Jewtopia

Yiddish, a national language that never had a nation-state, may no longer have millions of speakers, but it remains contested territory nonetheless. Several years ago, on a panel devoted to the declining state of Yiddish, the playwright Tony Kushner, who had recently staged a new adaptation of The Dybbuk, was accused by novelist Cynthia Ozick of using sentimental Yiddishkeit--love for Yiddish culture--to mask the liberal betrayal of the actually existing Jewish state in Israel.

This juicy exchange between two distinguished American Jewish writers compressed a century of linguistic and ideological Kulturkampf--Yiddish versus Hebrew, Socialism versus Zionism versus Communism, the unmovable object of cultural nationalism versus the irresistible force of assimilation, New Deal (or New Left) versus neocons, rootless cosmopolitans versus "muscle" Jews. Kushner had signaled his allegiance to a secular, progressive Jewish heritage; Ozick was suggesting that from a Zionist perspective, Kushner and others of his ilk were deeply reactionary, if not delusional, in ignoring facts on the ground--not to mention 5,000 years of Jewish civilization--to fetishize the lost world of East European and immigrant Jewry.

The Kushner-Ozick dust-up (reported only in New York's weekly Forward, the English-language offshoot of what had once been the world's largest Yiddish daily) is recounted at a key juncture in Paul Buhle's From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture. In Buhle's view, Kushner is the vanguard figure (whose Angels in America is a brilliant reworking of traditional Jewish ethical concerns) and Ozick the reactionary. Dismissal of his Yiddishkeit yearning is proof of her parochialism; Ozick fails to grasp "the intertwining of Yiddish heritage with American popular culture," and appreciate the "predilection of Jews to enact creatively the lives of others as well as of themselves."

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