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A Master Poet on Yiddish Poetry after the Holocaust

Dec. 12 2016

One of the greatest Yiddish-language poets, Jacob Glatstein addressed the dark fate that he anticipated for European Jewry in his fiction and verse even before World War II began. Here, in an interview with the poet and critic Abraham Tabatchnik—conducted in Central Park in 1955—he describes the “mission” of the Yiddish poet after the Holocaust and lays out his own theory of the history of Yiddish poetry. (Video, ten minutes. Yiddish with English subtitles. A recording of Glatstein reading “Good night, world,” one of his best-known poems, can be found at the link below.)

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More about: Arts & Culture, Holocaust, Jacob Glatstein, Jewish literature, Poetry, Yiddish, Yiddish literature

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

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