Last summer I studied Yiddish at the intensive language program at Columbia University in New York. Every morning I dutifully awoke at the crack of dawn, took the LL to 8th Avenue and then the local up to Columbia. I got a roll with butter and some coffee in an "I Love New York" cup at a little kiosk and walked through the gorgeous campus bursting with greenery, pride and money, to a building taken over by almost exclusively young people speaking ancient sounds.

The journey to Columbia was a difficult one and not just in terms of subway transfers. Though I had been immersed in the Yiddish revival movement for years and had been brought up in a Yiddish-speaking household, I had never believed that it was appropriate for me to learn the language. Yiddish was the world of my grandmother, Sarah, whom I never met. Entering it, I felt so out-of-place, cloddish, and bungling. I was afraid I was going to turn around and hit some heirloom off the shelf in this world of priceless artifacts. Like a bull in a china shop? More like a modern American in an old world in a different time.

I was also scared of being gay in that world. There is not even a word in Yiddish for "lesbian." Here, they borrow from the European as they did with all foreign words that they didn’t have a word for, "Lesbianke." I couldn’t get past my own internalized homophobia, and I thought that I would have to leave my lesbian self at the door.

At some point, the obvious occurred to me. If I don’t learn Yiddish, who will? My grandmother, long dead, cannot preserve the language and the culture, and my mother, well into her senior years, also cannot preserve it. I have a responsibility to learn it and to pass it down. Even though I may never understand that world, I still have to learn as much as I can, as flawed as I may be upon entering it. I am also obliged to bring my whole self into that world. I am obliged because I have no choice. Besides, I realized, queer people, like Jews, understand about displacement — having to leave home and go far away because of oppression. Queer people, like Jews, know about trying to gain visibility, acceptance, recognition and respect in a world that hates them. Queer people, like Jews, know about being merely tolerated because they’ve become powerful as a voting bloc. Queer people, like Jews, know the costs of immersion into the mainstream culture and the experience of losing what is so special about their own culture.

It turns out that by being gay, I have more access to Yiddishkeit. I understand implicitly what it means to always be the other.

At Yiddish school, there was a great buzz about a play called The God of Vengeance by renowned Yiddish writer Sholom Asche. The play, written in 1907, was a huge hit all over Europe and then opened in the Yiddish theater in New York where it was successful also, before moving to an English production on Broadway. The God of Vengeance, a play about redemption and the sins of the parents falling to the children, features a very touching (not to mention, fairly blatant) love scene between two women. The first not just for Yiddish theater, but maybe all theater? So queer Yiddishkeit has a history!