Last Spring, George Floyd gasped, "I can't breathe," seconds before his murder under the knee of a police officer. His plea became a metaphor for the violence of racism in America, and the months of reckoning that have followed have revealed a painful rift in America over the country's commitment to equality. This year, many Americans have asked how it's possible to express solidarity with, and fight for, the human rights of all groups, including those that may not be our own. In a year marked both by a deepening divide over social justice and the fear and loss due to the global pandemic, the celebration of Passover, a holiday commemorating exodus from slavery, offers an opportunity to think about how one group's experience of injustice can help to understand another group's pain.
I expect that this year, perhaps more than usual, many will be asking at their seder tables how Jews can translate the collective experience of trauma to speak out against racist violence in the United States. This was a burning question for the Yiddish poets who are the subject of my book, Songs in Dark Times, who found themselves between a privileged majority and threatened minority. In 1931, for example, Malka Lee, an immigrant from Galicia to New York, wrote about a Black man on a subway who described a lynching in the American south.
Now I hear his young cry on the wind
"My brother's body's swinging from a pine."
He raises his fist and waves it, wild,
He sees the murderer's portrait in every white…
The Yiddish poets I write about were not religious Jews. Nevertheless, the poetry they wrote in the interwar period is a wellspring of thought on the struggle among Jews to fight for other groups' freedom. My book is the story of Yiddish leftist internationalist poets who, in the 1920s and '30s, described the struggles of non-Jewish groups, including Chinese workers, Black Americans, Spanish republicans, Palestinian Arabs, and Ukrainian peasants. These writers attempted to translate the pain of others by using passwords from Jewish religious texts and collective memory. They were, in essence, changing what "we" meant—altering it from "we Jews" to "we workers of the world." These poets were rejecting the very idea of a religious or ethnic community of Jews. But they were also drawing from a rich tradition of Jewish text and practice to make sense of a polarized world.
The Yiddish internationalist poets were drawing from a history of Jewish struggle to convince their readers to empathize with others' struggles. For example, in keeping with the Jewish tradition of the yahrzeit (commemoration of the anniversary of a death), H. Leivick marked the occasion of a year after the execution of the Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in his poem "A Sacco-Vanzetti Year." Leivick identifies the perpetrator of the crime against the two anarchists as "The same evil from accuser to accuser." In the Yiddish original, Leivik's "accuser" is a "kateyger," the talmudic term for prosecutor which had come to mean, in Yiddish, "prosecuting angel." Leivick, with this Jewish password, links the injustice against the Italian anarchists to the many historical injustices against Jews.
Esther Shumiatsher, who wrote poignantly in the late 1920s about the human suffering she observed on her world travels…
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