New Yiddish festival up and running

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This article was published 10/02/2024 (968 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For many years the Rady JCC’s Mameloshen Festival offered Winnipeggers the opportunity to celebrate and indulge in Yiddish culture through a variety of events. While that festival was always enthusiastically anticipated and well attended, it tended to attract a largely older audience eager to connect with the music and memories of their youth. This week, Rady JCC launched a new Yiddish festival, one that is successfully filling the gap left behind by Mameloshen while also attracting an audience that is arguably more diverse and more excited about the future of Yiddish, rather than its past.

The new festival, whimsically titled the Put a Yid on It! Festival of New Yiddish Culture, began on Feb. 7 and continues this weekend.

The four day event, explains Shira Newman, Rady JCC’s co-ordinator of arts and older adult programming, was intentionally designed to have more of a multi-media and multi-generational focus than Mameloshen. In addition to featuring the klezmer music of Beyond the Pale and the screening of black-and-white films from the heyday of Yiddish cinema, the festival is hosting a Saturday night concert at the West End Cultural Centre with the hip-hop artist Socalled, also known as the Jewish Cowboy (or by his real name, Joshua Dolgin). That show will be followed by a deep-dive discussion into often untranslatable Yiddish expressions, and the screening of the 1975 film, Hester Street, on Sunday at the Berney Theatre.

“The audience for this festival is really everyone,” Newman says. “We made sure that everything would be fun and interesting for both Yiddish and non-Yiddish speakers. It is for both Jewish and non-Jewish people. Like Festival du Voyageur, it’s a celebration of our culture, and a part of the pleasure comes from sharing it with others.”

The Yiddish language is a thousand years old, and a century ago was the mother tongue of about 11 million people, primarily living in Eastern and Central Europe.

“It existed as a warm, funny and poetic language and there really was an entire universe of culture that existed around it — literature, theatre, music, film,” Newman says.

When more than half of those Yiddish language speakers died in the Holocaust, much of their culture disappeared as well. Assimilation in the post-war years also contributed to a decline in the use of the language and in the creation of and appreciation of its cultural aspects.

In recent years, however, the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture have enjoyed a resurgence.

“Whereas Yiddish culture and klezmer music were once on the verge of extinction and not at all considered part of contemporary Jewish identity, they are now very prominent components of North American Jewish identity and communal life,” says Eric Stein, founder of Beyond the Pale and artistic director of Toronto’s Ashkenaz Festival.

That renewed interest and identification seems to be down to a variety of factors, including COVID-19.

“Starting with the pandemic, so much went online and people were at home a lot,” suggests Rochelle Zucker, who, as a co-founder of the Mameloshen Festival, encouraged and supported Newman in her Yiddish festival planning.

“In general there was a great resurgence of interest with Yiddish classes, concerts, reading circles and chat groups becoming easily accessible and bringing together people from all over the world.”

Social media has also played a role, making it easy for people who care about Yiddish to connect, regardless of where they live.

In Stein’s view, the current interest in Yiddishkeit has a generational quality to it.

“Maybe it is (because of) a younger generation seeing that the generation in their families who spoke Yiddish fluently are now passing away,” Stein says. “Perhaps the idea of losing this connection to the past, to this rich cultural tradition, and to our not-very-long-ago ancestors is not something we are willing to do.”

The revitalized interest, however, has not been limited to the Jewish community.

Yiddish language and Yiddish culture, Stein asserts, have penetrated mainstream culture in a way that would have been unimaginable 40 to 50 years ago.

“Today there is a real re-emergence of the language, or Yiddish revival, in the arts, cinema and music,” he says. “There are popular films, TV shows, successful web series and festivals springing up everywhere. In the world of music, you can find an amazing array of bands putting their own modern spin on classical klezmer, and others using Yiddish in everything from punk to metal to psychedelic rock to hip-hop.”

Seeing just how much Yiddishkeit has permeated popular culture prompted Newman to create the Put a Yid on it Festival for Winnipeg.

The Winnipeg Jewish community’s history, after all, is steeped in the Yiddish language and culture. While the local Yiddish day schools, library and weekly newspaper no longer exist, Yiddish reading circles, language classes and the Yiddish-language Jewish Radio Hour, which Zucker hosts, have been mainstays of the community for years.

And now the Put a Yid on It! Festival of New Yiddish Culture can be added to that list.

“We plan for this to become a yearly event,” says Newman. “We are both a significant cultural centre in Canada and we have such a large and dynamic Jewish population. It only makes sense.”

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