The Inquisition! The Inquisition!

There were times when I conversed with Rocky in Yiddish. During our years together, I wrote Yiddish poetry. I did VCE Yiddish—the equivalent of what was called matriculation when I was young. I wrote a theatre piece about -dybbuks-Yiddish ghosts. Perhaps I performed it to Rocky on our morning walks.

I wonder about all this as we walk, the little brown dog and I, and though I rarely do so, I am listening to Yiddish music through my headphones which means that instead of aimless memories -aimless in the sense that they seem to have no rhyme or reason - accompanying me, I am walking in Yiddish memories which in my case are memories set to music and the memories are not ancient ones, but almost contemporary.

Yiddish has ceased some time ago to be a warm bath of ancient memories of a long-vanished time. It is true that there are songs, Yiddish songs, that when I hear them, cause a flood of tears, large sobbing tears, as if I am hearing these songs for the first time and for the first time, feeling in my soul what was lost when the songs and their composers, along with the millions of Jews who sang them, were extinguished in the Holocaust.

In the main, however, I ceased some time ago to be a Yiddish nostalgist, not wholly, because there have always been times when Yiddish songs felt like a wound, like the time my old sister was dying in an old people’s home and the only time she broke out of the prison of a creeping dementia was when we sang with her together, my children and Anne and I, the songs my sister sang as if she was living in them.

Yiddish lives for me in a wholly unexpected way. For a time, for no apparent reason, I found myself writing Yiddish poetry. I wrote in transliterated Yiddish because it had been many years since I had read Yiddish and indeed it had been a long time since I had spoken Yiddish.

My children and nephew formed a Yiddish band called The Bashevis Singers. Their first album was full of the songs that had made me weep since childhood. There was even a song on the album that was written by my son and me—I wrote the poem, he put it to music.

And then, over years really, their Yiddish music became timeless, contemporary in some way though not exactly modern. It moved away from the music of the vanished shtetl and the annihilated Jewish working class to music that was rooted in Judaism and Jewish mysticism, music that was contemporary and yet ancient.

They have taken me on their Yiddish journey which in truth has been a journey into aspects of Judaism, and that in part explains why on this chilly winter morning, I am listening to Yiddish music, to a new album by The Bashevis Singers that is based on the early nature poetry of the greatest Yiddish poet of the 20^th century, Avrom Sutzkever. Gorgeous songs. To call them songs of the natural world would do them, a disservice, for they are magical and overflowing with an indescribable joy.

But I am in part listening to these songs to sooth my troubled soul because once again in recent days, the Bund, once a great mass movement of Jewish workers in Eastern Europe, the majority of whom were annihilated by the Nazis, has again been maligned, its rootedness in the Jewish people denied, its love for Yiddish and Yiddish song and Yiddish stories, its love of Yiddishkeit traduced and not by the antizionists, the so-called neo-Bundists who are stealing my Bundist past, but by a man I admire and still admire but now with something approaching wariness.

Yossi Klein Halevi is the author of Letters to my Palestinian Neighbour, a brave and thoughtful book about Jews and Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, Halevi, an orthodox Jew but not a supporter of the Religious Zionist party in Israel, has been, among other things, trying to set the limits to what Jews can believe and advocate for before they should be banished from the Jewish people. Before they are, in his words, considered to be outside the tent. They must be banished because they have become enemies of the Jewish people.

I am not without some sympathy for banishment because some antizionists it seems to me, are blind to Jewish suffering in Israel and in the diaspora. They ridicule the notion that antisemitism is on the rise, that Jews feel increasingly unsafe, that the threat of antisemitic violence is blighting Jewish life and the lives of Jewish children.

Bad Jews I reckon, but Jews, nevertheless. The idea that they could be banished is ridiculous conjuring up as it does, the Sanhedrin that used to sit to decide whether bad Jews should be excommunicated the way the Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, was expelled from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in the 17^th century.

A few days ago, Yossi Klein Halevi was interviewed at an event in Jerusalem and broadcast on the For Heaven’s Sake podcast he shares with Rabbi Donniel Hartman, a podcast with many thousands of followers. I am among them. The title of the podcast was The Post October 7 Jew. You know I now can’t recall most of it except those parts where Halevi attacked the Bund.

I have written a lot about the resurrection of the Bund by antizionists and how this resurrection, has created an antizionist Jew who far from being a small sliver of the Jewish people, is the inheritor of a Jewish antizionism that at its heyday, was more popular, had more followers, than the Zionists. But the Bund they worship is a confection, a terrible distortion of what the Bund was and still is.

And now along comes Yossi Klein Halevi who is too concerned in my view with policing what is a kosher Jew ―and what he wants to say—at one stage he says he is obsessed with the Bund—is that neo-Bundists have got it right, that the Bund was always and forever essentially an antizionist movement.

And where it is still alive today—for Halevi pronounces it dead if not buried― he would consider it outside the Jewish tent, enemies of the Jewish people the way the Neo-Bundists are enemies of the Jewish people.

The Bundists were always outside the tent according to Halevi. Even after most of them were murdered during the Holocaust, the remnant of the Bund that survived, the few thousand Bundist survivors who managed to make it to the Displaced Persons Camps in Austria and Germany, were treated with contempt by the vast majority of the 300,000 Jewish inhabitants of the camps.

Not just that: The Bundists had to give up their antizionist ideology if they wanted to stay in the camps. There were Bundists, according to Halevi, who refused to cooperate with what certainly sounds like a sort of inquisition and these Bundists were expelled from the camps.

First I’ve heard of any of this.

I was born in an Austrian DP camp. My family lived in that camp for four years. My father was not a Bundist, but he was a Bundist fellow traveller. He knew Bundists in the camp, some of whom had been leaders of the Bund before the war. None of them were expelled from the camp as far as I know.

Leaders of the Bund who had survived did travel to the camps to try and organise exit visas for Bund members. No doubt the Zionist emissaries sent from Palestine to encourage the survivors to make Aliya were not in love with these Bundists. But expel them? Force them to give up their ideology? I think this from Halevi is a travesty of the truth.

What it says to me is that this obsession with drawing boundaries, with deciding who should and should not remain in the tent of the Jews has led him to a place where all obsessions eventually lead. He has reduced the Bund—and the Bundists who are still alive and thriving in Melbourne―to a caricature. He has emptied it of its commitment to the Jewish people, to its commitment to Yiddish culture and a life in Yiddish. He has reduced it, in his own words, to a bad idea.

The music does not soothe me. The gorgeous songs are gorgeous, but it feels to me like Halevi has wounded them, wounded these songs. This feeling will pass I know. The music is transcendental and will transcend Halevi’s accusations. The Bashevis Singers are the children and grandchildren of Bundists. Without that ancestry I doubt they would ever have produced Yiddish music of such spiritual beauty. In Yiddish, the language that I assume Halevi thinks died with the death of the Bund.

Listen to it. In the music, in the songs, is a truth that Halevi has chosen not to understand.

Listen to The Bashevis Singers new album here:

Moon's Milk