JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
People have been responding to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in many ways - some by donating money to humanitarian projects, others by protesting. Earlier this month, a fundraising album of songs for Gaza was released in Yiddish, a language nearly eradicated by genocide. Deena Prichep reports.
DEENA PRICHEP, BYLINE: After October 7, Joe Dobkin, a New York artist, was reading the news, and he saw a video of an Israeli soldier on a tank rolling into Gaza, singing an old Yiddish song.
JOE DOBKIN: And the song was "Zog Nit Keyn Mol," which is an anthem of partisan resistance to the Nazis.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED SOLDIER: (Singing in Yiddish).
DOBKIN: And this is while all day, every day, I'm watching images of people being bombed to death.
PRICHEP: Dobkin is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors and descendant of people who didn't survive. So he wanted to respond in Yiddish, speaking out about what he saw as a genocide, in this language that was almost destroyed by one. So he wrote a song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FALNDIKE VENT")
DOBKIN: (Singing in Yiddish).
PRICHEP: The lyrics say, there is no safety through oppression, that the past should not become a prison. It needs to be a tool of liberation.
MADELEINE COHEN: For every generation that comes to Yiddish, there is this feeling of urgency, a feeling of responsibility because of the violent ruptures of the 20th century.
PRICHEP: Madeleine Cohen directs educational programs at the Yiddish Book Center and teaches Jewish studies at Mount Holyoke College. She says because of genocide, displacement and assimilation, outside of Orthodox Judaism, a surprisingly small number of Jews grow up speaking Yiddish. So those who choose Yiddish feel the weight of its story and can see parallels, like Yiddish musician and ethnomusicologist Isabel Frey.
ISABEL FREY: Singing in Yiddish about what is happening in Gaza is automatically putting into relation the Holocaust and whatever is happening there.
(SOUNDBITE OF ESTHER GOTTESMAN SONG, "NISHT")
FREY: It's something that opens up a space for acknowledging the pain of the other and seeing it in relation to one's own trauma and pain. And I think that's actually something very powerful.
PRICHEP: Frey, along with artist Joe Dobkin, helped create the album "Lider Mit Palestine" - "Songs For Palestine." It features 17 original compositions from different musicians - some modern, some mournful, some that can break your heart and all shaped by Yiddish and its history, like this poem by Sholem Berger, sung by Esther Gottesman.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NISHT")
ESTHER GOTTESMAN: (Singing in Yiddish).
FREY: "Their hunger is not our bread, and their death will not revive the dead."
PRICHEP: Frey also translates this song by Josh Waletzky.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A SHTIK FUN HARTS")
JOSH WALETZKY: (Singing in Yiddish).
FREY: And it's based on this Yiddish idiom - the person that digs a grave for the others falls in themselves.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A SHTIK FUN HARTS")
WALETZKY: (Singing in Yiddish).
FREY: "We're standing at the crossroads between humanity and the abyss, and it's tearing out a piece of my heart." I mean, that's how I've been feeling every day.
PRICHEP: To build the world of Yiddish culture is to work in the shadow of loss and destruction, and also music and joy. The Yiddish community, like pretty much every Jewish community, has been torn by what's happened on and since October 7. But the musicians on "Lider Mit Palestine" are hoping that they can use this old language to bring a new perspective.
For NPR News, I'm Deena Prichep.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A SHTIK FUN HARTS")
WALETZKY: (Singing in Yiddish). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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