Arguments, whether about the tiniest detail or the grandest principle, are absolutely fundamental to Jewish tradition. From Reform to Orthodox, Jews across denominations share a common thread: the love of vigorous, often lengthy, debates that can persist for years without a definitive resolution.
This rich culture of spirited disagreement takes center stage, both spiritually and comically, in ‘The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language.’ This brand-new chamber opera, created by composer Alex Weiser and librettist Ben Kaplan, chronicles the intense disputes between two academics as they grapple with the daunting task of compiling an exhaustive Yiddish dictionary.
Set to be performed at Manhattan’s Yivo Institute for Jewish Research on September 18th and 21st, the opera draws its inspiration from the real-life, often contentious, relationship between two pivotal figures: Yudel Mark and Max Weinreich.
Max Weinreich, a towering figure in Yiddish scholarship, was a co-founder of Yivo, an institution established in Vilna, Poland, in 1925, dedicated to promoting Yiddish culture. As the Nazis rose to power, Weinreich, along with Yivo itself, relocated to the safety of New York.
After the devastation of World War II, Yivo embarked on an ambitious project: to publish a truly comprehensive Yiddish dictionary. They entrusted Yudel Mark (whose name rhymes with ‘strudel’), a Yiddish scholar and linguist known for his obsessive tendencies, with its oversight. Mark’s vision was grand: his dictionary would meticulously document every single Yiddish word—all 250,000 of them. To Weinreich’s utter dismay, this even included neologisms that *might* one day come into existence.
Adding to the tension, Mark deliberately chose to disregard the ‘takones’ — a set of rules crafted by Weinreich and Yivo in 1937 to standardize Yiddish. This standardization was a crucial effort, as Yiddish varied significantly across Europe, where seven to eight million speakers lived before the war.
Weinreich, a man with an undeniable imperious streak, was profoundly insulted that anyone would dare alter the established prefixes and spellings. He went so far as to threaten the removal of Yivo’s prestigious logo from the dictionary project.
Following Weinreich’s passing, Mark penned a heartfelt obituary in the Forverts, the prominent Yiddish newspaper. In it, he referred to Weinreich as his ‘bar plugta,’ a Talmudic term that loosely translates to ‘scholarly opponent’ or ‘philosophical sparring partner,’ though perhaps ‘frenemy’ best captures the 21st-century sentiment. The two men engaged in arguments so fierce they would have shattered anyone less accustomed to spirited bickering, and their fundamentally incompatible goals infuse the opera with both profound meaning and genuine humor.
“To accurately portray this story, we had to expose all the unpleasant arguments that took place,” Kaplan explained during an interview at Yivo’s Chelsea offices, where both he and Weiser work. Mark and Weinreich, he added, were “at times petty, grandiose, or messianic.” Kaplan further elaborated, “They would argue over a single diacritic for hours. That’s undeniably amusing, but for them, it was a matter of immense gravity.”
Mark genuinely believed that every Yiddish word held a sacred spark, and he dedicated himself to rescuing them all from what he ominously termed “the icy sea of forgetting.” His unwavering obsession was entirely impractical. In the opera, when Weinstein inquires, “How long do you expect this dictionary to be?” Mark confidently responds, “Only 10 volumes,” to his colleague’s immediate alarm. He then adds, “Maybe 12.”
Mark, the idealistic dreamer with a notable lack of social finesse (portrayed with dry exasperation by Jason Weisinger), is a tenor, fitting the mold of most heroic opera figures. Weinreich (Gideon Dabi), the strict 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 helpful projected supertitles — the opera begins in 1953, the year serious work on the dictionary commenced. In a touch of mystical flair, influenced by Tony Kushner (Kaplan served as his assistant for a year), Yudel Mark receives a divine calling from three mezzo-sopranos. These ethereal figures are divine manifestations of ‘alef,’ the very first letter of the Yiddish alphabet. The ‘alefs’ implore him to metaphorically ‘open the graves of Yiddish words and blow into them a breath of life.’
Weiser meticulously scored the opera for clarinet, string quintet, and piano. He deliberately avoided the augmented second, an interval often instantly recognized as distinctively Jewish in music, as well as ‘krekhts,’ a sobbing musical ornamentation typical of both klezmer and cantorial singing. Weiser noted that some of his admired composers—such as Steve Reich and the Bang on a Can founders Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe—craft pieces that delve into Jewish themes without relying on a stereotypically Jewish sound.
Weiser and Kaplan share a striking number of biographical parallels. Both are 36, grew up in secular Jewish households, and attended liberal arts colleges on the East Coast. Weiser, who now directs public programs at Yivo, was raised near Union Square and pursued his studies at Yale, where he took classes with Lang, before earning a master’s degree at New York University. When he first joined Yivo in 2016, he admitted he hadn’t even heard of the organization. However, as he began immersing himself in Yiddish language and literature, he said, “my mind exploded.”
His debut album, “and all the days were purple,” released in 2019, featured Weiser setting Yiddish and English poems against a backdrop of post-minimalist soundscapes. The New Yorker hailed it as a “ravishing song cycle.”
A few months into Weiser’s tenure at Yivo, the organization sought a new director of education, and he enthusiastically urged Kaplan to apply for the position. (The two had become friends after a rather unexpected meeting at a Christmas party, a detail that now elicits shared laughter.)
Kaplan, who spent his formative years in Queens and on Long Island, confessed, “I didn’t think I’d engage with anything Jewish after my bar mitzvah.” Yet, while at Williams College, a course on the Hebrew Bible as literature ignited a spark. “I felt a sense of betrayal — why wasn’t I taught this growing up?” he recalled. “I then went all in and pursued 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. It was after this that Weiser read his friend Alec Burko’s Ph.D. thesis, focusing on post-war academic efforts to preserve Yiddish, and experienced his own moment of divine inspiration. “Alex said, ‘Our next opera is about a Yiddish dictionary,’” Kaplan recounted. “I initially told him to leave me alone.” But then, he delved into Burko’s dissertation.
Tragically, approximately half of the world’s Yiddish speakers perished in the Holocaust. In the aftermath, many surviving Jews, eager for assimilation, often viewed Yiddish as a painful reminder of subjugation or simply a comical language of harsh sounds. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, notoriously dismissed it as “a grating, foreign language,” and even imposed bans on Yiddish theater and newspapers. As Kaplan keenly observed, the protracted dictionary saga transcended mere words.
“It’s deeply rooted in memory and grief,” he affirmed, “a poignant exploration of how much of your culture you can truly preserve and what inevitably must be left behind.”
It’s no surprise to reveal that Mark, who passed away in 1975, never managed to complete his ambitious dictionary. Yivo ultimately published four volumes, which sadly don’t extend beyond the letter ‘alef,’ and two additional volumes have since been made available online. To this day, the complete lexicon of Yiddish words remains undocumented.
For Weiser and Kaplan, “The Great Dictionary” isn’t a narrative of failure. Instead, its profound significance lies in the ongoing dialogue, or ‘pilpul’ in Yiddish, between Weinreich and Mark. This style of argument stretches back 2,000 years, echoing the debates between the revered Jewish sages Shammai and Hillel, and perhaps even further to Abraham’s challenging exchange with God concerning the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the Mishnah, a third-century compendium of Jewish wisdom, rabbis coined the term — an “argument for the sake of heaven” (or “machloket l’shem shamayim” in Hebrew) — to underscore that scholarly debate is not just permissible, but actively encouraged.
Yudel Mark was astute enough to recognize that he would likely never complete the dictionary. “So we both will not live to see it,” he once wrote to a colleague, in a letter preserved within Yivo’s extensive archive. “What of it?”