Rebecca Pierce 00:00

Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. My name is Rebecca Pierce, I’m a contributing writer at Jewish Currents, and I will be guest hosting this week. Today, we’ll be discussing the West Belfast-based Irish language rap group Kneecap and their self-titled semi-autobiographical film, which came out last year.

Soundbites from Kneecap 00:26

—Kneecap. So-called Irish language rappers promoting antisocial behavior and violence.

—A Belfast band has been criticized for chanting anti-British slogans.

—[Soundbite in Irish]

—Why don’t you just speak the Queen’s English?

RP 00:52

The group is known for their satirical take on politics and nationalism in the North of Ireland and their advocacy for the Irish language, which faced centuries of repression under British colonial rule. Kneecap has made headlines recently for their onstage statements at Coachella in support of Gaza, and last week, UK prosecutors announced that band member Mo Chara had been charged with a terrorism-related offense following allegations that he displayed a Hezbollah flag that had been thrown on stage at a show and chanted in support of Hezbollah and Hamas. The band has released a series of statements responding to the charges, distancing themselves from calls for violence against civilians and redirecting attention to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

RP 01:33

The charges are part of a global trend in which speech related to Palestine is conflated with material support for terror, most notably in the United States, where student visa holders have been detained by ICE for statements and organizing in solidarity with Palestinians. Today, we’re going to talk about something a bit different, which is the band’s legacy of language advocacy, the place of music and language in decolonial movements, and the connections between these movements and Jewish efforts to preserve languages like Ladino and Yiddish. Joining me are singer and ethnomusicologist and Yiddish cultural organizer, Isabel Frey; Devin Naar, a professor of Sephardic studies and Jewish history; and musician and cultural worker, Ira Temple.

RP 02:14

Welcome to the podcast, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. In preparation for this, we all watched Kneecap’s film (which is streaming on Netflix and other platforms), and I really was excited about the thought of bringing together a group of folks who are focused on Jewish language preservation revival in art to have a conversation about some of the themes in this film and how it’s relevant to our communities. So, I was wondering if you could all start with just quickly introducing yourselves and sharing your general response to the film. What did it bring up from your own experiences?

Ira Temple 02:46

I’ll start. I’m Ira Temple, I’m a musician and, as you said, cultural worker. And I think my favorite part of the film is the introduction because, as a person doing language revival, the story that we tell about the mythology of where we’re coming from is so important, and they do it in this cinematic way that was so exciting to me. You know, you start with a baby, and then the baby’s existence is immediately politicized in a really violent climate. And then you’re introduced to all the structural factors make it difficult for the language to thrive. That resonated really hard for me as a person who performs often in Yiddish. The way that this film did that around the Irish language was really beautiful, and with self-consciousness about stereotypes and all that stuff, which I’m sure we’ll get into.

Isabel Frey 03:33

Yeah. Hi, I’m Isabel Frey. I’m a Yiddish singer and I’m a researcher also of Yiddish music and ethnomusicologist. And I really enjoyed the film; sonically, and aesthetically, and cinematographically, I thought it was really great. What stuck out to me, I think, was this question of how to bridge generational divides, which is something, I think, that is also a really common theme in Yiddish cultural work also, and the question of generational contradictions and changes, also. But I also was struck by how continuous, still, the transmission in some ways works throughout the film—really, a story of continuous transmission, and it’s almost a bit of, I don’t know, maybe envy, to see it when working a language (Yiddish), where, I mean, there is continuity, but there also is definitely more rupture in some ways. And the ability to tell a story where there is a seamless transmission—I was a bit envious.

Devon Naar 04:34

My name is Devon Naar, and I’m a historian of Sephardic Jewish history and culture, and of Jewish studies more generally. I’m also attempting (or I have been attempting) to speak to my children in Ladino. And we are one of the few families in the world, apparently, undertaking such an experiment. And so, this film resonated with me in many ways and also presented a completely different universe. What would the very nascent, barely extant Ladino revivalist movement look like if it involved drugs, if it involved sex, and if it involved violence—that was a completely different universe, and maybe there are some lessons there either way. But I think one of the themes that emerged from the film, a key metaphor, comes from DJ Próvaí, who uses the metaphor of the dodo. And I’ve really been thinking about the dodo. He says the Irish language is something like the last dodo that’s stuck behind glass, and you need to smash the glass and let the dodo be free. It made me think about Ladino also, in a very profound way, because I think some of my efforts to bring Ladino into a variety of domains—outside the currently authorized spaces for the language (which are basically music and food), but to bring it into the space of politics, of literature, of philosophy, of epistemology—really, a whole encompassing language, makes me think about changing the image of Ladino. It’s something that is perceived as precious; it’s associated with nostalgia, it’s frozen in time. And so, I do feel like that metaphor of breaking the dodo free, of breaking the language free and letting it operate in all of the domains, is something that I really found inspiring.

RP 06:30

I can just say, speaking from my own perspective, I happened to grow up in a Black Jewish family where my mom was Black and Catholic and grew up on the South side of Chicago. So I grew up with, actually, a very strong political consciousness of the politics in the North of Ireland. And that feeling of jealousy, Isabel, that you mentioned, was something that I really grew up with as well because as Black Americans, we don’t have a lot of stories of our resistance where we live to tell the tale. I didn’t know about many of the uprisings in the US like the Gold Coast uprising of enslaved people till I was an adult. And I didn’t study a language—even though I’m a huge nerd for languages and have been interested in them since I was a small child—I didn’t study a language that had anything to do with my personal background until I was an adult and took Yiddish classes with the Workers Circle in San Francisco, even though at the time my grandfather was like, “Who are you going to speak that to?” when I told him. So there’s something really magical and special about seeing this relationship to a language unfold—also through the language of hip hop, which felt like it was speaking back to me in a personal way as a Black American. And also, there’s that feeling of jealousy and also vicariousness, living through this experience of getting to see these folks just speaking their native language and knowing it in this really long-standing colonial context. In the film, the character Arló, who’s played by Michael Fassbender—he’s Móglaí Bap, the rapper’s father in the story—describes the Irish language as a light that guides us toward our freedom and says that every word spoken in Irish is like a bullet taken up against British repression. And there’s this very direct relationship between speaking Irish, teaching Irish, rapping in Irish, and resistance. I’m just curious: What about that stuck out to you all in this film? Do you feel that there’s something similar that happens as we engage in Jewish languages like Yiddish and Ladino, especially post-Holocaust? How has this come up in the work that you all do?

DN 08:24

Thinking about it, in relationship to Ladino, I see some similarities in terms of an aspiration for resistance that’s articulated very differently but also tremendous distance from the bullet metaphor, for me. The resistance that Ladino is engaged in is multifaceted. We might call it a diasporic language; I like to think of it as a multi-rooted language that has connections and roots all across the Mediterranean space, but it’s actually engaged in a cultural struggle with maybe four more dominant languages. So, it’s not just in the case of Irish against English or English colonialism, English cultural imperialism. For Ladino, we have its relationship to Hebrew. We also have Ladino in relationship to Yiddish, of which Ladino is sometimes the little step-sibling, maybe. And then we have it in relationship to Spanish, to Castilian Spanish. And from the perspective of Castilian Spanish, Ladino seems like a bastard language. Ladino is incorrect Spanish. And so, Ladino—the odds really stacked against it, in terms of all these other languages that are at play, so much so that—even the name of the language, right? It was very important in the film that Irish be called Irish and not Gaelic or some of the other varieties here. Ladino in the Ottoman Empire used to be called Judesmo, which emphasized the Jewish character of the language. But we very well know that that name is already taken, either by Yiddish or by Hebrew. And so, that’s a real challenge. In terms of the question of the bullet, there’s a line in the film, “a country without a language is only half a nation.” And [Max] Weinreich made that famous quip, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy,” and Ladino has never been that. It has never aspired to be a language with an army and a navy. I even wrote a poem about Ladino and my efforts to revitalize the language where I address this, and one stanza speaks precisely to this, which says “lingua djudia / sin bandiera / ni askyer, ni armada / ni la sangre de la espada,” which means “a Jewish language without a flag, without an army and without a navy, and without blood on the sword.” And I think that’s an asset and maybe puts it in a different framework, even though it’s engaged in cultural resistance, but it’s in a slightly different mode or a different framework.

IF 10:58

I also have a very similar text that I wrote, a song that is also referencing this, you know—without an army, without a state. And I really like your metaphor, also, of the multi-rootedness, and I also like to think about it in terms of transcultural dynamics, where culture is not discrete; it’s not made up of discrete cultures, but different axes are co-constituting itself. I mean, it is a feature of all language that you have these transcultural dynamics, but languages hide them, usually, really well through linguistic national discourse. And I was struck by how, in the film, it’s really a binary, right? Irish versus English, and Irish is constituted as a whole, and that’s what I find really interesting. Contemporary Yiddish cultural work doesn’t do that but really embraces a lot of these different components, and the multiple sites of the language, and the multiple others, and the different relations to being minoritized in different times and places. And the metaphor of the bullet didn’t really sit well because it also essentializes the use of language in itself as resistance, in itself as political. I think that’s problematic in the sense that oppressed and minoritized languages still have the potential to be mobilized in ways that are not necessarily resistance but that are maybe feeding into hegemonic discourse, for example, or feeding into ethnonationalism. We just have to be, I think, careful with this ascription of subversive politics to language revitalization in general.

IT 12:32

Yeah, I think it’s actually a really interesting point of the film that the hero character is really problematized inside the film. Like he’s the one who says every word is a bullet, but he’s also—we see him be unavailable for his son in a masculine, militarist way. And we see—is it really a bullet to the British to get really high and talk about loving MDMA? But I think, actually, part of the power (this is very clear in the film) is to be able to live inside the language, and to live as a whole self, and to do some integrating, but it’s integrating within a context of struggle. And I think that’s something that brought me into Yiddish as an activist practice and something that keeps me in it—not that just that there’s an incredible tradition of lullabies, and songs about food, and dance songs, and stupid songs about killing women, and shitty underlife that mirrors some stuff here, but also, in the partisaner hymn—in the Yiddish Hymn of the Partisans—there’s this unforgettable line: “Dos lid geshribn iz mit blut un nit mit blay / S’iz nit keyn lidl fun a foygl af der fray”—“This song was written with blood and not with lead / It’s not a song that is sung by a bird flying above us.” Because it was at this time that the partisans melted down their printing press to create bullets to fight in the resistance, and a lot of the ways that we are distant from the languages that I think belong to us have to do with incredible violence that broke apart our communities, killed so many of our ancestors, and I think that it’s a really important part of my cultural work to create a container for people to engage with some of the violence, including some of the resistance. I definitely learned through my engagement with that material that resistance was part of our legacy, and being able to tap into that and understand that it’s happened is part of a politic of solidarity and understanding of other people who are practicing resistance. So that legacy of resistance is very important and moving to me to work with. And also, I completely agree with Devin: It’s not the whole point of life. Like, we resist so that we can live. And living, living is the thing.

DN 14:38

You know, if I were to rephrase this line: Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom; every word of Ladino spoken is a breath of life for the language, for the culture. And the word in Ladino for “a breath” is actually a Turkish origin word, which is soluk. So you can take a deep soluk, and that links you across the generations, and it reveals a sense of resilience and possibility. And for me, the violent elements are subordinated in that way.

RP 15:10

It’s funny, the film has its own counterpoint to that line about the bullet at the end, where—I think it’s Mo Chara who’s narrating—says: I think we’ve had enough bullets. This film’s particularly about the ceasefire generation and these youth who grew up in the (supposedly) post-violence period.

IF 15:26

I did also just want to respond to Ira, to your example of the Yiddish partisan song, “Zog nit keyn mol,” because that for me is one of the examples of how telling stories of resistance is, on the one hand, really important. And that’s what I’ve been doing, basically; I became a Yiddish singer because it was really powerful for me to tell the story of Jewish resistance. But at the same time, I feel like I’ve witnessed more and more how it gets instrumentalized, and especially with that song. There was this video of an Israeli soldier singing the song riding a tank into Gaza in the fall of 2023. And it was, I don’t know, basically for me, it really destroyed—it shouldn’t destroy the song, obviously not—but it just also exposed, again, how much it can go into very different directions, and the bullet can be also mobilized in very different directions.

RP 16:19

I’m so glad you brought that up because I remember that moment as well, and it felt like such a violation to see because that’s a song that I’ve studied in Yiddish classes. It’s also a song that represented international solidarity. Like Paul Robeson sings a version of that song that’s incredible. And for me, if there’s any contemporary people that I would bestow that song on, it’s people in Gaza. And so, to see that being sung by someone undertaking genocidal violence as they’re singing the song about our Jewish survival of genocide and our Jewish resistance to genocide, it really broke something to hear. And it leads me into another question. I’d like to go deeper into this role of music in preserving in transmitting language. Every Yiddish class I’ve taken, music is such an important part of it. It’s part of how I carry the language with me on a day-to-day basis, and in this film, music is the medium through which the language is being transmitted. So, I’m curious: In all of your work, what do you see as the role of music in preserving and transmitting both language and history of resistance? And what’s also the power and challenge of creating art in a language that might not be fully understandable to your audience right away?

IT 17:29

I mean, these are just the questions that I think many of us dedicate our entire lives to. A lot of times, people get into Yiddish, and they’re like: Finally, I found an anti-fascist language. And sometimes at some point, we have to be like: Yeah, a language itself isn’t anti-fascist; only anti-fascism is anti-fascist. And the language does so much, and the language can contain a record of historical anti-fascism, but Yiddish also contains a record of fascism. But a lot of the community that I know that’s working in Jewish diasporic language is saying: Okay, how can we create this pillar of identity for people who are here with us? Say we don’t want our identity to be grounded in nationalism; say we don’t want our identity even necessarily to be grounded in religion. Maybe some of us are not religious, some of us are very religious. Some of us have different religious upbringings. We have disagreements about how gender works in religion. We have disagreements about all this stuff, but we want to have some clear pillars of identity. And music is just an amazing identity pillar because it creates a space for people to be together, gives them something to do. It is very co-regulating. Everybody breathes together. Sound is very physical. It enters your body, it’s waves. Sound and music do something that very few other things do, and there’s a reason that babies respond to music. All groups have music. And when people discover music, they tap into something that is really deep and important to them. So, this is an incredibly lush and effective place to do cultural work.

IF 18:57

Yeah, I think a lot also about the power of music in this context where there is not so much linguistic understanding (or maybe none at all). It’s something I think a lot about in relation to Yiddish, in relation to the term “post-vernacular.” Singing in Yiddish in a context where people don’t necessarily understand it and maybe even the singers themselves had to learn it—I think it creates a different listening experience, basically, and it creates a listening experience where you listen more to the sonority of everything, the sonority also of the language. And it becomes—the famous definition of post-vernacularity by Jeffrey Shandler is that it becomes more important that something is being said in Yiddish than rather what is being said. And then applied to music, it becomes more important, also, how it sounds and the whole aesthetics of it. And at the same time, that is such a political act, then, also, the choice, the deliberate choice to make music in this language. So, I think it connects aesthetics and politics in a really interesting way and in a really powerful way, and it’s something that is helpful, I think, for all left-wing political movements at the moment. Because that’s something I always say as a protest singer, is that the left is really bad, at the moment, at channeling affective politics—affective with an “a”. This deep power of music can be mobilized, and I think we need to—as socialists, as organizers, we need to channel that and not just hold boring speeches, basically, but also think about how it sounds and how it touches people musically and aesthetically.

DN 20:37

For me, I think that the starting point with song and Ladino goes back to my childhood. The first thing that I could recite in Ladino is actually part of the tefillah, part of the prayer service of Shabbat morning. An excerpt—“bendicho su nombre,” [ie.] “Berikh sheme”—that is chanted in Ladino. And so, chanting or song has been a key element in my story with Ladino from the very beginning. And for my children, one of the things that I wanted to do—and also my spouse too—was to bring in lullabies that others have alluded to because we rewrote some extant lullabies to make them in consonance with our own values. And then, I composed a few of my own to try to bring some messages and the sound of the language to my children from a very early age.

DN 21:30

I think the challenge with Ladino and the music scene today is related to both the opportunities and the pitfalls that come with maybe the multi-rootedness of the language. If you think about the Ladino music scene (to the extent that there is one), there are some that are trying to render Ladino music in flamenco. There are others that are rendering it in early music, or Renaissance, or medieval style of music. There are others that render it in a rock mode. I don’t know of any Ladino rap yet, but what I think is actually missing right now in the contemporary Ladino musical scene is maybe the most essential element of the soundscape, which would be to set contemporary Ladino music in the Middle Eastern or Oriental style, as it was called—in the Maqam style, which is the style in which the songs were sung in the Ottoman Empire using oud and dumbek and other instruments like that. And I think that we’re in a moment now in which creating new Ladino music—rendering Ladino music in that Levantine style—is essential in terms of the political message that it conveys. A Jewish language rooted in Spanish, expressed in the Middle Eastern musical modalities, I think really represents the bridge-building possibility that is inherent in Ladino language and culture. And so, if I had one aspiration for Ladino music in the contemporary moment and moving forward would be not only the creation of new songs in Ladino that speak to pressing themes and questions that we’re dealing with but also that sets it in this soundscape that connects these elements. The Jewish, the Spanish (or Hispanic) elements, and the Middle Eastern.

IT 23:29

I love that, Devin, and I think you’re describing something that is about why this is powerful and why so many elements have to be in place for that to happen. We don’t have any representatives for Judeo-Arabic on this call, but I do a lot of work with this French Moroccan singer, Laura Elkeslassy, and Laura is singing in French, and Arabic, and Hebrew, and Ladino. And when people hear the music that we’ve put together, what they’re experiencing is an identity formation that they maybe could imagine but they had never experienced. Because our visions of Jews and Arabs are sometimes far apart in the US, so to see Arabness and Jewishness together in the same music, it’s different than going to a conference and saying, “I want to tell you about this part of the world”—because you hear it, and you experience it in your body, and you don’t have to tell your brain, “Oh, this is a real thing.”

IT 24:19

And that undoes a lot of knots for people, in my experience. And the same is true, for me, for performing in Yiddish—that I watch it undo knots for people who are struggling, maybe, with: How can I be Jewish at a time like this? How can I hold on to my Jewish identity? What even is there for me? The political context for it is so hard, but if you can speak honestly to your experience, which is what I try to do in my work, and use Yiddish and use your cultural connections and make a claim to the history that you have, nobody can take that away from you. So, that cultural work creates a narrative where both the performer and the listener are empowered to have ownership of their identity and legacy. And it is a challenge, sometimes, in Jewish multi-diasporic spaces because this thing that we’re talking about, which is that you want to experience this homecoming or you want to experience this sense of who you are—if you’re looking for that and then you go to a space and you hear the reverse, or you hear somebody rendering the song that you want to hear poorly, or you only hear Yiddish and you don’t hear any other diasporic languages, you can very easily experience a tremendous sense of alienation because it’s the thing that you’re looking for so deeply. And so, a lot of work that I do is working with different Jewish groups to help think about building out a calendar where different Jewish cultures can have homes. Because there’s no silver bullet for this problem because the multiethnicity of our community is a huge strength—and also a challenge for booking artists.

DN 25:45

If I could just tack on a little part to what Ira’s saying, especially related to the Judeo-Arabic and maybe other Jewish diasporic languages—Judeo-Farsi, there are many others—I think the comparison with Irish becomes very interesting here because I think in the film it’s very important for Irish and English to be set in opposition to each other as a dichotomy. And I think that what you get with Judeo-Arabic is you get breaking down and undercutting the dichotomy. You get a different synergy, and you can feel, as you’re describing, different ways of thinking about the relationships between cultures or identities that one may have expected to have been in tension or in opposition to each other. And so, I think there’s something really important that comes from this way of framing and thinking about and experiencing something like Judeo-Arabic music that breaks down these false dichotomies.

RP 26:45

Getting back into the things that we, I think, as folks who are Jewish in the diaspora looking at language reclamation work, wrestle with. In Kneecap’s film, the relationship between language reclamation and Irish nationalism is very central, and for many of us who are in the Jewish diaspora, we have some conflicting feelings around that because being in diaspora is different than being a community that’s living on the land that you are historically from. There are a lot of attempts to portray Jews as, like, indigenous to Palestine in a way that’s covering up the settler colonial history of Zionism there. And many of us are wrestling with nationalism and Zionism in our work. So, what does it bring up for each of us to watch this film that is really tying language reclamation, in a positive way, to this nationalist context that we may or may not relate to fully?

DN 27:36

I mean, I see nationalism as a tremendous obstacle. One of the fundamental precepts of Zionism is sh’lilat ha-golah—the negation of the diaspora and the overturning, the deletion of Diaspora Jewish languages and cultures, which would include Yiddish, and it would include Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic, and all of these other languages. And so, for me, the reason why there’s really no organic native Ladino speakers being raised anywhere in the world—it has to do with the decimation of the Holocaust, for sure. It has to do with assimilation, both forced and opted into, in the places in which people of Ladino-speaking heritage reside. And it also has to do with the coercive work of nationalism in general that has coerced out of the pure nation and its pure, authentic language the detritus of diaspora, in the case of the Jewish people. And that, for me, is a tremendous loss. It’s a tremendous loss, certainly, in a place that purports to be a Jewish state that has contributed to the deletion of Jewish culture, for me, is really overwhelming and incredibly distressing.

IF 28:57

Yeah, I think that’s, for me, one of the interesting things in thinking about Yiddish language politics. If we compare the Yiddishist movement in the early 20th century—the beginning of Yiddish linguistic nationalism—this was still a form of nationalism, even though, definitely, there were many competing ideas of how this kind of self-determination could look. And obviously, we all think and talk a lot nowadays about the bund and bundism in relation to Yiddish, but that was just one strand of it, and on the other side of the spectrum, there’s a lot of nationalist conceptions that do really bleed over into early Zionist thought. And we also can’t forget how the elite of early Zionist thinkers were all thinking and speaking in Yiddish, even though they did, at some point, reject it. So that’s one of the things that I grapple with. So historically, Yiddish language politics was definitely also mobilized in some form in a nationalist way, but nowadays, I feel like Yiddish gets mobilized within a particular subculture of Yiddish cultural workers in an anti-nationalist way and in a way that undoes ethnonationalism. And that’s what I find so interesting. I wrote my dissertation about Yiddish folk song, and I think a lot about that in relation to the term Yiddish folk song; because folk song, as with all folk-song traditions, calling something a folk song is a nationalist act, in a way. It’s a nation-building act, and folk songs were starting to be collected to be the voice of a nation. And nowadays, I feel like Yiddish folk song, in a way, is mobilized to undo this idea of a Jewish folk, definitely of a pan-Jewish folk. It’s a historical irony, almost.

IT 30:40

Yeah. Like if we think about Irish identity in Ireland versus the US, it’s a totally different question what cultural work does. Because once you bring Irish culture to the US, then you’re operating in a different framework of whiteness. Assimilation into whiteness becomes a goal of a lot of Irish immigrants, in the way that it becomes a goal of a lot of Jewish immigrants. And I think that that tie is really interesting. And I think that radical Jews and radical Irish people in the US have a similar way of starting to pull at some of the threads of whiteness, saying: What if we can take some of the power from this hegemonic identity by leaning into specificity and understanding different contexts of solidarity and challenge that people faced along the way, but not just leaning so hard into US American whiteness?

RP 31:29

There was something really powerful about learning about these historic Irish figures from the North of Ireland, like Bernadette Devlin, who would come to America and say: Irish Americans who are participating in policing and these other systems, what are you doing? In the North of Ireland, we’re the people who are being targeted by the police. And I think she was given the key to the city, to New York, and gave it to Angela Davis or something because she was just so disgusted with the racism that Irish Americans were benefiting from. And then there’s, of course, Irish Americans who love Kneecap and are really embracing this moment and this relationship to their history and culture—to take something back, in a leftist perspective, and that’s really special. And then you also have within Ireland itself right now, people who are using Irish nationalism in a way that’s anti-immigrant, and Kneecap members have spoken out against this. There’s a lot of pushback against it. But you have people like Conor McGregor inciting against migrants, and these anti-migrant protests that have been happening in both the North and South, and it’s just very interesting seeing how the context of nationalism can so quickly go from liberatory to oppressive, and we really need to watch ourselves. And I think what this film does that’s interesting is there’s definitely a look into: What is the downside of this history of having to be militant in a nationalist context? What has that done to communities in the North of Ireland? We talked a little bit about Michael Fassbender’s character being an absentee father. There’s this whole encounter with the radical Republicans Against Drugs, who are an Irish militant nationalist group that are targeting the Kneecap guys in this film because they’re selling drugs to the community. And they’re also enacting violence within their own community to do this, and this sort of punishment culture that comes out of that, and also, some of the ways that masculinity comes into that, and it’s not always positive masculinity. There’s some toxic masculinity in relation to women that we see. I think it’s interesting, I don’t think Kneecap, as much as they adopt an aesthetic of militancy, I don’t think that they’re totally uncritical of what having to be this way has meant for the community in West Belfast.

IF 33:37

Also, aesthetically and cinematographically, it’s very playful with the animations and everything. You get the sense of how the band really also plays with this image of militancy, and how it’s an ironic distancing and partly subverting, but then also really channeling it in very interesting ways. And there definitely is ironic distance, but there are also moments that are uncomfortable. And on the level of masculinity, that’s where I really started to feel more uncomfortable. I think those are where I’m not so 100% sure how ironic it actually is, or how much there’s a lack of reflection happening. And that ambivalence is maybe also what came up now in this case of them being accused of Hezbollah and Hamas support. I mean, they released a statement where they very clearly distanced themselves from it. But it probably also comes from this playfulness with militancy in relation to Irish nationalism, that maybe there is also really a lack of critical reflection on that in relation to other forms of militancy. I don’t know. That would be my interpretation.

RP 34:46

It didn’t totally surprise me that a group that has a member named DJ Próvaí, who wears a balaclava, was adopting some of these trappings or interacting with this flag that was thrown on stage in this way. I watched some interviews with the band prior to this particular controversy, but they do talk about their relationship to sectarianism and militancy and these other themes in Irish history, and saying that for the Ceasefire Generation, there is this sort of humor, taking the piss out of each other from different sectarian groups, that’s used as a form of bonding. And they describe these in instances where they get recognized by people from loyalist communities in the North of Ireland, and there’ll be a back-and-forth of gentle teasing that can sound pretty rough, especially to people from the older generation, for whom sectarianism really defined their lives, and they’re trying to play with that and turn it on its head. And I think that I can’t speak for people’s individual decision-making, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the comments that we’re seeing that are in the news right now were being undertaken, in their minds, in that context.

DN 35:51

I mean, I guess we can get a little snippet of insight from one of the scenes where DJ Próvaí bares his butt and it says “BRITS OUT,” and then there’s this confrontation, and he tries to clarify that that message is not for an individual, but it’s for the Brits as a colonial force. And so, there seemed to be an awareness and an ability to distinguish between a regime or a state and an individual, but I think some of those distinctions are lost in the playful manner that they have; or maybe, I don’t know, all the drugs and all the other elements that go into their persona. I think some of that nuance is easily lost, and that’s maybe part of what’s getting them into trouble, into very serious trouble right now.

IT 36:43

I feel like working with organizers as an artist, as a cultural worker, often means thinking about how we work with different levels of risk and different levels of play. If your language is statements and coalition building, you have to be much more careful about your language. But if your language is processing and humor and saying the tropes of your community out loud so that people can recognize who you are, you’re gonna say some things that wouldn’t work in the other setting. And I think that there’s a really important place to process desire for violence that’s different from actual violence. Do you know what I mean about there just being a different space for, first of all, things that you say in your community, and second of all, things that you’re processing emotionally or joking about? Then people are like, “Well, artists are public figures, so it’s like they’re making a statement that blah, blah, blah,” and I’m like, “You don’t really understand what art is, at some level.” But then they have followers, so then they’re seen as leaders, and I think that, on its own, creates a lot of complications.

RP 37:50

What I don’t want to get lost is that when Kneecap has made public-facing statements that like, “This is what we believe,” that has been really trying to center what’s happening in Gaza, and not trying to have their antics be the centerpiece of the conversation. I think there’s a reason why this conversation about whether or not Mo Chara was endorsing violence or not—it’s meant to dominate in our conversation more than the fact that, like, Kneecap got on the stage at Coachella and spoke out against the genocide in Gaza and had their mics cut off, or the fact that there is a genocide happening in Gaza. I think at the end of the day, a lot of what this group has been representing in the world through their music is this idea of solidarity between different historically marginalized communities and the role music can play in connecting people across decolonial struggles. I’d love to hear from all of your work and what you’re seeing out in the world: What are the possibilities and challenges for solidarity through language and art in this moment?

IF 38:52

I think a lot, at the moment, about how Yiddish music can be mobilized for different kinds of solidarity but particularly solidarity between different minoritized groups or different oppressed groups, marginalized groups. I think one of the ways in which it does that is really through being historically specific, basically, or tapping into different specific histories. And one of the projects that I’m involved with now that is going to be released in June, it’s called Lider Mit Palestine, so Yiddish songs for Palestine. And it’s a compilation of new Yiddish songs that are all written in solidarity with Palestinians, some of them in the past five years or so. And some of them are responding directly to the ongoing genocide, or some of them are not about Palestine but more about rejection of ethnonationalism, basically. And everything, all the money is going to cultural aid organizations in Gaza. I do hope that it will stir up some of these conversations around precisely this question of the power of diaspora language to enact solidarity.

DN 40:05

Listening to what you’re describing, Isabel, I see no parallels in the Ladino cultural space. Insofar as right now, the extent to which there is a Ladino reclamation movement or a Ladino musical revitalization movement, I would say it’s largely depoliticized. I think it’s more operating in the framework of, maybe, inclusion—like let’s open up the Jewish space so that there’s an opportunity for Ladino culture to enter into the collective Jewish consciousness. There needs to be a lot more work to be done to activate the ingredients that I see as deeply rooted in the Ladino cultural tradition and apply them to a political agenda. But I do believe that the elements are there, as I alluded to, in terms of thinking about a Spanish-rooted Jewish language connected to the Levantine world. I think those elements, the possibilities of cultural bridge-building inherent in there, are very ripe for deployment in an American context in particular. And I think the first step in developing out a contemporary Ladino politics of solidarity can be found in one of the concepts that I find to be very key in Ladino, which is the term moabet. And moabet is an Arabic-origin term which has, as its origin, the meaning of “love,” “love of the soul,” but its meaning in Ladino is “conversation.” And the way that we express that love is through the deep connections we develop through conversation. And so, I think Ladino can provide us with some of those building blocks to develop those conversations that can eventually evolve or take the form of solidarity and develop a strong politics—once had that politics, I would say, doesn’t have it anymore in an active way.

IT 42:12

Yeah, reaching toward legibility feels like a big piece of my work also. Even though in the left, we’re all like, “Yeah, yeah, I know about the bund, I know about Yiddish leftism,” but let’s be real about what percentage of American Jews that is. I think that if we’re serious about building non-Zionist Jewish community alternatives, then we have to scale up, and I think there’s a lot of great work to be done. I think that my existence as a queer and trans art maker makes it easier for me to reach across the divide and work with people who are doing non-Jewish diasporic work, because it’s not necessarily the top of everybody’s agenda to work with Ashkenazi Jews right now, in a politics of solidarity kind of way. And I see the roots for my politics of solidarity through what I’m doing with my language, in a kind of “secure your own mask before helping others” way—where it’s like, how the fuck are we going to do politics of solidarity without understanding what we lost in our own oppression? But that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the easiest to mobilize. I think the connections between, then, how that mobilizes politically, is complex, and has more to do with the non-language types of political ties that I and my community build. Like, I don’t necessarily reach to a Yiddish song if I need to mobilize a huge number of people because there’s a lot of learning there to do first. So, I think there has to be work happening at a lot of levels.

RP 43:34

Well, thanks, all of you, this has been a really fascinating conversation. I really appreciate all of your contributions. And that’s our show, thanks for tuning in. Please subscribe to the podcast, share it with a friend. You can subscribe to Jewish Currents at our website, JewishCurrents.org, and we’ll see you next time.