December 2024: Handpicked
Each month we ask a member of our staff or a special friend to select favorite stories, books, interviews, or articles from our online collections. This month’s picks are by Eve Glazier.
Eve Glazier is the project assistant for the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project. Eve holds a BA in American studies from Barnard College, where they studied social movement history and took courses in Yiddish. Before coming to the Yiddish Book Center, Eve worked as a research assistant for the Barnard Center for Research on Women and as a student associate at the Barnard Archives and Special Collections. In their role at the Barnard Archives, Eve helped start an oral history project documenting the history of the New York Coalition for Women Prisoners.
Arbeyt un frayhayt
Arbeyt un frayhayt (Work and Freedom) is a book of songs collected by folklorist Szmil Lehman, published in 1921. A committed member of the Jewish Labor Bund, Lehman compiled this book to document the music that made up the daily soundscape for people involved in revolutionary political struggle in the Russian empire. This songbook is a touchstone in my work because it contains one of the first recorded instances of the song “Daloy politsey” (“Down with the Police”)—an anti-police, anti-tzar song that emerged around the 1905 Russian Revolution and has been taken up by many social movements since then. After finding “Daloy politsey” in the Arbeyt un frayhayt collection several years ago, I went on to write my undergraduate senior thesis tracing the song’s history. The book has songs for strikes, songs to sing while marching, prison songs, and songs to honor martyrs. I love that Lehman situates these more overtly political protest songs together with a section on love songs and lullabies for children because it helps us think about (often feminized) care work as an important site of social movement building. I also love that this songbook includes several (sometimes many, many) variants of each song so you can really see how these songs are constantly made and remade in an iterative folk process.
Wandering
For both my academic work and community organizing, I’m really interested in understanding the histories of prisons and policing, so I’m always excited to see how Yiddish writers think about these carceral systems. In this story by Mina Smoler (beautifully translated by Joey Reisberg), a newly arrived Jewish immigrant to New York lands himself on a chain gang in Georgia due to a train mishap and defiance against brutal labor conditions. Smoler’s writing offers a sharp critique of how the chain gang system disciplines disobedient workers and disproportionately ensnares Black people into captivity. She also provides a nuanced examination of the social positionality of European Jews in relation to structural anti-Blackness. I especially appreciate Smoler’s attention to creating a vivid inner world within the chain gang barracks as she highlights the ways that meaningful, heartfelt relationships can flourish even under conditions of total repression.
Di arbuzn
I’m fortunate to get to spend lots of time with the stories in our oral history collection, and I love when people we interview share a Yiddish song that they remember, often with context about how they learned it and why it was important to them. This clip of musicians and activists Gerry and Leslie Tenney singing “Di arbuzn” (“The Watermelons”) has particularly resonated with me this year. Gerry describes the song as a “sensual, collective farm love song,” with words by Soviet Yiddish poet Mendl Abarbanel. Watching the joy and synchrony with which Gerry and Leslie sing together is a true delight!
Watch (in Yiddish and English)
Sixty Years Bund Celebration
This audio recording of a commemoration of the Jewish Labor Bund’s 60th anniversary in 1957 nearly brought me to tears sitting in my office cubicle. The pride, grief, and steadfastness of the Bundists who spoke or sang at the event ring so clearly in their voices. The recording features theatrical speeches recounting the history of the Bund, commemorating Bundists who died in the struggle, and reflecting on the future of the Bund in the global Jewish diaspora. The speeches are interspersed by protest songs performed by a rousing choir. I’m struck by the Bundists’ deep and ritualized commitment to historical memory. The Frances Brandt Online Yiddish Audio Library contains not only this recording but also the 75th and 80th anniversary commemoration, and I’ve seen lots of archival documents from similar events. It seems to me that these ceremonies were not just about looking back at the past but also about mobilizing the past to insist upon continuity and enliven a Bundist future, even under vastly different conditions than those they faced in their early 20th-century prime.
Jewish Neighborhoods: Philadelphia
I grew up in the Philadelphia area and take a lot of pride in my hometown, but I never learned much about the city’s Jewish history. I had the sense that New York had the Jewish history and Philly . . . not so much. Of course this is wrong, and I was thrilled to find a slew of interviews with people dedicated to preserving Yiddish history and culture in Philly. The Wexler Oral History Project compiled some of those interview clips for this curated feature on Yiddish in Philadelphia. It’s always great to see familiar streets given a new depth and dimension by learning more about their history!
Klezmer Banjo
A great excitement of my year has been learning to play the banjo, so I was intrigued by this clip of musicologist Henry Sapoznik discussing his encounters with Klezmer banjo. The banjo has a rich and complex history. Its early forms originated in West Africa and was brought to the Americas by enslaved Africans. It became important in African American communities, made its way into white culture largely through minstrelsy, then was widely adopted in both folk and popular music traditions in the Unites States. I’m interested in how material objects like the banjo become a sort of map through which we can trace a complex constellation of migration, social relationships, power, exploitation, and solidarities. Certainly these Klezmer banjo tunes have much to tell us about how Yiddish-speaking Jews fit into these relational constellations and, as Henry reflects, how they negotiated American and Jewish identities.
Q&A
Tell us about your selections and what they say about your relationship with Yiddish language and culture.
I’m inspired by a long tradition of thinkers and activists using archives in creative ways or turning to unconventional sources to tell history from the perspectives of those on the margins, and I chose materials that reflect different manifestations of these practices. I didn’t exactly set out to have a unified theme in my selections, but looking back I notice that most of the materials I curated have some kind of musical element. I’m drawn to music as a source because it offers a window into the lives, beliefs, and theoretical contributions of everyday people whose perspectives often did not make it into conventional historical records because they did not hold power or were not deemed important enough to document. In this way, music is a fantastic lens through which to learn about grassroots Yiddish history. This past year I spent a lot of time with the archives of my own great-grandparents—George Korson, a folklorist who recorded the songs and stories of coal miners, and Rae Korson, a folk song librarian. They were not Yiddishists, but what I’ve learned from their commitment to documenting the beautiful, messy lives of ordinary people informs how I engage with Yiddish cultural work. I find it really meaningful to think about my work with the Wexler Oral History Project as a continuation of both the legacies of my direct relatives and also of the strong lineages of Yiddish organizers and culture makers who understood the work of stewarding historical memory as a crucial part of bringing better worlds into being.
What are you working on next?
I’ll be continuing all of my routine tasks for the Wexler Oral History Project—coordinating interviews, processing records, answering public inquiries, and curating content for our social media and email newsletters. We’ve also got some exciting new projects in the works, including developing a Queer Yiddishkayt oral history series and creating oral history workshops for children in the area. Outside of my job, I’m working on a research project on Yiddish prison songs and what they have to tell us about the impacts of incarceration on members of the Jewish Labor Bund.