Rad Yiddish

Teacher: rosza daniel lang/levitsky

As organizers, agitators, and educators (jewish & not) move towards deeper understandings of the wild diversity of jewish diasporic communities and work to counter assimilationist flattenings of jewishness (whether through ‘americanization’ or zionism), revitalizing our connections to the specifics of jewish diasporic cultures is key.

This workshop digs into that process with yiddish culture, looking at song, theater, visual art, ritual, foodways, and other cultural work with direct resonances for our justice movements. Because how we do things matters as much as what we do, we’ll also talk about ways of approaching cultural work and innovation that are grounded in yiddish culture. We’ll discuss a wide range of material (with english translations provided for yiddish texts), as well as our own work and projects (past, present, and future).

*Last class (Friday May 27) meets 2 hours earlier instead of regular time

Teachers: Naomi Seidman(week 1)
& Zohar Weiman-Kelman(week 2)

Week 1: Dos Polish Yingl, or Why Yiddish Literature is so Queer

In this course, we will be reading some brief excerpts of Yiddish literary texts, beginning with the Prologue to Dos Poylish Yingl, a nineteenth-century novel narrated by a sexually indeterminate fetus and moving on to Yentl and others. The question of why Yiddish literature would feature so many queer characters will be our central focus.

Week 2: Yiddish Sado-Masochism (Dirty Poetry)

This two session course will delve into the realms of Yiddish S/M by way of poetry and sexology written in Yiddish during the first half of the Twentieth Century. We will explore how certain practices were described, and consider the effect of this legacy on our contemporary context.

Teacher: Jenny Romaine

This course will be a survey of the community embedded Yiddish theater projects Jenny Romaine has led and co created since the 1980’s with emphasis on her work with youth. The goal of the course is to share methodology through examples. Also, to make public scripts and scores that have not been written about or shared widely. If you are interested in “minor characters,” archival treasure, the glamour of Catskill hotel hallway rehearsals, intergenerational solidarity, and queer prismatic folk theater with youth becoming the norm, this may be your jam. We will be reading scripts in Yiddish, English and other languages. Everything will be translated into English verbally or in writing.

Teacher: Mai Li Pittard

Never heard of Naftule? No problem. Welcome to your turntable intervention.
Join PNW renegade klezmer Miles for your tour through the wild 500-year adventure of Yiddish culture: The hits, the stories and scandals, and Miles’ controversial argument for a recent new, distinct ‘revival’ wave. This interactive listening and historical lecture class will focus on recordings, “needle-dropping” standards in different eras so you can really hear the changes in bands’ styles and conventions in groove over time, and hit a solid selection of must-hears through history (including recent releases), especially highlighting queer artists’ stories and work throughout history.

This class is not quite music appreciation and not quite history–more like an elevator pitch for the relevancy of modern klezmer and Yiddish music, and the fulfillment of the widely-known conspiracy from Big Klezmer to get you hooked on the good stuff (and the stories behind it). Everyone will leave this class with at least 1 new weird historical story and a solid listening list that will change your f***ing life. No experience necessary; only enthusiasm required.

Teacher: Ethel Raim

One of the most beautiful streams of traditional Yiddish song is the repertoire of unaccompanied love songs and lullabies. Often embellished by vocal scoops and slides, minute glottals and cadences that trail off, the repertoire is largely characterized by a nuanced expressivity and a compelling intimacy rarely heard in other folk traditions.

Singer and cultural activist Ethel Raim will teach songs from the repertoires of several noted traditional singers, including Lifshe Schaechter-Widman, Harry Ary and Feygl Yudin (for examples, see the Recommended Resources for Further Study). For this class, familiarity with Yiddish is encouraged, but not required. To conduct this class in a manageable way, each day, four participants will be selected to sing in the class unmuted (so 16 different participants will have this opportunity over the 4-day course).

Singing (unmuted) in front of the class is entirely optional and must be indicated in advance. If you would like the chance to workshop your singing (sing unmuted in class), please send a brief recording of yourself singing a Yiddish song (unaccompanied) to qyc.applications@gmail.com by Sunday, May 1st. The quality of the recording is not important, I just want to hear you sing to get a sense of appropriate song choice for the class. We will get back to all applicants who wish to workshop their singing in class by Sunday, May 8th.

Recommended resources for further study:

Ruth Rubin Sound Archive (YIVO)

Stonehill Jewish Song Archive (CTMD)

Yiddish Song of the Week (An-sky Jewish Folklore Research Project)

Teacher: Steve Weintraub

With so many festivals having moved online, it has been necessary to find a way to lead people in Yiddish dances when the leader couldn’t take the group by the hands and lead them. Going in circles alone at home seems an awful choice.

So Steve has devised ways of teaching dances that mostly face the camera and can be done alone in the space of a Zoom window. These efforts resulted in his choreographing some folk dances, which Steven thinks of as etudes that present possibilities for dancing to klezmer, and that allow dancers to practice them. Some dances focus on assimilating specific gestures or patterns and there’s a fun khosidl choreography to the popular klezmer tune Ot Azoy that presents some possibilities for dancing to that kind of rhythm. Steven has even created a version of the square dance, the Sher, that can be done solo, but which will also be useful practice for dancing a Sher in a group.

Non-gendered language will be used throughout. These dances can be done standing or seated to accommodate various abilities.