Ninety Years of Seattle’s Jewish Newspaper

Seattle’s Jewish Transcript has appeared without interruption since 1924, sometimes playing a mediating role between the city’s Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities. A look at the paper’s early days suggests that Jewish communal preoccupations have changed little. Hannah Pressman writes:

A single page of the Jewish Transcript yields a trove of insights into the pressing concerns of Washington’s Jews in the 1920s. Then, as now, assimilation and the risks of cultural adaptation were prominent themes. My eye was immediately drawn to a serious-looking headline, “Is the Yiddish Language Doomed to Die Very Soon in the United States?” In the wake of the Immigration Act of 1924, . . . the article’s author worried that the immigration quota would “kill Yiddish” by drastically reducing the Jewish readership of Yiddish newspapers. However, a survey of “newsdealers” yielded the interesting observation that “the buyer of Yiddish newspaper buys an English paper at the same time,” proof that, at least in the late 1920s, American Jewish citizens still held on to their mame loshen.

Read more at Stroum Center for Jewish Studies

More about: American Jewish History, Jewish press, Ladino, Seattle, Yiddish

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society