Kinneret

in my post-grad unemployed friend era 🤪🤪🤪 (i am not doing well someone plz give me a big girl job plz plz plz)

If I wasn't getting ready for Shabbat and had the spoons for it I'd talk about how "classic" Jewish productions like 'Yentl' and 'Fiddler' deliberately present a sanitized and idealized version of Shtetl life and Jewish culture and history, when in reality living in the Shtetls was a life of poverty and constant terror and people weren't dancing around petting chickens and goats all the time and singing and actually pogroms happened all the time and children often died or were kidnapped before they reached adulthood and sometimes Jews were just outright forced to leave their villages and leave all their possessions behind and all the while in the Shtetls they were treated as the permanent underclass, underneath even the gentile serfs and had constant restrictions on their dress, their food, and their economy. This contributes to a warped view of Shtetl life even within Jewish communities, where they romanticize the "good old days" of the Shtetl before the Holocaust when in reality there were never any "good old days" because the Shtetl itself was a symbol of forced social isolation and oppression, and antisemitism always existed in Europe long before the Holocaust. And because most of the Jews who've lived in these conditions have died, new generations of Jews are growing up with a distorted narrative of their own history.

It's been a long time since I watched Fiddler, but isn't the whole plot of the show about the family preparing to flee from an oncoming pogrom?

Yeah except most gentiles don't know or care about that...... you'd think goyim would have an ounce of media literacy but literally most people I know just walked away with "haha cool dances and songs isn't shtetl life so quaint!" Because yes that's the premise but it's not exactly carried through thematically and Fiddler and Yentl were designed to cater to gentile audiences by muting certain themes.

Seeing Yiddish Fiddler back in December really brought home how much of the show is inherently a translation. It translates (the lighter of) Sholom Aleichem's rather dark Tevye stories about a man struggling with poverty, modernity, and antisemitism into a charming stage musical filled with dancing Jews. It translates their Yiddish into English -- and the translation back into Yiddish is really unexpectedly powerful! It translates the sound of klezmer into the Broadway idiom, what @lunetta-suzie-jewel called "caffeine-free diet klezmer."

It even translates Jewishness itself for a gentile audience -- how many times during the first act (i.e. the act that everyone remembers) does Tevye break the fourth wall to explain Jewish life and customs to the audience? This isn't just a case of "American-born Jewish show creators trying to deal with their own feelings of alienation from the world of their ancestors." This is outright sitting down and explaining to non-Jewish audience members basic aspects of Jewish life that, even if you're an Americanized, culturally alienated 1960s Jew, you'd at least recognize and wouldn't need to be told what they are.

Below the cut, a description of a bit of stage business in Yiddler that pulled that metaphorical curtain away, probably one of the best directing choices in the whole show.

... Is there a canopy in store for me? / Sunrise, sunset / Sunrise, sunset / Swiftly fly the years

i'm afraid it's a slay or be slain world besties 😔

and a very merry ben tallmadge falling into the delaware river to all

bring them home.

Jewish Pride Always

You're worth it. You're worth fighting for and you're worth working through all that trauma. Exploring new ways to live, leaving the past behind. You're wonderful.

Anyway, this a daily reminder that your local Jews don't owe you shit and they especially don't need to justify their existence, history, or culture to you for you to feel a microscopic piece of empathy for them

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (1877)

i am not immune to a brunette with sad eyes

Converts, please do not sell yourself short or underestimate the position that you hold within Jewish communities. Your love for Judaism, the Jewish people, and the Jewish culture is infectious and can make people realize the value of the culture they've simply grown up in. When people ask you, "Why did you want to convert?" don't take it as them really asking "Are your reasons for converting up to my standards, to which I will thereby judge whether you're worthy or not?" Most of the time, what we're really saying is, "Please tell me why you love the thing I just grew up in. Tell me why someone would choose this."

Many Jews grew up facing antisemitism in school. So it's baffling to think that someone would willingly subject themselves to this, and some of us grew up internalizing this shame and rejecting our Jewish identity in order to fit in. But you, as a convert, spark light within these people. You, as a convert, have boldly gone against the grain because you see the value in our way of life, one that is not easy. You've joined a people, many times at the expense of your friends and family, and your safety. You're something to aspire to. You rekindle the love and connection we have to our nation. If you don't already realize the value in this, you will when you notice those around you being moved by your words.

Being a convert is not a mark of shame because you're "different," it's a badge of honor. In many ways, you are lighting the torch for the next generation of Jews you come in contact with.