage, and made his fellow Jews sweep the streets. He strutted about, using the glistening boots of the occupiers to knock down both doors and people. He stole from the imprisoned, carrying around the ghetto an open bag into which women and men were expected to place what jewels or money they had managed to hang on to. And he identified young men to be inducted into forced labor.

In the words of one survivor, a woman by the name of Bouena Sarfatty, He was like a lion let out of a cage.

Hasson reserved particular cruelty for girls and women. He forced them to strip naked, searched their genitals for hidden money, sheared their hair, raped them and pimped them to others.

To protest her forced marriage to Hassons brother Dino, who long harbored an obsession with the young woman, Sarika Gategno wore the same dress for three months and consumed nothing but alcohol and cigarettes.

From March to August 1943, Nazi overseers directed 19 transports of Salonicas Jews, totaling 48,533 souls, to depart from the train station adjacent to the Baron Hirsch ghetto. One of these trains would head for the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen; 18 for Auschwitz.

The journey to Auschwitz took between five and eight grueling days. Nearly all the Salonican Jews brought there were gassed upon arrival.

On Aug. 2, a special deportation carried away the families of Salonicas wartime Jewish community leadership (including the Jewish police) to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. Before his own deportation, on this very train to Bergen-Belsen, Hassons father publicly disowned his son, who yet remained in Salonica.

By August 1943, Salonica, like Greece as a whole, had been virtually emptied of Jews by the Nazis.

Hasson himself arranged to flee eastward with his wife, daughter and pregnant lover in August 1943.

Several times in the dramatic, confused weeks and months that followed, he was recognized by Jewish refugees from Salonica (in Albania, Italy and Egypt) and arrested by Allied representatives, but amidst the chaos of war Hasson repeatedly escaped or was released.

Finally, upon the liberation of Greece in October 1944, the British captured him and returned Hasson to Greece for trial. In the summer of 1946 that trial, a sensational event that gripped the city of Thessaloniki and the Salonican Jewish diaspora, resulted in a guilty verdict. Hasson was sentenced to death and executed.

Jews across the political spectrum, from Bernie Sanders to Benjamin Netanyahu, claim to seek inspiration in Jewish tradition to explain and propel their political values.

But cultural inheritance does not necessarily determine a persons behavior or destiny. And Jewish history ought not be sanitized. What Hassons story teaches is that under the right circumstances, the politics of hate are seductive, even to those who might otherwise be a target.

[ Youre smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversations authors and editors. You can get our highlights each weekend. ]

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Vital Hasson, the Jew who worked for the Nazis, hunted down refugees and tore apart families in WWII Greece - The Conversation US

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