18 | Thursday, Apri 28, 2011

Arts & Entertainment

Queer Fashion Show Presents ‘Rainbow Vision’

Annual UCSC fundraiser event set to premiere at Porter College this weekend

Queer Fashion show, hosted at the Porter/Kresge Dining Hall, will feature several fashion lines and performances created by students.Photos by Molly solomon

By Mitchell BatesArts & Entertainment

Reporter

One of UC Santa Cruz’s premier events has returned for another year. The Queer Fashion Show will be presenting “The Media in Rainbow Vision” at Porter College this Friday and Saturday. Not only does the event promise to be some of the most ambitious student theater on campus, but the sexy char-ity show will also donate all proceeds to the Walnut Avenue Women’s Center, Planned Parent-hood and the Diversity Center.

Fourth-years Zackary Forcum of Oakes College and Jasmine Fernandez of Porter College will be directing this year’s Queer Fashion Show. The two former dancers have each been involved in the show’s last three perfor-mances, and share a passion for the causes advanced by the queer community.

“I love that there’s a night to celebrate queerness in perfor-mance,” Forcum said. “[During] my freshman year I saw the show, and it looked like so much fun. I immediately wanted to get involved.”

Queer Fashion Show has long been a part of UCSC culture. Forcum discussed some of the history behind the event.

“No one knows for sure when it began,” Forcum said. “The Queer Fashion Show started with queer individuals emptying out their closets and parading around the Porter quad.”

The UCSC university library documentary project “Out in the Redwoods” puts the origin of the show in the late 1980s, when it was known as the Alternative Fashion Show.

Since then, the show has be-come a mainstay at UCSC, and is emblematic of the school’s iden-tity as a queer-friendly campus.

“We’ve come a long way in the last few years for queer repre-

sentation,” Forcum said. “UCSC is one of the most openly queer schools in the U.S.”

The show has since grown from its humble beginnings. This year, in addition to the usual

festivities, there will be a gallery showing before the performance. The show’s directors provided a few other glimpses of what to expect.

“You’re going to see four dif-

ferent fashion lines, each student-designed and all of them very different,” Forcum said. “We will be having spoken word, dance and comedic skits, all performed by a cast of more than 60 people, and it will be very, very sexy at times.”

The show’s reputation for being provocative is aided by the work of its designers. College Ten fourth-year and student designer Juliana Findlay discussed the inspiration for her fashion col-lection.

“My line focuses on a stripped-down version of the tuxedo,” Findlay said. “I took it apart, made it sexier, and did it in the vein of Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ and ‘Smooth Criminal’ music videos.”

The entire production is student-run, from the creation of advertising campaigns to the choreographing of dance rou-tines, and students participate on a volunteer basis.

“Our actors don’t get material

things or any sort of monetary value from the Queer Fashion Show,” Forcum said. “They only get a great experience. When you think about how busy life has gotten, it’s really beautiful that people commit so much time to put on a show for char-ity. The students get involved in this event because they care and because they love it.”

But supporting charity isn’t the only goal the Queer Fashion Show plans to accomplish. The directors also hope to help ad-vance the queer community.

“The show is ‘Media in Rain-bow Vision,’ and we’re basing it on the media’s portrayal of the queer community,” Fernandez said. “We want to break their perceptions. Instead of putting people in little boxes, we want to celebrate queerness and diversity. This is an opportunity to learn more about the queer community here at Santa Cruz and the stu-dent body as a whole. Hopefully we’ll open some minds.”

Show InfoWhat: UC Santa Cruz’s 15th Queer Fashion Show

When: April 29 and 30. Doors open at 8 p.m., show begins at 8:30 p.m.

Where: Porter/Kresge Dining Hall

Cost: $6 undergrads, $8 general admission

“We are going to die.”That was the conclusion

College Nine second-year Greg Gerschenson reached as he drove College Ten second-years Ahil Ponarul and Jon Tong to Alpine Meadows Ski Resort on Saturday, April 9. The trio were discussing their plans for Red Bull’s Schlittentag.

“Every possible scenario I can think of ends in all of us dying,” Gerschenson said.

Schlittentag, German for “Sledding Day,” is an event Red Bull holds at various ski resorts across the nation. Event par-ticipants build sleds from found materials and ride them down a course. Teams compete under team names reflecting their cho-sen theme. This year’s Schlitten-tag saw igloo-riding eskimos and three men in a tub tearing down the Tahoe slope.

One week before Schlittentag, Gerchenson, Tong and Ponarul decided they wanted to bring some UC Santa Cruz representation to the slope. While teams were not required to be affiliated with a college, the event was marketed towards university students. Consequently, a significant

18 | Thursday, April 14, 2011

Sports

Slugs Take on SchlittentagUCSC second-years participate in Red Bull’s “Sledding Day”

Second-yearS GreG GerSchenSon, ahil Ponarul and Jon TonG hit the slopes in homemade sleds last Saturday at Red Bull’s Schlittentag event, hosted at Alpine Meadows Ski Resort.

Photos by Sal ingram

By Samved SangameswaraSports Reporter

number of the teams displayed some form of school spirit.

Two days before Schlittentag, the trio started gathering sup-plies to make their sleds. Having started later than most, the group from UCSC said they did not have their eyes on one of the top three positions. Sleds at Schlit-tentag are scored on a 100-point scale, with 50 going to speed, 25 to creativity and 25 to style. Gerchenson said they were more concerned with just having a good time than with winning.

“Well, we’re going to enjoy ourselves,” Gerchenson said. “Maybe we’ll get best crash — that would be awesome.”

Another team led by UCSC second-year Samuel Bruns was slated to compete, but had to back out at the last minute due to a family emergency. This left Gerchenson, Tong and Ponarul with an extra sled and the idea of

splitting into two teams. Gerchenson decided to use a

plank of wood Bruns had found, attach skis and a beach chair to it and adopt the team name “Wait.. This Isn’t Cabo.” He completed the outfit with board shorts, a tank top and flip-flops. Unable to transport his entire sled from Santa Cruz to Tahoe, Gerchenson built it just minutes before he took it down the slope. Saying that his sled may not have been the best, he remained confident that he would be able to make it work.

“My sled is probably about 70 [percent prepared for the course],” Gerchenson said. “But I’m around 100.”

Gerchenson was the first person to register on-site at the competition, so he was given the honor of going first.

When constructing the sled, Gerchenson underestimated the

effect that all the duct tape he put on the bottom would have. The friction created by the layers of duct tape holding on the skis brought his sled to a halt before he reached the first jump in the course. However, after giving himself a few pushes, he was slowly but surely able to make it to the bottom.

“At least I can say I had the safest sled out there,” Gerchenson said.

Team Banana Swag, comprised of the banana-suit-clad duo Tong and Ponarul, had a little more success. Riding face-first on boogie boards rented from OPERS, they launched themselves down the hill separately because, as Tong said, “Two slugs are better than one.” Tong picked up more speed on the course and finished with a clean run. Ponarul trailed behind by a few yards and lost

his momentum before the last jump, slowly sliding across the finish line.

Neither team managed to place in the competition, as only the top three and best crash were announced. First place went to a golf cart mounted on snowboards and second was awarded to a Bat-mobile replica built and manned by the family of UCSC third-year Tessa Santos. Best crash went to a sled from Stanford that exploded into pieces when it hit the last jump. However, the failure to claim a prize didn’t bother Gerchenson.

“I didn’t expect [my sled] to be the safest sled,” Gerchenson said, “but at least I finished. And my sled didn’t explode like Stan-ford’s.”

And the trio is already looking forward to Schlittentag 2012. Gerchenson discussed contacting the Ski and Snowboard Club and having them make it one of their events in order to increase the UCSC participation. Ultimately, all three of the UCSC partici-pants said that the best part of Schlittentag was that it provided a unique, albeit slightly wacky, way to show their school pride.

“In the end [winning] didn’t matter,” Gerchenson said. “We went with an idea, executed it, and it went well. It was fun and I got to represent my school for a little bit.”

Meet the TeamsWait... This Isn’t Cabo

Team Banana Swag

Team Members: Greg Gerchenson

Sled Theme: A lost tourist

Sled Materials: Plank of wood, beach chair and duct tapeOutfit: Tank top, board shorts, flip flops and sun-glasses

Team Members: Ahil Ponarul and Jon Tong

Sled Theme: “Two Slugs are better than one.”

Sled Materials: Boogie boards from OPERS

Outfit: Banana suits and UCSC shirts

cityonahillpress.com | 25

Editorial

The Final Blow to the UCCalifornians need to join together if the UC system is to survive

Illustrations by Rachel Edelstein

This looming threat, though a speculative comment made by Gov. Jerry Brown in a speech last week, becomes more and more of a potential reality for UC students and Californians with each day that passes and an all-cuts budget remains the likely option for Brown to sign off on.

Brown just traveled to Riverside to rally Californians into pressuring four state legislature Republicans to al-low tax extensions to be on a June ballot, and thus allow Californians to vote on the matter. If the extensions do not make it on the ballot, or if Californians do not vote for them, the extensions will expire and the UC will likely face a $1 billion cut to its operating budget.

Such a cut, Brown speculated, would mean that stu-dents in the UC may see a twofold rise in their tuition. Brown also mentioned campus closures as a potential way of coping, if the tax extensions are not enacted.

The behavior of the Republicans in the legislature is abhorrent. They are not doing their job, which is to let the people of California vote.

The fact that doubled tuition is even a possibility for the UC system is absurd. Such a move would have devastating impacts. It is understandable that cuts need to be made to every facet of the state — and as hard as it is to face, even to the UC system — but to make this kind of cut would be detrimental and extremely shortsighted. Cutting $1 billion from the UC would not be just a cut. It would be the elimination of the public institution.

For students in the UC system and families supporting their children in the system, this would not be an issue of needing to save more, work more or taking out more loans — it would force many students to drop out. If enacted, students in the UC system would be trapped into paying private school tuition, despite the fact that they

enrolled at a public institution. Brown’s statement that closing some campuses would

be another possible solution is also shortsighted, for a number of reasons. Closing down any UC campus would make entrance into the UC system that much more dif-ficult, flooding more students into state universities and community colleges — schools that are also receiving im-mense cuts. This would not be a solution to anything. It would be deflection, moving the problem to another part of the state’s budget.

Furthermore, any closure of a UC campus would mean thousands of employees without jobs. A closure to uni-versities of that size would overwhelm the state with more unemployment.

Either move — closure of some UC campuses or dou-

bling tuition — violates the objectives that this beautiful system was founded on: affordability, accessibility and the advancement of knowledge. While each of these facets of the UC have been jeopardized in the past few years as dramatic raises in student fees and tuition, increases in class sizes, and the reduction in number of teaching assis-tants have been implemented, these two moves would be a complete affront to the more than century-old system.

There has been a disillusionment with placing blame for the absurd climbs in student fees, for the forced

furloughs, for the laying off of numerous employees, for the increased class sizes and the decreased accessibility, but blaming will not be a means for saving the UC. We all need to rally the state into providing more funding for higher education and to push the Republicans to let Californians vote. After all, it is our system.

We cannot keep blaming just Yudof, UCOP and the chancellors and looking within the UC for a solution — the fact remains that the state has all but stopped invest-ing in higher education. The solution cannot be found in parading to chancellors’ and vice chancellors’ homes and blaming just the higher-ups in the UC system. The solution must be found in all of us: in our parents, our neighbors, our family friends, in Californians. The disillu-sionment must end. Everyone contributes to this system,

and if we want to save it, we all must take part in that. We must join forces rather than splinter.

If this system is going to be saved, all Californians need to rekindle their sense of ownership and pride for the system that once had international prestige — the UC is all of ours, and Californians need to remember that.

Like one editor's grandmother said to her husband when she first saw the library at UCSC, “This is ours, we support this, and can you believe that?”

That is the attitude that will save the UC.

We all need to rally the state into providing more funding for higher education and to push the Republicans to let Californians vote. After all, it is our system.

Looming Consequences

If the state legislature does not allow tax extensions to be on the June ballot...

The UC will likely face a $1 billion cut to its operating budget and...

Students may see a twofold rise in their tuition or the closure of a UC campus.

"Double tuition."

in universities? How many of these people are native speakers?” Wex asked. “It’s a big problem because you’ve got some relatively capable people who are trying to immerse themselves in the language, but it gets harder and harder because there are fewer places to go.”

Jesse Kirchner, a visiting assistant professor of linguistics at UCSC, studied Yiddish throughout his graduate career. In discussing what might endanger a lan-guage like Yiddish, Kirchner drew parallels between Yiddish and other extinct or endangered languages.

“What has caused those languages to become extremely endangered are things that were done to break the connection between one generation and the next,” Kirchner said. “As long as something like that doesn’t happen, Yiddish can endure indefinitely.”

However, given that this generational break has already occurred with Yiddish, Kirchner could not predict whether it would survive as a spoken language.

“It’s safe right now because there’s a generation of speakers learning it,” Kirch-ner said. “But to project out further than that, the future is very much in question for all the other languages in the world — and that would include Yiddish.”

Although Levitow did not agree with the idea that Yiddish is a dying language, he did say that Yiddish culture has been made increasingly irrelevant in modern Jewish communities, especially with the adoption of Hebrew as the official spoken language of Israel and, consequently, the global Jewish community.

“To me it seems kind of obvious — the whole center of Jewish life changed,” Levi-tow said. “When I was a kid, if you went into the synagogue, people spoke Yiddish. Now, you have to make an effort to go out and learn it. It takes hard work.”

Starr-Glass’ glowing opinion of the class and Reb Yankel (the Yiddish title for Levitow in class) was echoed by her class-mate Ian Flanagan, a fourth-year history major.

“If there was one person [in the class] he’d still teach it,” Flanagan said. “He teaches the class — he doesn’t let the book teach the class. He’s so passionate about the course, but not overbearing.”

Flanagan said he has frequently en-countered people who do not understand that Yiddish is still a spoken language with vital communities around the world.

“A lot of people will ask, ‘Why are you taking Yiddish? Nobody speaks Yiddish,”’ Flannagan said. “But [Levitow] brought in Yiddish newspapers from New York, so it is prevalent in certain areas, in New York and European countries. If people understand that it’s still in use, it will come back.”

Levitow’s normally cheery face clouded over as he addressed the notion that Yid-dish had been left behind in the modern age.

“Here in California, you really get the sense that Yiddish is of another time,” Lev-itow said. “But in fact, it’s not true. There are a lot of people who still speak Yiddish — they make an effort to keep it going in their families. New York is a center, also Toronto, and Chicago and L.A. All places

I

10 | Thursday, May 12, 2011

Feature

cityonahillpress.com | 11

Feature

By Eli WolfeSports Reporter

After a few false starts, one student finally gets it right, eliciting cheers and applause from her classmates. Wielding a shard of yellow chalk in one hand and an enormous eraser in the other, Jonathan Levitow — UC Santa Cruz’s only Yiddish language instructor — holds his arms out wide and grins sheepishly, as if to apolo-gize for the small triumph enjoyed by his class.

“Yiddish is too difficult to be learned by human beings!” Levitow said.

Yet humans — at least Jewish humans — continue to learn it, as they have for the last thousand years. Originally the lan-guage of Jews in Eastern and Central Eu-rope, Yiddish spread across the globe on the tongues of Jewish immigrants, arriving in the United States in the 19th century as the spoken and written language of tens of thousands of Jews on the East Coast.

Following World War II, however, the Yiddish-speaking population of Europe was decimated. The adoption of Hebrew as the national language of the state of Israel dealt Yiddish a second deadly blow by de-nying it a homeland. In the United States, Jewish immigrants often neglected to teach their children Yiddish in an attempt to expedite assimilation, wiping out a pool of potential Yiddish-speakers in the course of a single generation.

Today, there is a popular misconception that because of all this, Yiddish is a dead language. While this statement is far from true, it is also not quite a lie.

Crippled by genocide and decades of bad luck, Yiddish survives in sizable pockets of speakers — mostly ultra-Orthodox com-munities of Jews and enclaves of aging na-tive speakers in New York — but lacks the cohesion or popularity needed to regain its stature as a daily language used by Jews at home and in public.

In 1970, the U.S. Census found almost 1.6 million Jews who spoke Yiddish as a home language. By 1980, that number had dropped to 315,953. In 1990, it fell again to 213,054. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of Yiddish speakers in America fell to 158,991 — almost a 90 percent drop between 1970 and 2007.

Despite its wounds, Yiddish continues to thrive in some circles. More than a dozen Yiddish programs have sprouted up in American universities in the last 20 years, according to a 2010 study by Dr. Zachary Berger entitled, “The Popular Language That Few Bother to Learn.” In the midst of budget cuts and slashed language programs, Yiddish has managed to take root at UCSC with only a handful of students and educa-tors.

Openly passionate about the language and the program, a small pocket of students and teachers are making a stand to preserve the cultural and linguistic heritage of a language they have come to love.

Introductory Yiddish was first offered at UCSC as a course in the Jewish studies program in spring 2010. Thirty students enrolled in the class — about six times the

Illustrations by Louise Leong

In a small classroom hidden at the end of the hall on the first floor of UC Santa Cruz’s social sciences building, six students and their instruc-tor struggle to say,“I like the weather today”in Yiddish. It sounds simple, but several students have already stumbled over the treacherous, paradoxical grammar.

number of students enrolled at the Yiddish program at Stanford, which is also taught by Jonathan Levitow.

Bruce Thompson, a lecturer for the his-tory and literature departments at UCSC, said one reason for the popularity of Yid-dish is the renewed interest many young Jewish students have had in reclaiming their cultural heritage.

“It’s a characteristic swing of the pendu-lum: The second generation wants to lose it, and the fourth generation wants to get it back,” Thompson said. “There’s a recogni-tion that there was a rich Jewish culture in Eastern Europe as well as a rich literature, and it did so much to shape modern Jew-ish secular culture and identity.”

Rachel Starr-Glass, a third-year Jewish studies major, said her family was original-ly from Eastern Europe. A major reason she decided to take Yiddish was so she would be able to explore her own cultural connections to the language.

“There’s so much Yiddish literature out there, and I feel like if I could have direct access to that, the whole world opens up,” Starr-Glass said. “There’s a whole Yiddish culture, and I want to be able to directly access that. My grandma speaks a little, and my brother. It’s in the family.”

Professor Murray Baumgarten, co-founder of the Jewish studies program at UCSC, said knowledge of Yiddish also al-lows students to access thousands of texts accumulated over the centuries that would have been lost to the ages if not translated into Yiddish.

“One of the things that marks Yiddish is the numerous number of texts of world importance that were translated into Yid-dish,” Baumgarten said. “I mean, political science, economics, literature — there was a great sense that Yiddish wanted to be

connected to the larger world of Western culture.”

At UCSC, finding financial support outside the classroom has been integral for not only the preservation of the Yiddish language course but also the Jewish studies program that runs it. Founded in 2000, the Jewish studies program was given its start by donations from the Helen Diller Family Foundation, which allowed the program to establish a major, run independently of university funding, and hire faculty mem-bers like Yiddish lecturer Levitow.

Despite a rich literary tradition, some Yiddish scholars worry that even as the number of programs devoted to teaching Yiddish culture and literature at the uni-versity level increases, the actual number of speakers learning Yiddish outside of Hassidic or Charedi communities is drop-ping at an alarming rate.

A 2006 study by the Modern Language Association found 969 students enrolled at four-year colleges and graduate programs learning Yiddish. In 2009 (the most recent year available), that number dropped to 336. Although this drop is partly due to the drastic class reductions in one rab-binical academy and one state school, it still represents an enormous blow to the national Yiddish-speaking community.

Michael Wex, Yiddish scholar and New York Times best-selling author of “Born to Kvetch,” a humorous linguistic and sociological history of Yiddish and Jewish culture, said the plight of Yiddish is best reflected in the Jewish community’s sud-den interest in preserving Yiddish.

“There’s a very positive attitude towards Yiddish these days, and has been for a couple decades now — and that worries me,” Wex said. “When Yiddish was healthy and flourishing, everyone was ashamed of it and trying to hide it. Now it’s not very healthy and it’s become our legacy.”

Wex said symptoms of Yiddish’s poor health are evident in the popularity of Yid-dish phrase books that promise to teach readers exotic food words, cute endear-ments and juicy curses. Wex said these books promote a superficial knowledge of Yiddish that at best scratches the surface of Jewish culture, and at worst misinforms the reader.

“The interesting thing about Yiddish is that the number of people who know the difference between ‘fuck on’ and ‘fuck off ’ is tiny and diminishing,” Wex said. “I’m not a prig, but the Yiddish is wrong — a book that tells you how to ‘fuck on’ is absolutely useless.”

One of the most basic problems ob-structing Yiddish education is the lack of certified teachers. Berger cites the Yiddish Teacher’s Seminar in New York — which was closed in 1987 — as one of the last institutions to offer graduate students serious education as Yiddish instructors. Wex mentioned the article as he addressed pressing issues facing Yiddish advocates.

“Who is teaching the spoken language

1.6MillionJews who spoke Yiddish as a

home language in 1970

158,991Jews who spoke Yiddish as a

home langauge in 2007

969Students enrolled in a four-

year college studying Yiddish in 2006

6Students enrolled in the one

Yiddish class offered at UCSC

336Students enrolled in a four-

year college studying Yiddish in 2009

By the Numbers

Statistics behind the disappearing Yiddish language

Continued on p. 20

Teachers, students and scholars weigh the value of Yiddish in the modern age

where people speak Yiddish day-to-day.” The absence of an iconic, permanent

Yiddish-speaking community is some-thing author Wex believes is permanently stunting the growth of Yiddish.

“One of the big problems [with] teach-ing Yiddish is it’s very difficult to get any outside-the-class support,” Wex said. “You can’t say, ‘Well here’s a program where you can go to Yiddish Land during the sum-mer.’ It’s not the fault of anybody teaching Yiddish — it just doesn’t exist.”

Levitow said UCSC’s program is excep-tionally lucky to receive private funding, because more than almost anything else, steady cash flow is the necessary ingredi-ent for building a stable Yiddish-speaking community.

“The problem really is, in a nutshell, money,” Levitow said. “If you’re running a synagogue, an adult education program, you’re constantly trying to save every dollar you can. So do you hire somebody to teach Yiddish if there are only three students? What we really need are a few more millionaires who could fund Yiddish educational foundations that were stable and could count on funding.”

The Koret Foundation — one of the main donors supporting the program — gave the Jewish studies program a three-year grant to run a Yiddish course. But even private funding cannot guarantee a program’s survival. Last year, as the Yid-dish program was just starting up, UCSC’s Hindi/Urdu program lost its own private funding and was forced to close down.

In response to an email query, Koret Foundation communications officer Kirsten Mickelwait said she could not divulge grant information nor speculate on future support for the program. She did say UCSC’s program is the only one Koret funds specifically for Yiddish education.

For students like Starr-Glass, the uncertain future of the Yiddish program and Yiddish itself has had no effect on her enthusiasm to learn the language — in a large part thanks to Levitow’s class and teaching style.

“I love it, I really do,” Starr-Glass said. “His way of teaching is really natural, it’s conversation, and he’s funny — we’re laughing 75 percent of the class. There’s definitely a lot of grammar, the structure of sentences. But the majority of the time we learn by conversation and a lot practice reading and writing.”

For Michael Wex, learning practical conversation skills and grammar is the only efficient way to bring Yiddish back as a language of daily use.

“I think it’s important for the textbook to teach you unremarkable day-to-day ex-pressions,” Wex said. “When the plumber comes, you have to be able to tell him what’s clogged. If you can’t do that, you’re not fluent.”

Lecturer Thompson said there are a number of practical reasons to continue

“It’s a characteristic swing of the pendulum: The second generation wants to lose it, and the fourth generation wants to get it back.”

— Bruce Thompson, UCSC history and literature lecturer