New Article: Rokhl Kafrissen: The Yiddish Cream Always Rises to TheTikvah Fund Top
David Shasha
Rokhl Kafrissen: The Yiddish Cream Always Rises to The Tikvah Fund Top
It will come as a comfort to all of you to learn that Yiddish culture is doing extremely well these days.
Back in 1980, Aaron Lansky founded the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts:
https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/about/saving-literature
As you can see from its website, the institution has over time grown by leaps and bounds; another spectacular White Jewish success story.
We then have Jeremy Dauber of Columbia University working hard to make sure that Yiddish voices are fully heard in the marketplace of ideas:
He has published widely in the popular media and in academia and has done a great deal to bring Yiddish Literature to the general public.
We have also recently seen the massive success of a Yiddish-language version of the ubiquitous Broadway staple “Fiddler on the Roof”:
That one is pretty ironic given that the original “Fiddler” was written as a schmaltzy bit of nostalgia for American Jews who were given a drastically revised version of the somewhat embittered Sholem Aleichem stories.
Those stories were actually harsh Modernist critiques of traditional Shtetl life, but by the time they were brought to Broadway things were quite different, as Alisa Solomon shows in her definitive study of the cultural politics of “Fiddler,” Wonder of Wonders:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250058708/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
Tevye went from Yiddish to English and back to Yiddish from the English – it is a wonder our heads have not fallen off from the whiplash!
The Ashkenazim sure love them some “Fiddler on the Roof”!
Naturally, we have CHABAD and other Hasidic groups who have never relinquished the language and continue to use it in their understanding of “Jewish” sacral essentialism, as the following post indicates:
And under the leadership of editor Rukhl Schaechter, The Forward’s Yiddish edition is thriving with young writers and activists on staff:
https://forward.com/author/rukhl-schaechter/
Indeed, Yiddish is doing so well these days that Modern Orthodox Rabbi Eli Kavon used it as a hammer to beat on poor Moses Mendelssohn:
https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/How-Moses-Mendelssohn-killed-Yiddish-in-Germany-599781
It is certainly true that, in his program to bring Modern ideas and values to traditional Ashkenazi Judaism in the 18th century, Mendelssohn insisted on “proper” German which he expertly deployed in his famous Bible translation, the Be’ur:
https://thetorah.com/moses-mendelssohns-beur-translating-the-torah-in-the-age-of-enlightenment/
He largely succeeded in his endeavor to acculturate Ashkenazi Jews along the integrative lines of the classical Sephardic model, and Yiddish was severely undermined in Germany.
But the language took on renewed vigor in the Pale of Settlement as young writers in the 19th century took the language and marked it as their brand when it came to their own Modernizing project, as we have seen with Sholem Aleichem and his Tevye.
You can see the evolutionary development of Yiddish in the following article from the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe:
https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Yiddish_Literature
It must be said that Mendelssohn’s attempt to implant the Sephardic values of Jewish Humanism into Ashkenazi culture, though initially successful, ultimately failed in the tumultuous wake of the Holocaust, Zionism, and the massive assimilation of so many American Jews into Gentile culture and out of Judaism.
Mendelssohn remains a despised figure for the Orthodox who see him as an apostate and for the apostates who see him as Orthodox.
But stay with me here, it gets even more interesting.
I first learned about rising Tikvah Fund star Rokhl Kafrissen in 2015 when she published a very aggressive poisoned-pen response in the Rootless Cosmopolitans blog to our friend Jonathan Katz’s very courageous article on “Ashke-normativity”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/rokhl/davidshasha/q84ktULGijo/aF9iwD4BBu4J
For those who have not read Katz’s original article, first published in New Voices in 2014, here it is again:
It is not hard to see why the White Jewish Supremacists took such careful note of Ms. Kafrissen and her Yiddishism; she was cut out of the same malign cloth as they were. Her advocacy promised a new, viciously ethnocentric turn that did not acknowledge the debilitating problem of Ashke-normativity.
Over the past few years she has not only proven their initial assessment correct, but has reaped the ample rewards for her loyal service to their benighted racism.
She found a welcoming home in Jane Eisner’s Forward back in 2011:
https://forward.com/author/rokhl-kafrissen/
Eisner also provided a similar space for the Sephardi Sigal Samuel beginning in 2013, cresting with the famous – or should I say infamous! – “Year of the Arab Jew” in 2015:
https://forward.com/opinion/israel/211507/lets-make-2015-the-year-of-the-arab-jew/
I too spent 2015 writing about Eisner and Samuel and their spurious delusions.
Here is the final entry in what felt like an endless series of attacks on them and their inability to correctly process the classical Sephardic heritage and its current discontents:
It is interesting to note that my final article actually marks Yiddish Supremacy as a fitting way to end the end of the “Year of the Arab Jew.”
Samuel’s many disjointed articles present a stark contrast with Kafrissen’s unified oeuvre, as the former was strong on “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit cultural ephemera, where the latter took on serious intellectual issues connected to the larger cultural resurgence in Yiddish that appears to be impossible for Sephardim to match when it comes to promoting our brilliant literary-intellectual heritage.
It is therefore little wonder that while Kafrissen moved up the Jewish media ladder with lightning speed, Samuel has faded into Sephardic obscurity. It was fated from the very start.
In 2017 Kafrissen was given her very own Tablet magazine column, “Rokhl’s Golden City,” thanks to our dear friend Alana Newhouse:
https://www.tabletmag.com/author/rokhl-kafrissen
As we can clearly see, she has compiled an extremely impressive collection of very serious Yiddish culture articles, at the same time that Newhouse has debased the Sephardim.
There was the University of Washington’s Devin Naar’s “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardisckeit:
https://www.tabletmag.com/author/den
And there were also a couple of companion articles by fellow Seattle Sephardi Emily Alhadeff:
https://www.tabletmag.com/author/emily-alhadeff
There was honestly not much of substance there, but I wrote about it anyway in the following article:
Tablet is also the proud home of Adam Kirsch, another White Jewish Supremacist who denies Sephardim inclusion in Modern Jewish Literature in his popular work The People and the Books:
Just for good measure, Kirsch is also quite antagonistic to the Talmud, which he demeans on a regular basis in his wacky “Daf Yomi” columns:
It is important to remember that while the Yiddishists are working diligently to promote their culture in a very serious manner, Sephardim like Naar have undermined the classical Sephardic heritage and the values of Convivencia with his anemic Social Science approach to our history and culture.
Here is my article that reviews the U-Dub Sephardic problem:
So, while Ashkenazim dig ever deeper into their literary-intellectual heritage with great diligence and confident institutional assurance with its ample financial and logistical support, Self-Hating Sephardim like Naar and Alhadeff are blithely genuflecting to the impregnable Ashkenazi power structure.
We have just seen how this works in my article on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Netflix series “The Spy” and the Point of No Return blog:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/ok-Fjz_vDIg
Tablet recently brought on yet another useless Sephardic writer who knows nothing about our intellectual heritage, Esther Levy-Chehebar:
https://www.tabletmag.com/author/esther-levy-chehebar
Her vacuous articles on jewelry, food, the vacation habits of the Brooklyn Syrian Jews, and even more food represent a new low for “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardschkeit, as I have written:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/g2JsWu4lGvM/d9qNMVIsAwAJ
Kafrissen’s pointedly ethnocentric writing on all matters Yiddish should be juxtaposed to these pathetic Sephardim whose presentations lack the most rudimentary values of our heritage.
But of course, this is the enchanted world of The Tikvah Fund, where Sephardim do not count for anything.
There is naturally Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of the formerly-Sephardic Congregation Shearith Israel who, when accompanying a delegation of Sephardic religious leaders to the Vatican, elected to bring native Spanish speaker Pope Francis a book by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik translated into Spanish!
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/8grLxDB0ksk
And there is Soloveichik’s dissertation advisor, the devout Straussian Leora Batnitzky, head of Princeton’s Judaic Studies department, who has also written Sephardim out of the Jewish Modernity:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/uODidN91g0c
In my cover letter to SHU 490 way back in 2011, I carefully noted the Eurocentric racism of her book How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought.
Here is what I said then:
Examining the list of 29 names listed on page 4 of the introduction we note that there is not a single Sephardic name. After beginning with the Sephardi apostate Spinoza – who is more associated with the Ashkenazi Jewish Enlightenment than he is with the traditions of Iberia and the Middle Eastern Jewish civilization – the discussion centers exclusively around European Jewish intellectuals and their culture.
Although the book has not been published, it is clear from the introduction what the contents of it will actually be. There is no discussion of Sephardic Jews because Sephardim are not acknowledged as a legitimate part of the cultural-intellectual development of modern Judaism. This in spite of the fact that figures such as Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Graetz, and Ahad Ha’am – to name a few – are greatly reliant on the classical Sephardic tradition in their writings and teachings.
Sadly, this is not simply a situation of oversight. Scholars – of all people – are required to examine a subject with scientific rigor and precision. The common exclusion of Sephardic thinkers in the Modern period – thinkers like David Nieto, Elijah Benamozegh, Sabato Morais, Israel Moses Hazzan and, more recently, Jose Faur – is the product of an outright Ashkenazi ethnocentric racism. It is not that Ashkenazi Jewish thinkers should be ignored or dismissed, but that Sephardim should be included in the discussion to allow for a more nuanced and balanced view of the matter. The exclusion is as shameful as it is pervasive.
My point was emphatically confirmed in the following review of the book by Batnitzky’s Tikvah Fund Neo-Con ally Jon Levenson:
That is some Tikvah Fund Ashkenazi incestuousness at its very best.
But then, more to the specific point, there is Ruth Wisse and her own Neo-Con Yiddish Literature concerns:
https://tikvahfund.org/faculty/ruth-wisse/
Here is her aggressive praise for the “heroic” Benjamin Netanyahu, a fellow Sephardi-hater:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/wisse/davidshasha/_0FPgviYgSc/FBcyB5f2UMgJ
And she has recently done a Tikvah podcast on the whole “Fiddler” thing:
In the WION of 12/3/17 I discussed the Wisse festschrift, Arguing the Jewish Canon, which reinforces the racist point:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674025851
Here is what I said there:
The HUP book is chock full of papers from White Jewish racists writing about other White Jewish racists:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674025851&content=toc
So, while Sephardim are relegated to “Bourekas and Haminados,” we see the Ashkenazim discussing important things like the Modern Jewish Canon; an All-White construct that speaks to the primitiveness and barbarity of Sephardim who apparently do not know how to write “canonical” books.
It boldly confirms what fellow Tikvah Fund White Jewish Supremacist Adam Kirsch expressed in his book that I mentioned earlier: Sephardim are not part of Modern Jewish Literature.
Soloveichik, Batnitzky, Wisse, and Kirsch have set the table perfectly for Kafrissen’s meteoric rise in The Tikvah Fund world.
We have now been informed that The Jewish Review of Books has brought her into their elite Tikvah Fund Neo-Con fold:
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/authors/?a=rokhl-kafrissen
JRB is also home to the Sephardi usurper Matti Friedman, who has brought his Right Wing HASBARAH dogmas into the Mizrahi culture debate.
Here is Friedman’s 2014 article “Mizrahi Nation” from Tikvah’s Mosaic magazine:
In 2017 JRB published his paean to the Mizrahi poet Erez Biton:
We will recall that Biton became the iconic poster boy for the Fascist Naftali Bennett’s committee to promote Mizrahi Jewish education in Israel:
Ashkenazim speaking for Sephardim – how very Tikvah!
We can thus see an interweaving of Yiddish Studies with the larger program of Neo-Con White Jewish Supremacy that has become a key facet of The Tikvah Fund racist program.
It is certainly a very positive thing to see all the good work being done on Yiddish culture, but at the same time it is not a positive thing to see the many manifestations of Ashkenazi Jewish racism towards Sephardim and how this plays out in the field of the current institutional discourse.
Sephardim, when they are presented at all, are seen as boorish simpletons and Arab haters; their culture reduced to a vulgar caricature, their religious ethos completely subsumed under the tyranny of Ashkenazi categories and modalities.
And while it is true that Sephardim have in recent centuries become a demographic minority relative to Ashkenazim, over the course of Jewish history it has been our rich, cosmopolitan Jewish culture that has been deployed as the most appropriate way to deal with Modernity and its many complexities.
While secular Yiddish culture has its own richness and complexity, it stands in stark opposition to religious Jewish Orthodoxy. It is that harsh and contentious binary that differentiates the Ashkenazim from the Sephardim.
Though “Might Makes Right” White Jewish Supremacy has eviscerated the enfeebled global Sephardic community, it has not been able to create a workable synthesis for Jews who continue to be perplexed by the challenges of the contemporary world.
I have addressed these issues in my article “A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction”:
The Tikvah Fund has its own Neo-Con hierarchical pecking order that shows us the interlocking mechanisms of White Jewish Supremacy. The rejection of Sephardim and the elevation of Yiddish, and of Rokhl Kafrissen more specifically, an individual who has militantly denied the very concept of Ashke-normativity, reinforces this vicious racism and the way in which it robs contemporary Jewish culture of the positive value of inclusion and multi-culturalism in favor of a debased Ashkenazi monolingualism.
David Shasha