Notes

1. Dutch includes a number of ‘leenwoorden’, loan words, from other languages besides Yiddish, notably German and French. Most of these words are well-integrated into the language and generally unremarked upon.

2. ‘Mokum’, or ‘Mokum Aleph’, is a positive local nickname for Amsterdam; Mokum means ‘place’ and Aleph is the letter A in both Yiddish and Hebrew.

3. Over the course of five months in spring 2011, I held six qualitative and informally structured interviews (each lasting between one and two and a half hours) with seven individuals, all involved in one way or another with Yiddish music in and around Amsterdam. This was in addition to the countless casual conversations with these individuals and their fellow Yiddish music enthusiasts. Some are professional singers, some are choir leaders, some play klezmer, some write and translate Yiddish. All but two interviewed for this paper are of the postwar generation and were born and raised in the Netherlands; this demographic – over-fifty, white, middle class and with varying degrees of past or present involvement in different folk-leftist activities and scenes – forms the focus of this ethnography. Their opinions are not meant to be representative of the Amsterdam or Dutch population as a whole, but should be taken as indicative of a predilection characteristic to this rather specific demographic. The names have been changed in accordance with the wishes of the people concerned or in an effort to protect their privacy.

4. Nevertheless, no ‘Jewish pillar’ ever developed in the Netherlands, due to the Jewish population’s geographic dispersal, tendencies toward internal migration, and high concentration in cities with strong liberal and socialist organisations. As a result, most prewar Jews were involved in the ‘social-democratic pillar’ (Knippenberg 2002).

5. There are also a number of very active Jewish interest groups in Amsterdam and the Netherlands, such as Een Ander Joods Geluid [A Different Jewish Voice] and Gate48, both of which take critical stances on Israel’s political actions and Zionism more broadly. Their influence on Jewish social practice in Amsterdam has largely been ignored, however, in published social research.

6. As a reviewer rightly pointed out, the integration of Jews into Dutch society (their ‘emancipatie’) as decreed by Lodewijk Napoleon during French rule of the Netherlands in the early 19^th century was neither voluntary nor organic, and not to be romanticised by historians. Yiddish speech was, in fact, discouraged. But these details are not salient in the everyday remembrances of the general relationship between Jews and Dutch society by my informants.

7. 75% of the Jewish population in the Netherlands was killed in the Holocaust. In Amsterdam, 66,000 of 80,000 Jews were murdered, 10% of the city’s overall population at the time (Bovenkerk 2000, 238).

8. This critical lacuna is despite – or perhaps because of – the curious popularity of ‘anything Jewish’ in Amsterdam; Daan, one of the first to sing Yiddish folk music in Holland in the 1960s and now the owner of over 1,200 Jewish folk recordings, says with a knowing wink that with that label on it, ‘it sells.’

9. Klezmer, as I invoke it here and as it exists in popular form, consists of (often) Yiddish vocals as well as instrumental accompaniment, thus blurring the line between ‘traditional’ (purely instrumental) klezmer and Yiddish choral singing (purely vocal).

10. ‘Hasjeweine’ means ‘disappeared’ or ‘dead’.

11. It bears being said that the gabber subculture in the Netherlands, with its especially unique style of dance, is not always the specific referent of the term as it is used in Amsterdam. In this city, it has maintained its Yiddish meaning of ‘friend’. In the words of Amsterdam rap group Osdorp Posse, “een gabber is geen hakker maar je makker,” in their song “Origineel Amsterdams” (2000). This usage of the term further differentiates Amsterdam from Rotterdam (the centre of gabber activity) along the lines of cultural and linguistic Jewishness.

12. ‘Oishes’ are the characters of the Yiddish alphabet, most of which are identical to that of Hebrew.

13. However, few would speak unambiguously against Israel, as participation in leftist political circles today would generally entail.

14. ‘Allochtoon’ is an official term to designate a person with at least one parent born outside of the Netherlands. In general use it tends to signify people of non-Western origin. It stands in contrast to ‘autochtoon’, one with both parents born in the Netherlands.

15. The 2010 election resulted in the liberal party VVD receiving the most seats though only 20.5% of the very divided vote – not enough to form their own government. Wilders and his PVV made large gains with 16% of the vote, and Cohen on behalf of the PvdA took 19.5%. The VVD has formed a right-oriented coalition government with the PVV and the CDA, with Cohen becoming the leader of the opposition. Mark Rutte, leader of the VVD, has since become prime minister of the coalition government.

16. A prime example of this ‘lumping together’ is a speech given by Wilders to his supporters in Almere in February 2010, in which he elaborated on his plan to banish the headscarf in the Netherlands. To the delight of the crowd, Wilders declared that the ban would not apply to other religious items such as Christian crosses and Jewish skullcaps, because ‘these are symbols of our own Dutch culture’ (RTL 2010).

17. ‘Gojim’ is the Dutch pluralisation of ‘goy’, a Yiddish plural term fairly well-known among Dutch and English speakers to mean a non-Jew.