the Gaza War in 2014...I know a lot of people became activists during that period. That’s actually when IfNotNow emerged. - Eli Valley

Satirizing the powerless is not good satire

thirty years ago, alt-weeklies were the lifebloods of communities. Now, you can count them on one hand.

(On the question of authenticity there is also a leftist Jewish trend to try and go back to a time before assimilation. For example learning Yiddish and reconnecting to a culture that existed before the holocaust. Is this trend trying to uphold a romantic idealized version of Judaism that cannot exist anymore?) I don’t think learning Yiddish and whatever else they’re doing is pre-assimilation. Jews were speaking Yiddish when they were assimilated. The problem today is that the main Yiddish speakers are Hasidic, but we forget that in New York and Warsaw before the war there were tons of Yiddish speakers who were assimilated. It was more the language of cultural autonomy. The larger debate is something I grapple with too, and it goes back to your question about living off the fumes of a dead culture. But for most cultures, in order to create something new you need to be well steeped in the roots and branches of what came before. So I don’t think it’s simply nostalgia. I think they‘re learning Yiddish as a galvanizing point in order to bound forward with something new, whatever that might be.