Two words drive Yiddish culture expert Zehavit Stern up the wall: “nostalgia” and “revival.”
Both terms often come up when describing the current state of Yiddish. But for Stern, there’s more to Eastern European Jewish culture than fiddlers, roofs and klezmer bands. The U.C. Berkeley doctoral candidate hopes to demonstrate this with “Jesters and Gestures,” a series of classic Yiddish cinema and contemporary films that explore Yiddish today.
“Revival is not what you should look for,” says the Israeli-born Stern. “Yiddish can be interesting if it’s relevant to us in a social or political way.”
“Jesters and Gestures” takes place Nov. 12 to 24 at U.C. Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive. The series runs in conjunction with the Eli Katz Memorial Yiddish Conference, sponsored by the Graduate Theological Union. Stern served as guest curator of the program.
Among the films she selected, several were filmed in prewar Poland during the golden age of Yiddish cinema. They include “The Dybbuk” (1937), “Little Mother” (1938), and “Jolly Paupers” (1937), featuring the famous Jewish cabaret team Dzigan and Schumacher. Molly Picon, the American-born darling of Yiddish stage and screen, stars in several as well (she traveled back and forth across the Atlantic to star in European-made Yiddish films).
Others, such as director Eleanor Antin’s 1991 experimental film “The Man Without a World,” are more recent documentaries examining the history and impact of a nearly vanished Yiddish culture.
To add some live performance spice, Stern booked the Israeli band Sala Manca and Yarden Erez to perform, musically tying together a Jewish past and present.
Stern says the idea for the series grew out of a class she taught at U.C. Berkeley last year, titled “From Old World to Lost World: After-Images of Yiddish Culture.” Her interest in the subject began at home: Her father, who immigrated to Israel from Lithuania in the 1960s, claimed Yiddish as a native language.
As an undergrad, Stern studied German, then realized with her mastery of both Hebrew and German, that Yiddish was tantalizingly close.
“I got hooked,” she says. “I was hoping to find amazing authors no one had heard of, finding the undiscovered Yiddish Kafka. I did find the culture amazing.”
Stern went on to do graduate studies in Yiddish language and culture, with an emphasis on film, at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. She came to Berkeley in 2005 to complete her doctoral dissertation.
Stern hopes attendees of the series will come away with a new appreciation of old Yiddish culture, seeing it as the vibrant, complex and forward-thinking stew that it was.
“One thing I fight against,” she says, “is the way people look at old Yiddish films, and think of them as documents of this precious Jewish life before the Holocaust. I sympathize, but I am very much aware of the fact that the films have another ideology.”
“Jesters and Gestures: Performing Yiddish Culture from Silent Cinema to Avant-Garde Film” runs Nov. 12-24 at the Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. Tickets: $4.50-$9.50. Information: (510) 642-0808 or online at bampfa.berkeley.edu.