(NPR and RNS) — In the first few days after Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, New York artist Joe Dobkin was scrolling through news coverage when he saw a video of an Israeli soldier on a tank rolling into Gaza. The soldier was singing an old Yiddish song.
The song was “Zog Nit Keynmol,” also known as The Partisan Hymn, inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
“I saw this, and I got the message that … what this Israeli soldier was doing is for the survival of the Jewish people. This is for me, this is for my family,” said Dobkin. “And this is while all day, every day, I’m watching images come across my social media feeds of people being bombed to death.”
Dobkin is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors — and the descendant of people who didn’t survive — so he wanted to respond in Yiddish, speaking out about what he saw as a genocide, in this language that was almost destroyed by one.
“ I needed something to counter it,” Dobkin explained. “And the thing that I wanted was also in Yiddish.”
Nearly two years later, with the Gaza Health Ministry reporting more than 63,000 Palestinians dead and an unfolding famine in Gaza, Dobkin has released “Lider Mit Palestine (Songs with Palestine): New Yiddish Songs of Grief, Fury, and Love,” …