
Discuss the topics below with Yiddish Shmoozers (In Translation)
Sunday, January 26
4-5:30 pm Pacific
Who will be today's Rokhl Auerbach?
My candidate at the moment is Masha Gessen, who writes opinions for The New York Times under the name M. Gessen, the name they adopted when coming out as a non-binary, trans person.
I want to call attention to their important New York Times opinion piece published in November 2024, "This is the Dark, Unspoken Promise of Trump's Return" Here M. Gessen draws on their conversations and sources with other anti-authoritarian thinkers to suggest (and I add my own language) that America under the current administration is its own thing, sui generis, despite its obvious references to fascism. Although we recognize the reprise of past hits from the Nazi playbook -- deploying a private armed militia (The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers as brown shirts), the threatened grab of adjacent territory (Canada and Greenland as the Sudetenland) -- what is happened to our country is not exactly like anything that has ever happened before.
Which is, after all, what the new president promised, isn't it?
Let us bring a "double-consciousness" reading to Rokhl Auerbach's Warsaw Testament. Let's read for what happened then. And what's happening now.
Please be so good as to sharpen your pencils and note:
How did the diverse Jewish individuals mentioned by Auerbach imagine, perceive, and understand the situation?
What groups and resources were available to them as they decided what to do?
Let us reflect on and discuss our own reactions to and observations of the changes unfolding around us.
The fear? The uncertainty?
Warsaw Testament's strength is in reporting what people felt, thought, and did --step-by-step, in real time.
Join us in reading Warsaw Testament as a resource for thinking about America's situation and ourselves in real time.
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