The 2022 Tobias Lecture with David Wertheim

The Mosse Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies presents

The 2022 Tobias Lecture

Paradoxes of a Pleaser: The Universal Appeal of Leo Fuld’s Yiddish Repertoire and the Centrality of Postwar Jewish Culture
A lecture by
David Wertheim
Director of Menasseh ben Israel Instituut for Jewish Cultural and Social Studies
University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Jewish Cultural Quarter

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With Yiddish hit songs such as My Yiddishe Mama and Wo ahin soll ich geh’n, the Dutch-born singer Leo Fuld became an international star in the early years after the Second World War, many years before the Klezmer revival. His work is ridden with paradoxes. It is Zionistic and diasporic, explicitly Jewish and very Gentile, and it exerted an appeal to non-Jewish audiences in Europe, the United States, and even the Arab world. What was his secret? Why did his audiences embrace his particular interpretation of Jewish music? And what does his success tell us about the reasons Jewish culture so often occupied a central place in the postwar era?

David J. Wertheim is a cultural historian and director of the Menasseh ben Israel Institute of Jewish Studies in Amsterdam. His research interests include modern German Jewish History and post-Holocaust Jewish non-Jewish relations. Among his publications are: Wertheim, D.J., Salvation Through Spinoza, A Study of Jewish Culture in Weimar and Wertheim, D.J. (ed.), The Jew as Legitimation; Jewish non-Jewish Relations beyond Antisemitism and Philosemitism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and Verloren in de tijd van Einstein, a book that traces the Dutch Jewish philosopher of science A.C. Elsbach. He just published a new book that discusses the centrality of Jewish themes in Dutch public debate: David Wertheim Waar gaat het over als het over Joden gaat? (Amsterdam: de Bezige Bij, 2022).

Co-sponsored by the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+