Arguments, whether about the smallest detail or the most profound concepts, are a fundamental aspect of Jewish tradition. Across different denominations like Reform and Orthodox, the spirited exchange of ideas is a shared practice, often unfolding over extended periods without necessarily reaching a definitive conclusion.
That culture of dispute is at the spiritual and comedic heart of “The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language,” a new chamber opera created by composer Alex Weiser and librettist Ben Kaplan. The work vividly portrays the disagreements between two scholars intensely focused on the scope and content of a monumental Yiddish dictionary.
The opera, which will be performed at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan, is rooted in the true story of the complex relationship between Yudel Mark and Max Weinreich.
Weinreich was a towering figure in Yiddish scholarship and a co-founder of YIVO, an organization established in Vilna, Poland, in 1925, dedicated to promoting the study of Yiddish culture. When the Nazis rose to power, Weinreich, along with YIVO, relocated to New York.
After World War II, YIVO embarked on publishing a comprehensive Yiddish dictionary, entrusting Yudel (rhymes with strudel) Mark with its oversight. Mark, a Yiddish scholar and linguist with an obsessive drive, envisioned a dictionary that would document every single Yiddish word—all 250,000 or so. To Weinreich’s dismay, this even included neologisms that might one day exist.
To make matters worse, Mark chose to disregard the “takones,” a set of rules established by Weinreich and YIVO in 1937 to standardize Yiddish, which had varied significantly across Europe where 7 to 8 million Yiddish speakers lived before the war.
Weinreich, known for his authoritative demeanor, felt insulted that someone would dare alter established prefixes and spellings, and he threatened to withdraw YIVO’s logo from the dictionary project.
Following Weinreich’s death, Mark penned a heartfelt obituary in the Forverts, the Yiddish newspaper, affectionately calling Weinreich his bar plugta. This Talmudic term roughly translates to “scholarly opponent” or “philosophical sparring partner,” though “frenemy” might be the closest modern equivalent. The intense arguments between the two men, which would have daunted anyone less accustomed to spirited bickering, provide both profound meaning and humor to the opera due to their incompatible objectives.
“To tell the story accurately, we had to expose all the contentious arguments that took place,” Kaplan explained during an interview at YIVO’s Chelsea offices, where he and Weiser work. Mark and Weinreich were “at times petty, grandiose, or even messianic,” Kaplan added. “They’d spend hours arguing over a single diacritic. It sounds humorous, but for them, it was a matter of life and death.”
Mark believed that each Yiddish word possessed a sacred spark, and he committed himself to rescuing them all from what he termed “the icy sea of forgetting.” His dedication was utterly impractical. “How long do you expect this dictionary to be?” Weinstein asks in the opera. “Only 10 volumes,” Mark replies, to his colleague’s alarm. “Maybe 12,” he adds.
Mark, the idealistic dreamer lacking in tact (portrayed with dry exasperation by Jason Weisinger), is a tenor, fitting for a heroic opera figure. Weinreich (Gideon Dabi), the stern disciplinarian, is a baritone. “But Max isn’t actually the villain,” Weiser clarifies. “Neither one is entirely right.”
Sung in a blend of English and Yiddish — with supertitles projected for the audience — the opera begins in 1953, the year work on the dictionary commenced. In a touch of mysticism, influenced by Tony Kushner (Kaplan was his assistant for a year), Yudel Mark receives a divine commission from three mezzo-sopranos. These figures are celestial manifestations of alef, the first letter in the Yiddish alphabet. The alefs implore him to metaphorically open the graves of Yiddish words and “blow into them a breath of life.”
Weiser composed the opera for clarinet, string quintet, and piano. He deliberately avoided the augmented second, an interval often associated with Jewish music, and krekhts, a sobbing musical ornamentation common in klezmer and cantorial singing. Weiser noted that some of his favorite composers — like Steve Reich and Bang on a Can founders Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe — craft pieces “that explore Jewish topics, but don’t have a stereotypically Jewish sound.”
Weiser and Kaplan share many biographical similarities. Both are 36, grew up in secular Jewish families, and attended liberal arts colleges on the East Coast. Weiser, the director of public programs at YIVO, was raised near Union Square and studied at Yale, taking classes with Lang, before earning a master’s degree from New York University. When he joined YIVO in 2016, he hadn’t even heard of the organization. But upon delving into Yiddish and its literature, he said, “my mind exploded.”
On his debut album, “and all the days were purple,” released in 2019, Weiser set Yiddish and English poems to post-minimalist soundscapes. The New Yorker described it as a “ravishing song cycle.”
A few months into Weiser’s tenure at YIVO, the organization was seeking a director of education, and he encouraged Kaplan to apply for the position. (The two became friends after meeting at a Christmas party, a detail that often brings laughter.)
Kaplan, who grew up in Queens and on Long Island, stated, “I didn’t think I’d do anything Jewish after my bar mitzvah.” At Williams College, he enrolled in a class on the Hebrew Bible as literature, and recalled, “I felt a sense of betrayal — why wasn’t I taught this growing up?” He then fully embraced his studies, adding a Jewish studies concentration.
Weiser and Kaplan previously collaborated on “State of the Jews,” an opera about the Zionist writer Theodor Herzl, which debuted in 2019. Weiser then read his friend Alec Burko’s Ph.D. thesis on postwar academic efforts to preserve Yiddish, which sparked his own moment of divine inspiration. “Alex said, ‘Our next opera is about a Yiddish dictionary,’” Kaplan recounted. “I said, ‘Leave me alone.’” That reaction, however, quickly changed after he read Burko’s dissertation.
Roughly half of the world’s Yiddish speakers perished in the Holocaust. Afterward, many Jews, eager to assimilate, viewed it as a painful reminder of subjugation—a comical language of harsh sounds and spitting. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, famously called it “a grating, foreign language,” and went so far as to ban Yiddish theater and newspapers. As Kaplan recognized, the dictionary saga wasn’t just about words.
“It’s about memory and grief,” he observed, “about how much of your culture you can save and how much you leave behind.”
It’s no surprise to reveal that Mark, who passed away in 1975, never completed his ambitious dictionary. YIVO published four volumes, which only cover entries up to the letter alef, and two additional volumes have since been digitized and made available online. Despite these efforts, the full breadth of Yiddish vocabulary has yet to be comprehensively documented.
For Weiser and Kaplan, “The Great Dictionary” is not a tale of failure. Instead, its true significance lies in the ongoing dialogue, or “pilpl” in Yiddish, between Weinreich and Mark—a style of argument that dates back 2,000 years to debates between the Jewish sages Shammai and Hillel, and perhaps even further to Abraham’s challenging of God regarding Sodom and Gomorrah. In the Mishnah, a third-century document of Jewish wisdom, rabbis coined the term “an argument for the sake of heaven” (or “machloket l’shem shamayim” in Hebrew) to highlight that scholarly debate is not just permitted, but actively encouraged.
Yudel Mark was astute enough to know he would never finish the dictionary. “So we both will not live to see it,” he wrote to a colleague in a letter preserved in YIVO’s extensive archive. “What of it?”