#jonathan boyarin

Yiddish Theater Festival offers humor, pathos, meaning

To commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day, Cornell’s Jewish Studies Program will show the classic Yiddish film “Our Children” (Unzere Kinder). 

The film stars the Yiddish comic duo Dzigan and Shumacher, along with a cast of young residents of a home for child survivors of the Nazi genocide, and effectively mixes film noir, pastiche, and cinéma vérité. The screening will take place 7:00 p.m. Monday, April 13, at Cornell Cinema. Admission is free.

The film was made in Poland in 1948; as film historian J. Hoberman wrote, "Our Children is not only among the first films about the Holocaust, it is also the first to critique its representation.” 

Directed on location by Nathan Gross and Shaul Goskind at the Joint Distribution  Committee-supported Helenowek Colony, an orphanage and school near Lodz, this film includes Dzigan and Shumacher's virtuoso turn as all the characters in Sholem Aleichem's Kasrilevke Brent (Kasrilevke is Burning), and an exchange of roles where they become the children's audience.

Reversals continue during the performers' visit to the children's residence, as the children teach adults about the healing possibilities of music, dance and storytelling. Some of the child performers, such as the historian Shimon Redlich, went on to distinguished careers.

“The film is part of our new initiative to enrich our understanding and transmission of European and North American diaspora history and culture,” says director of Jewish Studies Jonathan Boyarin, Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Menashe Unger started life as a good 19th-century Polish Hasidic Jew, the youngest son of a revered rabbi, and received rabbinic ordination at the age of 17 – then he turned his back on the religious world to attend university and join the Labor Zionist movement. He worked as a stone mason and journalist, and eventually emigrated to America, where he spent the remainder of his life writing about East European Jews, their histories, folk tales and wisdom.

Samuel D. Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College.  This quote was part of Professor Kassow's review of Professor Jonathan Boyarin's translation of A Fire Burns in Kotsk:  A Tale of Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland by Menashe Unger. 

Originally published in Buenos Aires in 1949 and translated for the first time from Yiddish by Jonathan Boyarin, this volume captures an important period in the evolution of the Hasidic movement, and is itself a missing link to Hasidic oral traditions.

Half a century after Hasidism blossomed in Eastern Europe, its members were making deep inroads into the institutional structure of Polish Jewish communities, but some devotees believed that the movement had drifted away from its revolutionary ideals. Menashe Unger’s A Fire Burns in Kotsk dramatizes this moment of division among Polish Hasidim in a historical account that reads like a novel, though the book was never billed as such. Originally published in Buenos Aires in 1949 and translated for the first time from Yiddish by Jonathan Boyarin, this volume captures an important period in the evolution of the Hasidic movement, and is itself a missing link to Hasidic oral traditions.

A non-observant journalist who had grown up as the son of a prominent Hasidic rabbi, Unger incorporates stories that were told by his family into his historical account. A Fire Burns in Kotsk begins with a threat to the new, rebellious movement within Hasidism known as "the school of Pshiskhe," led by the good-humored Reb Simkhe Bunim. When Bunim is succeeded by the fiery and forbidding Rebbe of Kotsk, Menachem Mendl Morgenstern, the new leader’s disdain for the vast majority of his followers will lead to a crisis in his court. Around this core narrative of reform and crisis in Hasidic leadership, Unger offers a rich account of the everyday Hasidic court life—filled with plenty of alcohol, stolen geese, and wives pleading with their husbands to come back home.

Unger’s volume reflects a period when Eastern European Jewish immigrants enjoyed reading about Hasidic culture in Yiddish articles and books, even as they themselves were rapidly assimilating into American culture. Historians of literature, Polish culture, and Jewish studies will welcome this lively translation.

In this story in Moment Magazine, Jonathan Boyarin, the Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and professor of anthropology adds to the discussion about the popularity of the “nice Jewish boy” phrase in America.

Cornell professors contribute to Jewish studies journal

Two articles in the Spring 2014 issue of "AJS Perspectives" (the magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies) are by Cornell faculty. The issue is devoted to the subject of “land,” in response to what's been called "the spatial turn" in the social sciences and humanities.

In "(Home)land: Reflections on Andalusi Jewish Attachment to Place," Ross Brann considers what great medieval Spanish Jewish writers had to say about both Iberia and the Holy Land. Brann notes that while fondness for their homeland informed the Jews' sense of local and regional identity, these writers also used Biblical expressions of longing to indicate at once "both the poet's homeland from which he and his community have been exiled and the biblical Land of Israel." Brann is the Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow.

Jonathan Boyarin, Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and Professor of Anthropology, contributed "Lower East Side Landings," co-authored with Elissa Sampson (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill). Their title alludes to this fabled New York neighborhood's role as first home on North American soil for so many immigrants. They also explore the persistence of the Jewish presence on the Lower East Side, as well as the various techniques guides use to evoke that presence even where it seems to have disappeared.