(NPR and RNS) — In the first few days after Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, New York artist Joe Dobkin was scrolling through news coverage when he saw a video of an Israeli soldier on a tank rolling into Gaza. The soldier was singing an old Yiddish song.
The song was “Zog Nit Keynmol,” also known as The Partisan Hymn, inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
“I saw this, and I got the message that … what this Israeli soldier was doing is for the survival of the Jewish people. This is for me, this is for my family,” said Dobkin. “And this is while all day, every day, I’m watching images come across my social media feeds of people being bombed to death.”
Dobkin is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors — and the 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.
“ I needed something to counter it,” Dobkin explained. “And the thing that I wanted was also in Yiddish.”
Nearly two years later, and with more than 63,000 Palestinians dead and an unfolding famine in Gaza, Dobkin has released “Lider Mit Palestine (Songs with Palestine): New Yiddish Songs of Grief, Fury, and Love,” a fundraising album that uses the historic language of European Jews to mourn Palestinian suffering.
The idea for the album began first with a song Dobkin wrote in Yiddish:
There is no safety through oppression,
not with occupation or high walls.
The past must not become a prison,
but instead be an instrument of liberation.
How does a prayer sound?
What does family mean?
Who has the right to grow old at home?
After conversations with fellow Yiddish singers Josh Waletzky and Isabel Frey, the group sent out a call for similar songs, writing: “In the midst of the ongoing nightmare in Palestine, inflicted allegedly on our behalf as Jews, we are moved — as inheritors and practitioners of a peoplehood and culture that was threatened with obliteration — to proclaim our commitment to a future of liberation for all people.”
The resulting album was released in July and features 17 original compositions from different musicians — some modern, some mournful, and all shaped by Yiddish and its history, like a poem by Sholem Berger, sung by Esther Gottesman, that when translated reads:
Their death will not revive the dead.
Their hunger is not our bread.
Multiplying their tears will only mean more tears.
Blood is red.
It’s not surprising that so many in the Yiddish community felt called to respond to Israel’s actions in Gaza, said Madeleine Cohen, who directs educational programs at the Yiddish Book Center and teaches Jewish studies at Mount Holyoke College.
“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,” said Cohen.
Because of genocide, displacement and assimilation, a surprisingly small number of Jews, outside of Orthodox Judaism, grow up speaking Yiddish. Some are drawn to Yiddish because of its history as a language of leftist, socialist causes — versus the embrace of Hebrew as the language of Zionism — and some for its rich cultural tradition. But all who choose Yiddish feel the weight of its story, said Frey, who is an ethnomusicologist as well as a Yiddish musician.
“Singing in Yiddish about what is happening in Gaza is automatically putting into relation the Holocaust, and whatever is happening there,” said 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 that’s actually something very powerful.”
Frey, who helped produce the album along with Dobkin and Waletzky, pointed out powerful lyrics in the album’s contributions. She said that one song, by Waletzky, “is based on this Yiddish idiom — the person that digs a grave for the others falls in themselves.”
The lyrics, translated from Yiddish by Frey, say: “You keep digging and digging a deep grave, and you keep thinking it’s for ‘them,’ 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,” Frey added.
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 Oct. 7. But the musicians on “Lider Mit Palestine” are hoping they can use this old language to bring a new perspective.
This story was produced through a collaboration between NPR and RNS. Listen to the radio version of the story.
