Pay No Attention to the Jew Behind the Curtain

By Steven Philp Over the past year, more than half of all state legislatures have considered proposals that would prevent judges from consulting faith-based or foreign legal codes. Tennessee and Louisiana have successfully adopted such measures, while Oklahoma recently became the battleground for a bill that identifies what many believe is the true target of this growing movement: a prohibition against the application of Sharia, an Islamic legal code derived from scripture, tradition, and centuries of interpretation. According to a recent article from Crown Heights News, the anti-Sharia movement has gained remarkable appeal as near-identical proposals are replicated in state legislatures across the country. Republican State Representative Sally Kern, a sponsor of the Oklahoma bill, explained, “It’s always helpful when you can say to your colleagues: this piece of legislation is practically identical to about 20...

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The Black Bus

By Symi Rom-Rymer Anat Zuria has made her career exploring the stories of religious women on the margins of their world.  Her latest work, The Black Bus, a selection at the recent New York Jewish Film Festival, is no exception.  In this probing documentary, Zuria focuses her attention on the wrenching displacement of Sara Enfield and Shulamit Weinfeld, two young women who have left the Jerusalemite haredi world of their upbringing.  They may have physically left their ancestral community but they struggle to fully escape its influence.  Einfeld, divorced with two young children, is a writer whose blog, A Hole in the Sheet, lays bare her experiences as an ultra-Orthodox woman.   Weinfeld is a photographer and law student who left her family only weeks before the shooting of the documentary. What the film does best is allow...

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Sects, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

By Symi Rom-Rymer A group of young Hasidic men hang out at the foot of the subway stairs at a station in Brooklyn, New York.   Soon, another one joins them and the conversation quickly turns heated.  “Do you bite your thumb at us sir?/I do bite my thumb, sir./Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?/No sir, I do not bite my thumb at you sir, but I bite my thumb sir.”  These lines may seem familiar, as they open one of the most famous plays ever written: William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  But would they seem as familiar in Yiddish? That is a question tackled in “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish,” a film by Eve Annenberg now playing as part of the 2011 New York Jewish Film...

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The Death of Yiddish?

By Merav Levkowitz For 25 years, the American klezmer band The Klezmatics has been unable to sustain itself solely from their Yiddish klezmer music. The reason is not for lack of talent: In 2006, they won a Grammy award for Best Contemporary World Music Album for their album Wonder Wheel: Lyrics by Woody Guthrie. In an age when music gains fame through social media and viral marketing, a Grammy award may not mean instant fame and success for anyone.  Yet the Klezmatics, the subject of a  documentary called On Holy Ground, have faced difficulties with deeper roots: the decline of Yiddish. For centuries, Yiddish was more than just an “Oy gevalt” and a “What chutzpah!” thrown into other languages for comic effect. Rather, Yiddish was the beacon of a rich East European Jewish culture of language, literature,...

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