This past Sunday in a rented storefront in Crown Heights, Vaybertaytsh, a podcast which producer Sandy Fox bills as “the first—as far as we know— Yiddish speaking, feminist radio program” celebrated the release of its second season.

Before it was a podcast, “Vaybertaytsh” – literally “translations for women” in Yiddish—was a term once used for commentaries on Torah written by Hebrew-literate Ashkenazi men for their Yiddish-speaking women wives (and other women) who were unlikely to learn the “Loshnkoydesh” (“holy tongue”) themselves. “Vaybertaytsh” also came at times to refer to the language of Yiddish itself, one of many names the “jargon” (another slang term for Yiddish) went by.

This podcast is a project of reclamation of the word.  Women themselves become the teachers, “flipping the concept of ‘vaybertaytsh’ on its head,” says Fox, “explaining and commenting on our own terms.” Interviews in the first season included a midwife serving the Hasidic community, a female cantor  for the renewal movement in Germany, and several international attendees of the Women’s March last January.

These interviews and conversations take place entirely in Yiddish, and the podcast draws guests mainly from the international community of Yiddishists, a group which speaks Yiddish in order to preserve the language. The Yiddishist movement began at the turn of the 20th century as activists and scholars sought to “legitimize” what was at the time seen as a “low” tongue, spoken by unsophisticated people—and women. “Those scholars were primarily men whose mission was to de-feminize Yiddish, to distance the language from its association with women as a ‘mameloshn,’ [or ‘mom’s tongue’],” Fox told me.

Sandy Fox, who also goes by the Yiddish name Sosye, describes Vaybertaytsh both as a continuation and a refutation of that philosophy. Just as these men sought to produce mainstream literature and journalism in Yiddish, Fox creates episodes of Vaybertaytsh available for download on any podcast app.

But unlike this earlier wave of Yiddishists, Fox does not shy from association with women or the home. The pilot opens with a tribute to the Riot Grrrl music movement , and another episode in the first season is devoted to a conversation between women who have lost their mothers on their memories of those women.

Nor does Fox insist on a rigid grammatical purity, as the first wave of many turn-of-the-century Yiddishists did. “I don’t really believe there is such a thing as ‘authentic’ Yiddish,” she says, “and it can be uncomfortable to speak perfect clinical Yiddish.” Vaybertaytsh’s opening episode contains a kind of non-apology for any grammatical “mistakes” the podcast may make: “Let’s simply feel free to speak” says Fox in the first episode (in of course, Yiddish). Creating something new is “too important to wait for a perfect Yiddish.”

As a Yiddish learner who speaks with less than perfect grammar, this stance excites me. More than once I have lost my train of thought while speaking due to interruptions correcting my grammar. While such interruptions are kindly meant and an important part of the language-learning process, they can make communication a little exhausting. “Often it’s been men serving as the gatekeepers,” Fox notes.  That gate-keeping can turn people away from actually speaking the language, something the relatively small community of Yiddishists arguably cannot afford.

At the second season’s release party, Fox welcomed non-Yiddish-fluent guests to “Yiddishland” before continuing entirely in Yiddish, while translations in English appeared onscreen behind her. “Maybe it seems weird, considering the fact that we all speak English. But such is the way of the Yiddishists,” the screen read, “Welcome to our world.”

The default language of the night was Yiddish, with a “learner’s couch” equipped with a dictionary. Party attendees schmoozed over the food, the drinks,  and the choice of women’s social justice groups to which to donate the nights proceeds (the winner was Days for Girls), all in Yiddish of varying fluency. Emboldened by the podcast’s premise, I took my time forming clunky sentences for concepts that I might have communicated much faster in English. By the time the event ended, I was only rarely asking my conversational partners to repeat themselves.

One man asked me near the evening’s end how I had first encountered Vaybertaytsh. I told him I’d heard of it online, I’d been unsure if my language comprehension would be strong enough to follow along, but I eventually checked it out and was using it to train my ear. “And here I am!” I finished exuberantly. My conversational partner nodded. “Okay. But I didn’t mean the podcast—I meant the language.”

Rachel Wetter is an educator and history nerd living in New York who also goes by Rokhl.

Images via Facebook.

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While we generally leave journalists and political pundits to discuss and predict what the immediate future may bring, there are scores of nerdy, computer-literate, and otherwise “indoor” types who formulate what will happen in the next millennia, instead of in the next fiscal quarter. These are our dear and not-so-near science-fiction writers, whose pimply-faced audiences are turning their inventions into realities as we tweet. One of their more lighthearted prophecies is the satirical animated series Futurama, created by David X. Cohen and The Simpsons’ Matt Groening, which addresses the issues of life in 31st-century “New New York.”

The series, which was canceled by Fox in 2003 and revived by Comedy Central in 2008 due to high DVD sales and a committed fanbase, much like Family Guy, follows the dysfunctional misadventures of the crew of Planet Express, a dismally inefficient intergalactic delivery service. Under the auspices of the geriatric mad scientist Prof. Farnsworth, the business serves as a courier for such futuristic items like dark matter energy, alien aphrodisiacs, and honey from giant space bees. In this not-so-advanced landscape, aliens and mutants live alongside humans, hovercars and pneumatic tube travel are realities, and the preserved head of Richard Nixon is President of Earth.

The world of Futurama can also provide us with some foresight on what the Jewish legacy might be like in a thousand years through Dr. John Zoidberg: The pathetic and klutzy lobster-like extraterrestrial with questionable medical skills and a strong Yiddish accent, who also happens to be the resident doctor of Planet Express.

Disliked and ignored by virtually everyone on the show, this lab coat-donning crustaceous alien is perpetually scavenging for garbage scraps as well as any iota of sociable interaction and approval—(he is so unlikeable that you might get punched in the face for even imitating him. Unlike most other secondary characters on the show, Zoidberg is rarely seen engaging in any dialogue with others—he exists mainly as an entertaining and foolish sideshow, recalling Chaplin-esque misadventures and the reckless blunders of the Three Stooges. His eager desire for attention has even found its way into Internet culture with the popular “Why not Zoidberg?” meme—something that he never actually says in the show but was created as a pastiche from his need for recognition and Yiddish rhetoric.

Despite Zoidberg’s accent, which voice actor Billy West claims was influenced by “marble-mouthed” Jewish actor George Jessel as well as other “rabbinical” and Bronx voices (which is complemented by telltale grammatical constructions along the lines of “You want I should put it here?”), he and others of his species are never explicitly referenced as Jewish. We get many clues, however, such as the episode featuring his burnt-out movie star uncle Harold Zoid—who was voiced by the inimitable voice and character actor Hank Azaria (the same year he starred in a TV movie about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising)—that recalls the golden, and largely Jewish, age of Hollywood.

A later season showcases Zoidberg’s home planet Decapod 10, full of even thicker-accented Ashkenazi shellfish (perhaps planet Decapod 9 is full of Sephardic crabs?). Further solidifying his Jew cred, in my personal favorite Zoidberg moment and one particularly telling of his cultural and stereotypical Jewishness, he has a flashback of his mother reprimanding his dream to become a comedian and suggests he become a respectable doctor—yet she later reprimands him once more for being spineless and giving up his dream of becoming a comedian by going to medical school.

Yet aside from accents and behavior, nowhere does it ever mention that Zoidberg or his fellow trayf crustaceans are Jewish. Interestingly enough, the only explicitly Jewish characters on Futurama are a handful of robots—we witness a “Goldborg Bot Mitzvah,” complete with robot hora dancing, a banner reading “today you are a robot” in Hebrew, and a rabbi explaining his attitude toward Robot Jesus—he believes he was built, and well programmed, but not the robot messiah.

The Jewish robot life cycle also includes “Robanukah,” a holiday that spurs Bender, Planet Express’ mischievous robot, to sing a song explaining the traditional six and a half weeks of oil wrestling—which eventually faces a crisis when his oil supply runs short two weeks, prompting Bender to descry that he needs oil for the whole holiday since it isn’t a “lousy Reform Robanukah.” Although Zoidberg’s Jewishness is less explicit than the robots’, he is still clearly Jewish. As others have noted, unlike the Irish vaudeville comedy of The Simpsons, Futurama is pervaded by the Jewishness of its borscht-belt comedy and Woody Allen-esque despair, giving Zoidberg and others their distinct and not-so-kosher personalities.

Given his disguised yiddishkeit, Zoidberg appropriately plays the parts of the Jewish character types the schlemiel and schlimazel—the one who spills the soup and the one who gets spilled on. While one could lament that the legacy of Jewishness in Futurama is embodied by Zoidberg’s overwhelming ineptitude, it’s clear that the series serves as one more atomic bond in the ever-strong molecular chain between Jews and geekdom. And above everything else, I’m certainly glad that at least according to Futurama, Jewish humor has survived for another thousand years.

Previously on Network Jews:

Jean-Ralphio, the status-obsessed sidekick on Parks and Recreation.

Shoshanna, the scene-stealing afterthought on Girls.

Ruxin, the fantasy football-obsessed jerk on The League.

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