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Conclusion: Polarity or Parallel Struggles?
Seated at desks arranged in a long rectangle, workbooks splayed in front of us bearing our scrawled attempts at oishes,[12] one of my peers at the Yiddish for Illiterates workshop at the Yiddish Festival in Leeuwarden raised her palm to her chin and asked aloud, ‘but what language is the Qu’ran written in?’ As soon as she said it she stiffened, and all eyes in the room fastened upon her, mouths agape. ‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘I mean, the Torah!’ A quiet chorus of nervous laughter ebbed the tension in the room. The man next to her shook his head and raised an eyebrow while he chuckled: what a mistake to make, he seemed to be saying.
Most of the people I spoke with strongly resisted (and resented) the tendency to collapse all Jewish life and practice with Judaism and Israel.[13] Nevertheless, this equivocation is common in popular thought, and conflict in the Middle East is felt to reverberate in anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic actions and ideas in the Netherlands (Berkhout 2010). Shura, for example, notices the way her audiences fluctuate at times when Israel makes headlines, and though she disavows any clean linkage between Israel and her peace-oriented Yiddish music, she cannot ignore this implicit polarization of Jews and Muslims. Daan, a former schoolteacher, remembers hearing his allochtone [14] students calling each other ‘Dirty Jews’; ‘it was not anti-Semitism,’ he says, just a lack of knowledge that ‘here in Amsterdam, being Jewish is quite normal.’ He explained to them that ‘Job Cohen [then Amsterdam’s mayor], he is Jewish, and almost every time a Jew is burgemeester [mayor] of Amsterdam, and the next one will be too... if.’
Daan’s if trails off as he alludes to the possibility that Job Cohen will succeed in his 2010 election bid to become the next Prime Minister of the Netherlands with the Labour party (PvdA), thus defeating the emergent rightist politics exemplified by Geert Wilders and his ‘Party for Freedom’ (PVV).[15] The topic of Wilders arose in much the same way in most of my interviews; subtly shaking their heads or biting their lips, my respondents seemed unwilling or unable to vocalise their dismay at the potential for him, and the populist nationalism he represents, to come to power. With his anti-immigration and anti-Islamic policies, as well as his overt personal and political affiliation with Israel, to many Yiddishists he represents a serious threat to their ‘typically Dutch’ values of tolerance, openness, and secular leftist Jewishness. In arguing for a tradition of Judeo-Christian ethics in the Netherlands that is threatened by Islam, he too constructs an affinity between ‘the Dutch’ and ‘the Jewish’, but on exclusionary religious and political grounds.[16] An open supporter of Israel and its hawkish political stance, Wilders employs a form of philosemitism ‘driven by his loathing of Islam’ that has especially polarised Jews across the Netherlands, who are torn between support for Israel and abhorrence of religious scapegoating (Buruma 2010). There is a different kind of familiarity at work here: the anti-Islamic sentiment circulated by those like Wilders betrays echoes of the anti-Semitic “rabble-rousing” many Dutch have fought to overcome in the postwar period (Berkhout and Pinedo 2010).
In pursuing and affirming the deep amalgamation of Yiddish and Dutch in Koosjer Nederlands, these people are telling a story about what they consider to be a successful integration of ‘a people’ into ‘the nation’. Further, they believe they are doing it in an inclusive and accessible way, as anyone who shares in the Amsterdam dialect can potentially participate in this relationship if they are willing to listen to and speak it as such. This sentiment can form the very real content of contemporary Dutch Yiddish practice. Joop, for example, tells of his band Di Gojim’s[17] latest show, which features the ‘beautiful story’ of a marriage, as it was ‘very special in the years before the War that a Jew was going to be married with a non-Jew in Holland, even Catholic or Protestant.’ Audiences around the country love it; this ‘jewel’, he says, because most people personally know of a similar relationship and ‘it’s the most beautiful thing’.
But there is more at work here than a simple telling of such a story, allegorically positing prewar Jews for contemporary Muslims to demonstrate how the latter can, too, integrate while maintaining their difference. As Daan’s lingering if suggests, much of this sentiment comes in spaces and stutters, in the forms of these Yiddishists’ discourse rather than solely its literal content. It is not just the shared language that is significant at this point, but also ‘the desire or necessity to communicate’ (Carter 2004, 46). This incomplete and inchoate discourse speaks to a general feeling among my informants of a breakdown of communication in the Netherlands, especially with Muslim youths, perhaps as a nagging recognition of the repercussions of verzuiling policy whereby only the elites of each ‘pillar’ would converse (cf. Spruyt 2006). As the Moroccan kids call gabber to each other outside his window, Boudewijn’s realisation that they are demonstrating linguistic affinity with both Dutch and Jewish cultures is ‘the echo of [his] own listening’ and desire to communicate with them, transforming the perceived communication situation between him and the kids; it plunges him and them into the ‘commonplace’ of aural Mokum (Carter 2004, 52). His dismay comes at their lack of awareness that they share this conceptual space, of mutual recognition and existential imbrication. To him, and his peers, this is the sound not only of Jewish Amsterdam but of Amsterdam itself. But this perceived incapacity to communicate in a straightforward way with others is characteristic of the misunderstanding inherent in any dialogue; indeed, this is what constitutes dialogue as a feedback loop of differing understandings, and upholds its goal of ‘keep[ing] the conversation going’ rather than bringing it to a tidy end (Carter 2004, 44). To keep this conversation going, though, might require Boudewijn to learn to speak some Surinamese and Arabic slang, as language develops and proliferates in plural forms, and so do understandings and experiences of place.