This weekend I had the pleasure of watching the recent film ‘Kneecap’ starring the titular Belfast-based rap trio, Kneecap. With their tracksuits and Beastie Boys-esque beats, one might have approached the film expecting a boyish romp through Belfast or perhaps a simple coming of age flick told through Irish language music. However Kneecap are anything but simple. Their snarky endorsement of political violence, their scorn for all things imperialist and their unwavering support for Irish independence in the Ulster counties, the trio have been praised as revolutionaries by some and chastised as hoodlums by others. Their gimmick, if you can call it that, is that they’re also all native Irish speakers and rap predominantly in the Irish language. The movie is a fictionalized retelling of their rise in Belfast, and how they used the Irish language in their music as a way of protesting the continued British occupation of the northern 6 Counties. It has won a series of awards since its premiere and has even been selected as the Irish submission to the Oscars. The band has been the subject of government censorship in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Having had their grant money stripped from them by the British government over their political views, and having been barred from entering the United States until recently, it’s fair to say that the trio has garnered controversy for their principled stand on imperialism both abroad and at home.
I myself am someone of fairly recent Irish heritage. My great-grandmother left her home in Newry during the Irish War of Independence to escape the violence that had claimed a number of her family members. This heritage drew me to Kneecap’s music as well as their film. Prior to viewing, I expected to walk away galvanized to learn the Irish language, and to honor my heritage and my family who died for the dream of Irish independence. What I didn’t expect was to walk away wanting to learn Yiddish.
The truth about me is that I am not very in tune with my Irishness. Intellectually, I have always understood it to be a part of me. My grandfather used to have a mental list of the families in County Armagh that we were related to that he would share with any person who lent him an ear. My family has a big corned beef and cabbage dinner every Saint Patrick’s Day (I swear to G-d). We even celebrate Christmas. But when confronted with my identity, and asked how I would define myself, the answer has always been that I am a Jew. I am most familiar with that part of myself, in so many ways it is a defining aspect of who I am. Even my Irish family is now largely Jewish through a series of conversions and marriages. Perhaps that is why, as I walked out of the AMC at the Garden State Plaza, I felt an overwhelming urge to open my Duolingo app and start practicing my Yiddish.
The movie begins with the backstory of one of the members of the trio, working as a school teacher. He privately laments the decline of the Irish language and wishes for something to galvanize Irish youth into viewing it as a language worth learning, speaking, and living in. The movie serves to show how Kneecap did exactly that—galvanizing young people in the North of Ireland and beyond into learning their language through their music and endorsement of ‘hood behavior.’ As I watched, I found myself daydreaming about the same thing happening with Yiddish here in America. How cool it would be to see young Jewish folk, (and non-Jewish folk for that matter), engaging with Yiddish language culture in a modern, undeniably exciting way.
There’s no denying that Yiddish has an antiquity problem, and that Yiddish music has often fallen into the expected outlet of Klezmer; the only genre where the language has much of a presence. In mainstream pop culture, Klezmer itself, though incredibly versatile and expansive, is often relegated to being the background music to a slapstick comedy routine or to give a setting a musical air of Jewishness. Similarly, Yiddish as a language is not given much thought aside from the sprinkling of vocabulary words into an overtly Jewish character’s vocabulary. Though Jewish people have influenced countless aspects of pop culture, our culture is almost always the butt of a joke, something to be pitied, or something to be mentioned in the online biography of an otherwise non-Jewish character. It’s not often at the forefront, and it’s not often portrayed as radical.
Like Irish, despite the misconceptions, Yiddish is a living language. Though under threat, many thousands of people still use Yiddish in their daily lives.. In Hasidic communities in the United States, particularly in the Lower Hudson Valley of New York, it is common to find billboards, ambulances, and even storefront signs in Yiddish. There are Yiddish oriented newspapers and websites, you can even set your iPhone to be primarily in Yiddish (though the formatting is still somewhat subpar and will occasionally fill in the gaps with another language). Even in secular Jewish circles, there are gasps of contemporary Yiddish culture. Bands such as Forshpil and Yiddish Princess who’s music are a love letter to Yiddish, and even the many Yiddish productions of Fiddler on the Roof are small victories for the continued usage and existence of the language.
Here is where the depiction of Irish in the film wholly departs from mainstream depictions of Yiddish. After 800 years of British occupation and rule in Ireland, the Irish language has become inherently political- a politicization that Kneecap uses to their advantage. The film gives space for characters to articulate the sociological capital of the Irish language, how centuries British repression had nearly driven it to extinction, and how the lasting ethnolinguistic impact of English on Irish citizens is an extension of colonial rule. I couldn’t help drawing a continuity between the fraught history of Irish and the linguistic decimation Yiddish suffered in the years following the Shoah. Yiddish speakers across the world had not only just seen their entire world wiped out, but were now being forced to abandon their mother tongues to assimilate into American, Israeli, or Soviet culture. In a way, they were being forced to abandon the last living connection they might have had to their deceased loved ones, who would have most likely been monolingual Yiddish speakers. This repression, perpetuated both by the traumatized self and by various state entities, has led to a sharp decline inYiddish speakers, save for the various sects of Hasidim and a myriad of elderly Jews who now make their homes in Israel, Australia, or the Americas.
In Ireland, the use of the Irish is often politicized to mean support for the Irish Republican Army and a rejection of all things British. Under the influence of Kneecap, the Irish language has expanded itself beyond folk music and Troubles-era protest ballads into a full endorsement of political violence, modern depravity, and anarchy set to 808s. Yiddish can and should be used in that way, especially at a moment in Jewish history that demands a rejection of the violence perpetrated by the State of Israel. The Israeli government’s appropriation of Jewish religion, language, and culture to justify their atrocious crimes must be rejected by Jews everywhere. But a key facet of Jewish culture that has been explicitly excluded from this appropriation- Yiddish language and culture. Despite being the most consistently spoken language by Ashkenazi Jews at the foundation of the Israeli state, it was discarded for the unifying Hebrew, prompting the latter’s resurgence into common parlance. If Netanyahu claims the violence of his government is perpetrated in the name of a Hebrew-speaking population with no regard for the community or ethics that lie outside the Levant, we can invoke that shunned monster of Yiddish to serve a community of independent diasporists.
In a world conditioned to mollify and silence all Jewish interjections, Yiddish is often a semi-conscious way of asserting one’s Jewishness in conversation. I have had many a conversation with non-Jewish people who look at me like I have three heads when I say that something seems like a schlep, or when I’m feeling verklempt. Few Yiddish phrases have made their way into modern America’s dialect, and every time they appear in a sentence it feels like an ember being blown on by the breath of someone not quite willing to give up on a dying campfire.
In the film, DJ Provai describes Irish as the last dodo bird encased in a glass habitat, forced to be on display as a living relic but not allowed to be free and reproduce. He says that Irish speakers need to break that glass and release the dodo as an enthusiastic, albeit convoluted, metaphor for the proliferation of Irish language culture. Yiddish is not just a novelty. It is a language with a deep history that permeates the very core of Jewish, specifically Ashkenazi cultural expression. The same argument for the mobilization of Yiddish can be said for Ladino, Tat, Arabic, and the plethora of other languages spoken by non-Ashkenazi Jews. Part of the beauty of our people is our diversity, especially in the way we speak. Now more than ever it is important for us as Jews to reject linguistic totality, to reassert ourselves as an independent community who will not be made beholden to any government and to seek community in each other. Put Yiddish in your art, in your music. Make it permeate the minds of those who sought to destroy it. Pour a whole bottle of kerosene on that dying campfire. Let the world know that we are still here, and so is our tongue.
