Writing Poetry in Yiddish During the Destruction of Gaza? Linguistic Citizenship in a Time of Moral Crisis

ABSTRACT

In this commentary, we foreground the dilemmas that arise when ethics and politics clash. Taking the Yiddish‐language poem Khurbn Aze [lit. The Destruction of Gaza] as our entry point, we argue that Stroud's sociolinguistic notion of linguistic citizenship together with Levinas's moral philosophy can offer a productive theoretical lens for understanding the complex nexus of ethics and politics. From a sociolinguistic perspective, we argue that the choice of language—Yiddish, in this case—together with poetry is itself an ethical and political act. It enables the poet to draw connections between the current moment in Gaza and previous Jewish catastrophes, thereby gesturing toward the possibility of new solidarities at a time when Jews and Palestinians are represented in political and media discourse as incompatible with each other. Drawing on the ethical double binds articulated in the poem, we also discuss the pitfalls of invoking solidarity with the suffering Other.