It's Hebrew, not Yiddish

There was a glaring microaggression on some signage at a multicultural festival this weekend. I took the liberty to fix it.

Hey LaKoomers, and welcome to high summer.

And who, at this time of the year, doesn’t like grabbing a lawnchair, your friends, or your sweetheart, and heading out to hear some free music on a lovely summer evening at a music festival?

Last weekend, some friends, my husband, and I did just that.

We attended the 54^th annual Concert of Colors, or Metro Detroit’s 34^th annual Global Music Festival.

Saturday night, we crowded into the beautiful Detroit Film Theater inside the Detroit Institute of Arts to catch the Don Was All-Star Revue, an incredible performance of local Detroit Blues artists curated by the legendary producer Don Was. It’s a mainstay of the Concert of Colors for many years now.

Sunday night, we returned with our lawn chairs to hear an incredible free performance of War on the DIA’s North Lawn Stage.

Sure, it was all innocent and fun.

Until you read the fine print.

Something was strange, something didn’t sit right.

You see, after October 7^th, my guard is up as a Jew, the wrong kind of Jew, the Zionist pro-Israel Jew, at these types of multicultural multinational celebrations.

I look for representation and often will not find it.

Some of my friends see that as my problem.

“If you don’t look for the anti-Israel stuff, or antisemitism, you will not find it,” I’ve been told.

But, in this post-October 7^th world, I am hypervigilant.

And I do look.

On the cover of the concert pamphlet listing the entire lineup for the five-day festival were the words from Bob Marley: Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.

Marley’s embrace of Rastafarianism had an interpretation of Zionism, seeing black people in the diaspora longing to return to their homeland, as Jews have yearned to return to Zion and Judea for millennia.

I bet if the organizers knew this, they may not have included Marley anywhere in their publicity material.

Because for the past 21 months, we have normalized slights, omissions, and microaggressions against “the wrong Jews,” meaning, proud, pro-Israel Zionist Jews.

We have normalized the hate, brushed off the omissions, and the misrepresentations by couching it as “criticism of Israel.”

Looking further into the pamphlet and the festival lineup, I saw that since 2014, a key festival partner has been National Arab American Museum in Dearborn.

The lineup of musicians included a band called Nafada – An Audio Uprising. Yes, that is the root word for intifada. The band was comprised of people of Middle Eastern and North African descent, but I’m guessing that there were no Israelis in this band, even though Israel is squarely in the Middle East.

There was also representation of musicians, bands, and artists from Nigeria, Morocco, Armenia, Turkey, Iraq, Persia, and Palestine. There were African drum circles, a Chinese musical performance, Jazz ensembles from India, and Latin-Reggae music from Ecuador.

Okay.

I guess this is to be expected and normalized.

It's not that I am against multiculturalism or diversity.

I love the diversity of our amazing country and what that brings with it.

I love trying different foods and listening to music inspired from the sounds and styles of music from around the world.

Music should be a bridge. Not a barrier.

I have had in my life a diverse range of friends, and there is a diverse array of people in my family from different racial and political backgrounds and religious affiliations.

But a little before and especially after October 7th, there has been this shift in progressivism, the progressivism that I once embraced.

It means: if you are Jewish and you want to be accepted in progressive multicultural circles, festivals, and events, check that Zionism at the door.

Leave that at home.

Go along with it.

Smile and keep quiet.

Take, for example, a “Queers for Palestine” shirt worn by a female festival goer.

No problem.

Or the shirt of the man below

This guy walked around with this shirt and danced without a care.

At an outdoor music festival.

Did he not make any connection?

Before War took the stage, I set out to use the port-a-potty and then get some food.

On my way, I passed the children’s tent, which was filled with hands-on activities, arts and crafts, and performances throughout the festival.

The entrance of the tent was flanked with two huge banners saying “Welcome” in a host of languages representing different people and nationalities from around the world.

There was Japanese, Chinese, Swahili, Spanish, French, and Arabic. Some of these languages, like Spanish, French, and Arabic were spread to different countries through colonization.

I looked for some kind of Jewish representation. There it was, and there you had it:

Yiddish is not the mother tongue of any nation.

No one speaks Yiddish anymore, except for the ultra-Orthodox, particularly the Satmar or the Karaite Neutra sect, which have been tokenized by the anti-Israel movement as model “good” Jews for their anti-Zionist stance.

Yes, nostalgically speaking, Yiddish has value. It’s the language that gave us great slang like kvetch, shlep, bubbye, and zeyde and other choice expressions. It is the first language of my great-grandmother who came from Poland.

And yes, there was a time when there was a thriving Yiddish theater, flourishing Yiddish newspapers, and Jews like my grandparents and generations before them called Yiddish the mamaloschen, the mother tongue.

That’s because, in the countries in Europe where they resided, Poland, Russia, and other Eastern Blocs, they were not full citizens of their countries. They were simply: Jews. Yiddish was the language of the stateless, powerless Jew with no independence over their fate, with no agency.

As scholar Jeffrey Weinstock wrote in Tablet:

“Yiddish was the language of the Diaspora, of the weak ghetto Jew killed in pogroms and in gas chambers, not of the strong, proud Israeli reviving the ancient tongue of the Bible in the ancestral homeland. Hebrew would be the language of the new Jew; Yiddish was for the Exile (galut in Hebrew and not, repeat not, galus in Yiddish).

Zionism took care of that.

Zionism and Israel were the remedy to statelessness and Jewish homelessness, and Jewish genocide, and Hebrew is Zionism’s language.

Hebrew was a dead language for 2,000 years and was revived as a main tenet of Zionism.

To the founders of the reborn modern State of Israel, spoken Hebrew was the path to unify the country, to create a culture, to pull the new Jew, the Israeli Jew, out of the trauma of centuries of persecution and tell them, yes, you are finally home in our ancestral homeland, and we are uniting under one language, Hebrew to build our society.

By labeling the phrase “Bruchim Haba’im,” the first thing you see in huge letters when you land at Ben Gurion Airport, Yiddish and NOT Hebrew, this was not accidental.

Naming the language of an entire country with 10 million people Yiddish and not Hebrew was very intentional. This was a deliberate erasure of recognizing that, yeah, Hebrew is a thing. It’s a language spoken by 10 million Israelis regardless of their religious, racial, or ethnic background.

I brooded about this at first.

I was just going to let it be.

But then I changed my mind.

I found a volunteer, and I sweetly said hello, she sweetly welcomed me.

Then I told her that her sign was incorrect, that the language described as Yiddish was Hebrew, and may I please correct the sign for educational purposes?

Without hesitation, she said, Certainly go right ahead.

And without hesitation, I crossed out the word Yiddish and wrote Hebrew.

So, LaKoomers, I want you to be bold.

Don’t wait for a committee, or go home and write a letter.

You have to do it.

Right then and there.

Keep a Sharpie marker in your purse or in your person, and when you see false things about Israel plastered on a lamp post or on a flyer, or at a sign at a “multicultural” festival, I want you to be bold and make the correction.

Maybe we are outnumbered.

Maybe thousands of people walked by that sign and did not give it a second thought.

But we cannot let the multicultural left erase Hebrew or Israel, even in the most subtle or subliminal of ways.

You can fight back with a Sharpie.