Apr

18

2025

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): A few years ago, in an email from YIVO, my mother stumbled upon this recording of the Malavsky Family Choir singing the four questions in a mix of Ashkenazi-inflected Hebrew and Yiddish translation. Recorded in New York in the 1950s, their rendition of the “Fier Kashes” is so delightful that it’s since become not only a staple of my seders, but a welcome earworm of the whole Passover season. It may be too late to feature in this year’s seders, but I can’t recommend it enough as a small joy with which to usher in these last days of Passover.

“Tateh, tateh,” the tune begins, using the classic text of the Yiddish four questions—“Father, father. We want to ask the four questions, father”—before the family explodes into a classic Ashkenazi “Ma Nishtanah” melody, but in majestic multipart harmony. Each question is then introduced in Yiddish: “The first question is . . .”—recited in Hebrew, and followed in Yiddish translation. Certain pronunciations will delight those who grew up hearing Yiddish-inflected Hebrew: “matzeh,” “mu-ror,” “mah-nish-taw-naw,” “ha-lai-loo ha-zeh,” any of which makes the transliteration in a 1960s Maxwell House Haggadah actually look sensible. My favorite part, however, is the translation of the third question. After hearing that for the rest of the year we dip not even once, while on Passover we dip twice, we get an enlivening bit of commentary: “Eyn mol, khreyn in kharoyses, und de tsveyte mol, tsibeleh in zaltsvaser!” (“One time, horseradish in charoset, and the second time, onion in saltwater!”) It’s expressed in such a way that you can almost see a set of chorus girls kicking up their legs to punctuate the line.

Listeners more articulate than I am about music will likely hear, in the choral stylings of this vinyl single, the staticky sound of assimilation. Like brisket rubbed in Lipton’s powdered onion soup, though, these markers of assimilation sound, 70 years later, a lot like tradition. They may also be part of what makes the preservation of this history possible. My family seders conclude with another set of questions, part of the seder repertoire my mother’s father brought from Poland and which is preserved, in this case, through Paul Robeson. For those who love Yiddish questions, I include this recording of Robeson singing “Vi Azoy Leybt der Kayser?” (“How does the kaiser live?”) as a bonus.

Josh Lambert (contributor): Lately, whenever anyone asks me for a recommendation in Jewish American literature, the field of my academic expertise, my first thought is always Fran Ross’s 1974 comic novel Oreo. It’s a book I’m embarrassed to have discovered way too late—long after I had written an extensive guidebook to the field and years after earning my PhD—but it has become one of my very favorites to teach. I’m hardly alone; there was a miniature boom in Oreo scholarship in the first couple decades of this century, with probably too many examples to reasonably link to.

Ross retells the myths of Theseus as the tale of a Black Jewish teenage girl from Philadelphia, named Christine, who is searching for her absentee Jewish father. Ross’s debt to James Joyce’s Ulysses is obvious, but she’s much funnier and more approachable—albeit with some serious flights into esoterica. Her jokes and wordplay hold up remarkably well half a century later: “When told at an early age that she would one day have to seek out her father to learn the secret of her birth, she said, ‘I am going to find that motherfucker.’ In her view, the last word was merely le mot juste.”

Oreo can be read alongside a half-dozen or so celebrated novels about race in the canon of American Jewish literature—esteemed books like Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants. And, not that it should be a competition, but judging from Ross’s deployment of Yiddish throughout the novel, she knew more of the language than most of her peers, who mostly cribbed from Leo Rosten. Moreover, in acknowledging the existence of Black Jews—as developed characters rather than as magical personalities, frauds, or simply absurdities—the novel’s sense of what family can mean, and what contemporary Jewishness can look like, is much more relevant than much else of what’s on offer in Jewish culture. For instance, the novel, in its humor, understands that you really can’t make assumptions about who somebody is just by knowing their name. In one scene, after Christine tirelessly searches for her father by combing through all the people listed under Samuel or S. Schwartz in the Manhattan phone book, she tries one, in a building on West End Avenue, with no luck: “The Schwartz in 4-B was too young to be her father. Besides, she was Chinese.”

I should note that the novel has many of the qualities of 1970s blaxploitation film, and in addition to all its charmingly recondite vocabulary, it is filled with racist, misogynist, and homophobic language, outlandish dialect spellings, and instances of violence, including even what might be considered child sexual assault. Still, the jokes seem so decidedly directed at the haters, and not at vulnerable people, that describing it as bigoted seems wrong, and my students, at least so far, haven’t seemed to find it offensive.

It’s no mystery why I didn’t discover this incredible novel earlier. Ross was a non-Jewish African American lesbian writer, who seems to have been afraid of nothing and nobody. She wasn’t the only non-Jew writing about Jews in the 1970s—think of John Updike’s Bech stories or William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice—but Oreo’s depth and strangeness set it apart. Despite having worked, briefly, for luminaries Toni Morrison and Richard Pryor, there was no way she was going to get the attention she deserved for writing a profoundly funny Jewish novel. Ross and her partner, Ann Grifalconi, essentially self-published Oreo, and it reached a larger audience only after being reissued in 2000 by a university press. But better late than never—it’s a novel that I expect Jews will be reading for another couple hundred years, at least.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Weimar Germany remains a frequent subject of art both high and low. Though the most popular current representations of the period are probably the oft-revived musical Cabaret and the recent Netflix series Berlin Babylon, these are merely cheap, vulgar knockoffs of the works produced at the time by the German artists of the school known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), including Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann. A show on the movement at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan, on display until May 26th, offers viewers the perfect introduction to this scene—and a scathing portrait of Germany in the process of disintegration.

Indeed, seldom has an aesthetic school produced such a sharp indictment of the society from which it emerged. For these artists, “objectivity” did not mean political even-handedness. There is no straining for impartiality, for instance, in Georg Scholz’s 1922 painting Of Things to Come, which shows three larger-than-life bourgeois men, smug and self-satisfied, towering over the factories they rule. Nor is there any in George Grosz’s Panorama (Down with Liebknecht), with its joyful bourgeois lubriciously celebrating the murder of the leader of the Spartacist uprising. Elsewhere, the work confronts us with the awful predicament of the poor and marginalized, their features exaggerated almost to grotesqueness. Throughout the show, we see clearly the murderousness at the heart of the defeated, postwar German society, the viewer all too aware of the horror it will soon wreak. It is a world inexorably headed toward disaster that is hanging on the gallery walls.

But the Weimar we encounter here is just as much the lustful and decadent one we have come to expect, with the era’s sexual openness exhibited in works such as Karl Hubbuch’s Enough for One, Rudolf Schlichter’s sarcastically titled drawing Handsome Johnny, and the scandalously frank Two Girls by Christian Schad. The show also includes August Sander’s coldly biting portraits and even everyday objects like the iconic Breuer chair; the capacious variety prevents the immense scope from inducing exhaustion. Those familiar with the gallery will understand what high praise it is when I say that the exhibition is worth the price of putting yourself through the hideously Germanic gauntlet of the security screening in front of the building. Just grin and bear it. As with so many things today, protesting is useless.

This Shabbat, the seventh day of Passover, we take a break from the cycle of the weekly Torah portions, reading instead a selection of verses from the Book of Shemot that describe the Israelites’ flight from Pharaoh’s rule. This passage culminates in the recently escaped Israelites safely crossing the Sea of Reeds, solidifying their freedom from enslavement. The recitation of these verses aligns the Torah’s mytho-historical account of the Exodus with the Hebrew calendar, as rabbinic tradition ascribes the Israelites’ crossing of the sea to the 21st day of the month of Nissan—the seventh day of Passover.

While this marks a sacred moment of redemption, its holiness is marred by the demise of Pharaoh and his army, as the very waters that parted to enable the Israelites to cross come crashing down on their pursuers. The Talmudic sage Rabbi Yochanan famously highlights this complexity by imagining even God, whom the Torah says “hurled the Egyptians into the sea,” expressing ambivalence about their fate: “The angels sought to sing God’s praises. God said: ‘The work of my hands is drowning in the sea, and you wish to sing praises before me?’” A midrash offers this rebuke as an explanation for the fact that Hallel—the compilation of psalms recited on holidays and joyous occasions—is abbreviated on the latter days of Passover, implying that extensive celebration is impossible or undesirable in the face of so much death. As further support for this practice, the midrash cites a verse from the Book of Proverbs: “In the falling of your enemy do not cheer, and in his stumbling do not rejoice.”

Yet Jewish tradition and liturgy are also replete with praise for our past opponents’ destruction and petitions for our contemporary foes’ demise. In fact, we can find this attitude in the traditional text of the Haggadah read at the seder: Earlier this week, many Jews beseeched God to “pour rage” upon the nations who do not know or follow God, asking the Divine to release a “blazing fury” to “overtake them.” And observant Jews make a similar declaration thrice daily, in the Amidah prayer, which includes a plea to “uproot, destroy, and erase” our adversaries and ends with a blessing praising God “who crushes our enemies.”

These sources reveal a core tension within our tradition about whether a Jewish moral ethos allows for celebration when our enemies fall—and indeed, as Rabbi Yochanan prods us to ask, whether any of God’s creations can be considered enemies. This ambivalence mirrors tensions in our movement spaces, with some activists joyfully celebrating when a healthcare executive is shot or a multimillionaire business executive implodes in his submersible, while others challenge the spiritual and political utility of rejoicing in punitive retaliatory penalties against those who have caused harm.

But while these debates often focus on what constitutes fair punishment, principles of restorative justice and prison abolition would have us question those very terms. In her 2021 book We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, Mariame Kaba helpfully distinguishes between punishment and consequences. She explains that abolitionism is not, as bad faith critics allege, about avoiding consequences; on the contrary, abolitionists support “real consequences” that allow for “transforming the conditions that exist in the first place for [harm] to even have happened.” For Kaba, punishment, which necessarily centers the suffering of those who have caused harm, ultimately keeps us bound to the world we’re in now rather than moving us toward “the world we want to live in,” whereas consequences aim to address the root causes of harm.

Under this framework, we might come to see Pharaoh’s drowning not as a punishment for his relentless pursuit of power and domination, but as a tragic consequence of this behavior. His own inability to loosen his control over the Israelites and insistence that they remain enslaved leads him to chase them through the parted waters, causing his death. But rejoicing in Pharoah’s demise seems to require forfeiting this understanding. Such celebration keeps the narrative centered on the violence of Pharaoh—both his perpetration of violence and the violence done to him—rather than shifting our focus to liberation and the responsibilities that freedom imposes on us. When we find delight in his downfall, we end up embodying a worldview that prioritizes the oppressor, and thus assume upon ourselves his tyranny, remaining enslaved by the very conditions—an obsession with control, strength, and power—from which we are striving to escape.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.