The Kimberley Plan

In 1939, Isaac Nachman Steinberg—lawyer, ex-Bolshevik, former comrade of Vladimir Lenin—arrived in Perth, Western Australia. His objective: to establish a homeland and safe haven for thousands of Jewish refugees in The Kimberley, in Australia’s far north-west.

Steinberg was the founder of the Freeland League and a proponent of territorialism, a political movement that sought to establish semi-autonomous Jewish colonies outside of Israel. An Orthodox, bearded, teetotaling Yiddishist with a fiery temper and passion for Jewish education, Steinberg charmed the Australian political establishment and undertook a long, grueling journey through The Kimberley, surveying the land for its economic and cultural potential.

The scheme gained serious momentum, but was ultimately nixed by Prime Minister John Curtin, who could not "entertain the proposal for a group settlement of the exclusive type contemplated by the Freeland League." Curtin was not the only one who regarded Steinberg as a dreamer. The Jewish community saw him similarly, but after his death in 1957, German-Jewish philosopher Erich Fromm lauded Steinberg as a realist who "could visualize a flower when he saw a seed... To have faith of [his] kind means to have courage."

Is Tuches in the Dictionary?

The word "tuches" does not appear anywhere in Uriel Weinreich's Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary (1968). Even though Weinreich's is one of the most beloved and relied-upon Yiddish-English dictionaries around, the revered linguist was perhaps overly focused on "correct" Yiddish – no dirty words, no casual idioms and no daytshmerish (a derogatory terms for a style of Yiddish that borrowed heavily – and some said, pompously – from high German).

So when Drs. Solon Beinfeld and Harry Bochner got together to edit the forthcoming Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictonary, it was not just so they could include words like "tuches" – though, let's face it, insults and dirty words are among the juiciest aspects of that (and any) language – but also so that Yiddish students, researchers, scholars and the Yiddish-curious would have access to a broader and more expansive vocabulary than is currently available. Back in the day, many of the words that found their way into Yiddish literature were more colloquial than proper, and this dictionary doesn’t just know that; it celebrates it.

The dictionary (the featured subject of a recent National Yiddish Book Center podcast) boasts 37,000 words to Weinreich’s approximately 24,000. It is clearly laid out, user-friendly, and will be fully accessible online. Tell your bubbe!

How We Freed Soviet Jewry

Twenty-five years ago, a rally of 250,000 people changed the fate of Jews worldwide. An oral history.

Twenty-five years ago, an estimated quarter of a million Americans, most of them Jews, flooded the Mall in Washington, D.C., to demand freedom for the refuseniks—Jews living inside the Soviet Union who were denied permission to leave the country. The Dec. 6, 1987, rally was planned for the day before a historic summit meeting at the White House between President Ronald Reagan and leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. The demonstration was the brainchild of Natan Sharansky, the most famous of all the refuseniks, who spent nine years in a Moscow prison on charges of being an American spy until his release and emigration to Israel in February 1986. It capped more than 15 years of organized efforts to assist Jews living under Communist rule—and became the largest protest on behalf of a Jewish cause ever in the United States.

Perhaps most impressively, it mobilized the American Jewish community—young and old, secular and religious, liberal and conservative—behind a single cause to a degree that had never been seen before, and has not been seen since.

This is a history of the march as told by people who were there and who helped make it happen. They include Jack Lew, President Obama’s chief of staff; Fred Zeidman, one of Mitt Romney’s key Jewish advisers; and Sharansky, who went on to found the Israeli political party Yisrael B’Aliyah, which eventually merged with Likud. All agree the Dec. 6 rally was a landmark event in modern Jewish history.

Natan Sharansky (former refusenik, now Jewish Agency chairman): It was Elie Wiesel who at some meeting with students, maybe even before my release, said that it would be good to have a march on Washington. And we didn’t know yet when, but at some moment we knew Gorbachev had to come to Washington. So, when I came in May of 1986 for the first time to America, Ed Koch had a reception for Jewish leaders at Gracie Mansion, and I said, “When Gorbachev comes, let’s have 400,000 American Jews come to Washington, in order to remind him that there are 400,000 Soviet Jews.” Everybody smiled and was happy, but it wasn’t taken too seriously.

Rabbi Haskel Lookstein (leader of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan and principal of the Ramaz School): Natan told me about his plan months and months in advance. I was initially skeptical he could pull it off—getting 250,000 people to come to Washington is really a huge, huge effort. But he was really determined to do it.

Sharansky: In the summer of 1987 it was already clear to me that in a few months, Gorbachev will come and nothing had happened. Morris Abram, who was the head of the Conference of Presidents [of Major American Jewish Organizations], said to me, “Natan, we cannot guarantee hundreds of thousands of Jews, so let’s do what is possible. We will bring 100 senators to the steps of the Capitol and they will declare to Gorbachev, ‘Let our people go,’ and that will be very powerful.” I said, 100 senators is great, but Gorbachev knows very well that’s just politics. I wanted expression, mass expression. Then my friend Avi Weiss, who was the head of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, he says, “Natan, you cannot trust the establishment, so I tell you what we will do, we will bring 100 rabbis and we will chain ourselves to the gates and we will be arrested, and that will be something real.” So, it was between 100 senators and 100 rabbis.

Gordon Zacks (former adviser to George H.W. Bush): Natan and I were in constant contact. He came to me to get counsel on how to proceed. I finally told him it was never going to happen through the establishment organizations, and that it if was going to happen at the magnitude he wanted it to, he was going to have to be the guy who went around to college campuses to create the energy and excitement he needed. And that’s what he did.

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May All Your Hanukkahs Be White

At first glance “ ’Twas the Night Before Hanukkah” looks like a novelty album. On the cover two smiling women in 1950s garb exchange presents by a fir tree topped with a Star of David while a demure girl lights a menorah. It seems to promise a kitschy collection of comic tunes along the lines of Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song.”

But the people behind this double album — four Jewish record collectors who form the nonprofit Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation — say they are deadly serious about the subject. They have compiled an eclectic set of songs that not only highlight the history of Hanukkah in the United States but also explore the influence of Jewish songwriters and singers on America’s Christmas canon.

“For us it’s the one Christmas album you can listen to without having to atone at Yom Kippur for playing it,” Roger Bennett, one of the producers, said.

The set, released on Tuesday, is full of cross-cultural curiosities: the gentile folk singer Woody Guthrie singing “Hanukkah Dance” and the tenor Richard Tucker (who was also a cantor) belting out “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

It started out as a project to tell the story of Hanukkah’s rise in the United States from a minor holiday in the 1870s to a Jewish counterweight to Christmas in the postwar years, what Mr. Bennett calls “a holiday on steroids.” But as the society members dug through old recordings, they began to think the albums should also address Christmas music by Jews.

“We kept finding artists that either did Hanukkah recordings and Christmas recordings, or Jewish artists that never did Hanukkah recordings at all, but left us Christmas recordings, like Barbra Streisand,” said David Katznelson, a San Francisco record producer who is one of the society’s members. “Yentl herself, and it’s a Christmas recording!”

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