A Memoir about Teaching English to Hasidim Is an Antidote to Woke Anti-Americanism

April 30 2021

In 1953, Henry Saltzman graduated from Brooklyn College and took a job teaching secular studies at a ḥasidic elementary school in Brooklyn. Although a Jew from a Yiddish-speaking home, Saltzman was far less pious, and far more Americanized, than his pupils, who belonged to the Satmar branch of Ḥasidism, known for its religious zeal. Saltzman tells the story of this experience in an autobiographical novel, titled Oy! Oy! Oy!: The Teacher Is a Goy. Fred Siegel writes in his review:

Saltzman struggles to educate his class of ten-year-old boys in the ways of the wider culture. He bypasses the dull curriculum he’s been given in hopes that his innovative lessons about vocabulary, geography, and current events will tempt his students to learn about and even appreciate America, their land of refuge. But it’s a delicate dance, and he repeatedly stumbles on ḥasidic sensibilities. First, he looks different. Saltzman wears standard clothing for men of his time in New York: no peyot, no yarmulke, no tsitsit. “He took pride in displaying, by means of a bare head, his freedom from their inhibitions and rules.”

It’s no surprise, then, that one of his future students shouts out defiantly after his job interview: “‘Oy Oy Oy the titchur is a goy.’ . . . There it was. The ugly word meaning Gentile out in the open again, as it had been all through his childhood. Only this time, he was the object of its scorn.”

Yet despite these early missteps, Saltzman’s knowledge of Yiddish makes him the perfect teacher and interlocutor. Deftly fielding the boys’ occasional insults, both intended and unintended, he gradually draws them into a love of secular learning. The class is a ragtag group that includes Holocaust survivors, refugees from displaced-persons (DP) camps, and neglected sons from enormous families. He discovers that the boys, with their limited, Yiddish-accented English, are fascinated by new words. . . .

Amid an epidemic of anti-American wokeness, Henry Saltzman’s thinly fictionalized memoir of mid-20th-century Americanization comes as a welcome respite.

Read more at City Journal

More about: American Jewry, American society, Brooklyn, Hasidim, Jewish education, Satmar

American Middle East Policy Should Focus Less on Stability and More on Weakening Enemies

Feb. 10 2025

To Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump’s plan to remove the entire population of Gaza while the Strip is rebuilt is “unworkable,” at least “as a concrete proposal.” But it is welcome insofar as “its sheer iconoclasm might lead to a healthy rethinking of U.S. strategy and perhaps of Arab and Israeli policies as well.” The U.S., writes Abrams, must not only move beyond the failed approach to Gaza, but also must reject other assumptions that have failed time and again. One is the commitment to an illusory stability:

For two decades, what American policymakers have called “stability” has meant the preservation of the situation in which Gaza was entirely under Hamas control, Hizballah dominated Lebanon, and Iran’s nuclear program advanced. A better term for that situation would have been “erosion,” as U.S. influence steadily slipped away and Washington’s allies became less secure. Now, the United States has a chance to stop that process and aim instead for “reinforcement”: bolstering its interests and allies and actively weakening its adversaries. The result would be a region where threats diminish and U.S. alliances grow stronger.

Such an approach must be applied above all to the greatest threat in today’s Middle East, that of a nuclear Iran:

Trump clearly remains open to the possibility (however small) that an aging [Iranian supreme leader Ali] Khamenei, after witnessing the collapse of [his regional proxies], mulling the possibility of brutal economic sanctions, and being fully aware of the restiveness of his own population, would accept an agreement that stops the nuclear-weapons program and halts payments and arms shipments to Iran’s proxies. But Trump should be equally aware of the trap Khamenei might be setting for him: a phony new negotiation meant to ensnare Washington in talks for years, with Tehran’s negotiators leading Trump on with the mirage of a successful deal and a Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the road while the Iranian nuclear-weapons program grows in the shadows.

Read more at Foreign Affairs

More about: Iran, Middle East, U.S. Foreign policy