Post by Fr David Neuhaus SJ | 16 February 2026
This is my 27th blog. I hope that those following these posts find something interesting in what I propose here. My main motivation is to keep attention focused on the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza and in the rest of Palestine. The attempt is to keep all of us focused on our obligation to work against conquest, fulfilling our vocation to be a leaven of the Kingdom of God, a leaven of freedom for all, equality, justice and peace. It is sometimes a struggle to find something that might indeed serve the purpose of keeping attention focused, promote awareness, encourage activism and keep a light of hope kindled.
Today, I send you a fascinating and moving album. Jewish singers perform in Yiddish, the traditional language of Jews in Eastern Europe. The melodies and styles are traditional, deriving from a millennium old culture; music that accompanied Jewish history, its joys and tragedies. Severely devastated during the Shoah, when millions of Yiddish speakers were brutally murdered, Yiddish became restricted to ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. It is now being revived in some quarters as an expression of a Jewish way of life that can challenge Jewish nationalism (Zionism) in Palestine/Israel. This particular album, “Lider mit Palestine – New Yiddish Songs of Grief, Fury, and Love” contains laments and resistance songs in the face of the genocide in Gaza.
The image on this page has a Yiddish title. Yiddish is written in the same letters used for Hebrew. It is though a Jewish dialect of German. The title of the image reads: Dortn wu mir leben, dort is unserer land”, translated as “There where we live is our country”.