Let me begin by saying I don’t speak Yiddish or understand more than a few words. My parents did their best to prevent me from learning it – they wanted me to be 100% American. But they spoke it when they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying or with people, like some of my aunts, who’d come from the old country and were much more comfortable with Yiddish than English. About the only Yiddish phrase my parents actually taught me was the phrase for “play with me,” schpil mit mir, which I used often as a youngster.
Nevertheless, I grew up loving the sound of Yiddish – the wonderful descriptive sound of the language itself. Do I really have to tell you anything about the meaning of shlimiel, shlimazel, schmegegge or schmuck? Actually the dictionary doesn’t add much to the sound. Call someone you despise by any of those terms, politician or citizen, and they’ll get the message, although you might have to duck or hire an attorney.
I’ve been puzzling about which terms are most appropriate for some of the nudniks in politish. Add a few other Yiddish expressions and you might mean full of baloney, clueless, conniving, contemptible, crazy, foolish, insane, unlucky, untrustworthy, a whore, or wicked – an alphabet of nonsense, and they’d never know which. I’d throw lots of those terms at the nebbishes recently appointed to the cabinet – and, though I don’t know a good Yiddish term for it, they are well described in English as DEI hires for incompetent whites.
Whatever does a politician mean when they accuse someone else of doing something because it’s just politics or political? I think it means they want to throw an epithet around instead of actually saying what’s going on. So, they deserve some of their own. I love the sound of schmegegge although I often mean rasha which means wicked but lacks that Yiddish gargle.
I prefer to think politics should be shtatme'nerish or statesmanlike, filled with people who have our interests in their hearts. Barack Obama, Stacey Abrams, Nancy Pelosi, and Paul Tonko are menschen – good people regardless of religion. I also like to think about menschen who were politicians I grew up with – President Franklin Roosevelt, Senators Herbert Lehman, Jacob Javits, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, one of my teachers who observed the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and dedicated her life to making sure it never happened again.
I hate Presidents Day. We used to celebrate some truly great presidents whose contributions to our country were crucial. On February 22 we celebrated the birthday of George Washington, who not only led our country to independence but also had the good grace, democratic and what they used to call republican spirit to step down voluntarily for the good of the country. On February 12, we celebrated the birthday of Abraham Lincoln who kept our country together and finally freed it from the curse of slavery. But Presidents Day? I wouldn’t celebrate the President who led the Trail of Tears. I wouldn’t celebrate the corruption of presidents who put the country up for sale as in the Teapot Dome scandal or any president who would put this country up for sale to foreign bidders in order to feather his own nest. Best for autocrats, ganefs, and kleptocrats, to share a cell in frozen Siberia where future archeologists can glean from their frozen remains what schmucks were like.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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