Everyday Ashkenazi Folk Magic Through Yiddish Language Texts:  Ethnography, Prayer, Literature, and Popular Press

with Rokhl Kafrissen

This year, Shvues (the Festival of Weeks) is June 11-13 and our class will include fascinating new Shvues themed material. Some highlights include:

Tikn leyl shvues: Today, the almost-forgotten practice of tikn leyl shvues, staying up all night to learn Torah, has made a mainstream comeback. Jews of all kinds fill the classrooms of JCCs and synagogues during Shvues/Shavuot. But the origins of the tikn are much weirder than anything happening during our modern cheesecake and lecture marathons. We will explore how (and why) spirit possession was part of the first tikn leyl shvues as well as its subsequent connection to the first dybbuk exorcism!

Segules (charms) and kameas (amulets): In the bible, we read how the Jews arrived at Mount Sinai after the exodus from Egypt. At Sinai, God told Moses that if the Jews accepted his commandments, they would be a segule mikol haamim, a treasured possession among all the peoples. (Shvues marks the giving of the law at Mount Sinai.) Today, a segule can refer to anything from holding a bride’s jewelry while she’s under the khupe (as a charm to find a match) to buying your cemetery plot young (to guarantee long life.) Segules of all kinds are a central part of everyday Ashkenazi magic. We will learn how segule went from “God’s treasured possession” to any one of hundreds of magical charms and beliefs.   

Other topics will include: the medieval Shvues-time coming of age ritual that preceded the Bar Mitzvah by hundreds of years; the magical potential of names; how the 16^th century kabalists of Safed reshaped Jewish life in Eastern Europe; traditional Ashkenazi folk beliefs around death, dying, and the intimate relationship between the living and the dead; grave pilgrimages and grave magic; and shprekhers and shprekherkes, the whispering exorcists of Ashkenaz.

As in previous classes, readings from Yiddish-language short stories, newspaper accounts, ethnographic materials, prayers, songs and other texts will be at the center of our learning process, supplemented by English-language primary and secondary sources. All Yiddish texts will have English translations. All lectures and discussion will be in English. Yiddish-readers at all levels are welcome, as are any students who haven’t yet started their Yiddish learning journey, but who want to start familiarizing themselves with the language.

 

Email cjcrokhl@gmail.com to register

Sundays, 3 PM-4:15 PM EST

May 26 – June  16th, 2024

All sessions held virtually via Zoom. Each session will be recorded and available to students to view for a month afterwards.

Registration is $100 for the 4 sessions

Student and artists fee: $50

 

Instructor: Rokhl Kafrissen is a journalist, cultural critic, teacher, playwright and the winner of the prestigious 2022 Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish prize. She’s been writing about life in the capital of Yiddishland since 2005, when her “Rootless Cosmopolitan” column began appearing in Jewish Currents.  Since 2017, her “Rokhl’s Golden City” column has appeared in Tablet magazine twice a month, covering the length and breadth of Yiddish culture. In the summer of 2021, her song “Kum tsu mir” (a Yiddish translation-adaptation of Jimmy Buffett’s Why Don’t We Get Drunk …) was recorded by an all-star klezmer trio and has been viewed over 12,000 times on YouTube. In 2023, she created and taught a brand new course for the Yiddish Book Center called “Between Heaven and Earth: Yiddish Women's Folklore, Rituals, & Magic.” At the university level, she taught a new course of her design during the Fall 2023 semester, an overview of Yiddish history and literature offered to students across the California State University system.