May 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 Josh Lambert.
Josh Lambert is the Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and English and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College. A scholar working at the intersection of Jewish studies and American studies, he is the author of the books Unclean Lips (NYU, 2014) and The Literary Mafia (Yale, 2022), which explore two areas where Jewishness profoundly shaped the direction of modern and contemporary life in the United States: in Unclean Lips, around questions of obscenity and sexual representation, and in The Literary Mafia, in the development of the book publishing industry. He served from 2012 to 2020 as the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center and now serves on the Center’s Board of Directors. Josh co-edited the anthology How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (Restless Books, 2020) and he judges fiction prizes regularly as well as writes book reviews and essays for general audiences in publications like the New York Times Book Review, Jewish Currents, and Lilith.
Larry Rosenwald’s Oral History
Among many other things, Lawrence Rosenwald has been an inventive and committed translator of Yiddish literature; a pacifist critic and thinker; and, very briefly, my colleague at Wellesley College (I was hired there shortly before he retired). Long before any of that, he was a student at Columbia University during the unrest in 1968. The protests he took part in back then have been in the news lately because of the campus protests happening now. You can get a good sense of who Rosenwald is, and why so many students adored him, from a moment in his oral history from 2018 when he interrupts his recollection of his college days to share a literary quotation: “Wordsworth says about the French Revolution, ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven,’ and that’s what I felt like.”
Yunge gazlonim (Young Thugs) by Mark Twain (translated into Yiddish)
There’s a very popular story, unlikely to be true but still sort of true in a way, about a meeting of the writers Sholem Aleichem and Mark Twain (if you don’t know it, you can listen to Bel Kaufman, a bestselling author and Sholem Aleichem’s granddaughter, tell it here). What’s undeniable is Mark Twain’s renown in Yiddish; the Center’s holdings include seven volumes of his work translated into Yiddish, including at least three different translations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, all printed in Europe. This one, published in Warsaw in 1923, sets itself apart by its title, changed to something very direct and compelling: Yunge gazlonim (Young Thugs). I suspect Mark Twain, had he known, would have approved that revision.
“The New Jewish Woman in America,” lecture by Paula Hyman
One of the pleasures of poking through the Yiddish Book Center’s website, for me, is that I can often hear the voices of great writers and scholars whose books I’ve read but who I never had the opportunity to meet. A wonderful example is a series of three lectures by the historian Paula Hyman, of Yale University, given at the Center in 1999 on the subject of “The New Jewish Woman in America.” The talks are as excellent as I’d expect—on the basis of my reading of Hyman’s extraordinary book Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, as well as Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, which she co-edited with Deborah Dash Moore—but what charms me the most is that, by way of getting started, Hyman mentions her efforts to get Yiddish taught at Yale. It took time, but that’s certainly happening now.
Gerechtigkeit (Justice)
A relatively new (or at least new to me) resource on the Center’s site is a digitized newspaper, Gerechtigkeit (Justice), the official organ of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which was published in English, Italian, Spanish, and Yiddish in the early 20th century. One of the first issues in the collection, from May 14, 1919, announces a “dzheneral strayk”/“general strike”/“sciopero generale” on its front page, but what caught my eye, unsurprisingly, was a cartoon, near the end of the issue, by the terrific American Yiddish cartoonist Sam Zagat, in which the advancement of cloakmakers’ rights is presented in a very on-the-nose allegory: a cloakmaker throwing off his old overalls in favor of a snappy “1919 style” suit.
Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance, Resource Kit by Debra Caplan
One of my favorite Yiddish plays to teach, Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance, is famous not least for the controversy it occasioned. Among the resources that the scholar Debra Caplan has helpfully gathered for those of us who teach the play is a New York Times report, from May 24, 1923, on the guilty verdict rendered against “the owner and twelve members of the cast” under a law against “giving an immoral performance.” What resonated for me, rereading this primary source recently, was the fact that a non-Jewish judge, John McIntyre, justified the conviction as a way of protecting Jewish people from offense, noting that “the play was a desecration of the sacred scrolls of the Torah” and failing to mention that most or all of the people convicted in his courtroom were themselves Jews.
Q&A
Tell us about your selections and what they say about your relationship with Yiddish language and culture.
Well, first I should say that the challenge of picking resources on the Yiddish Book Center’s website in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month is that almost nothing on the website wouldn’t be an appropriate choice. (Not to mention that I’ve contributed to the Handpicked feature a few times before, and I’ve already been able to spotlight many of my most treasured resources on the Center’s website.) So this time I spent a few hours browsing the collections and picking eccentrically, somewhat at random, reflecting on what resonated for me.
As I consider my choices, it’s clear that a few are inspired by the challenging political moment we’re in, surely one that will be recorded in the annals of American Jewish history, in which college students and professors around the country, including many Jewish ones, are dramatically protesting Israel’s war in Gaza with bitter divisions about how to understand those protests. To me, it’s fascinating to think about how earlier moments of mass protest in the United States, by Jews and others, have been reflected in the Center’s collections. Larry Rosenwald’s memories of Columbia in 1968 and the radical optimism of the first issue of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union’s newspaper struck me as two compelling examples to consider. I reacted to the news clipping about Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance because of the current political climate, too, as I have been fascinated and bewildered by how many non-Jews have been loudly objecting to antisemitism when it’s not always clear they have the well-being of actual Jews in mind.
My other two selections more simply reflect two of my constant interests. I’m first and foremost a scholar of American literature, and it was fun, if not surprising, to spend a little time with the editions of Mark Twain’s work in Yiddish translation. Finally, Paula Hyman’s books have been very important to me. While I have known and studied with many people who were close to her, listening to the recordings of her lectures at the Center, at a series of events I hadn’t realized had happened, was the first time I had ever heard her actual voice.
What are you working on next?
I’ve recently begun writing about the history of Jews in US videogames, and that’s been a lot of fun. My larger, current book project is an expansive cultural history of Jews in the United States; imagine a cultural history anchored not by figures like Abraham Cahan, Philip Roth, and Woody Allen but instead by Gertrude Stein, Anna Margolin, Muriel Rukeyser, Jo Sinclair, Sammy Davis, Jr., Fran Ross, Adrienne Rich, Paula Vogel, and Sass Orol. I’ve been experimenting with different approaches to this project, and I’m realizing it may take me a long time to complete it, but I’m enjoying the process of figuring out how to tell the story in a new way.