A feature-length documentary about the progressive artists spearheading a global cultural renaissance of the endangered | dG1fM2Exc3FRcEtZbXc
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Just like the Inuit have got 300-plus words for snow, Yiddish has got 300-plus words for
00:08loser.
00:13Growing up, I did not like being spoken to in Yiddish on the street.
00:16It had overtones of poverty, bad, heavy food.
00:27In the theater, there were two types of Jews, dead in a concentration camp or in a uniform
00:33in Israel.
00:34Okay, but there's a whole world of in-between.
00:40It's always going to be provocative to do a production in Berlin in Yiddish.
00:46I'm from an Irish Catholic family.
00:47I learned Yiddish because there's great literature.
00:49Isaac Becheva Singer won the Nobel Prize in Yiddish.
00:53When I was young, I was not told about these playwrights and visionaries.
00:56Though I knew that I was Jewish, I didn't necessarily have Jewish, and I'm starting
01:01to get Jewish.
01:05What's special about this show is that it's new Yiddish work on a bigger stage.
01:09It's so important to do this, especially now.
01:12The right wing has been growing stronger.
01:14Neo-Nazis have been defacing the memorial.
01:17One of the biggest questions is, how can you believe in any beauty in the face of such
01:22darkness?
01:23Yiddish is not just about the past.
01:33What we want is to bring this language alive again.
01:40The difference between a shlemil and shlemazl, the shlemil is the one who drops the soup,
01:45and the shlemazl is the one who it lands on.
01:52Yiddish speakers are people with passion, with heart, with ideas.
01:58And I love those kind of people.