AARON PALEY ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney, and today is February 7th, 2018. I'm here in Los Angeles, California, with Aaron Paley. We're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

AARON PALEY: Yes.

CW:Great.

AP:Avade [Of course].

CW:Gut. Fun vanem shtamt der mishpokhe? [Good. Where does your family come from?]

AP:Mayn mishpokhe -- mayn mame un tate -- mayn mame shtamt fun viskonsin. Zi iz geven in a kleyne shtetl, dzhuno. Ir mishpokhe zaynen geven di eynike yidishe mishpokhe in dzhuno, in dem nayntsn hundert tsvantsiker yorn. Un mayn tate 1:00shtamt fun bruklin, un zeyere eltern shtamt fun beylarus, vitebsk, nit vayt fun -- in poyln, nit vayt fun lodzh, in vilnye gubernye un bobroysk gubernye. [My family -- my mother and father -- my mother comes from Wisconsin. She was born in a small town, Juno. Her family was the only Jewish family in Juno, in 1920. And my father comes from Brooklyn, and his parents come from Belarus, Vitebsk, not far from -- in Poland, not far from Łodz, in the Vilnius Governate and the Bobruysk Governate.]

CW:Un vos veyst ir vegn bobe-zeydes dor [And what do you know about your grandparents' generation]?

AP:Ikh hob gekent mayn tates tate un mayn mames mame. Un di tsvey, zey hobn geredt yidish, ober ikh hob nit gekent yidish ven zey zaynen geven do, in di zayt fun -- vos iz geven? Ven zey zaynen geven gelebt -- un zey hobn gelebt do 2:00in amerike. Far geshtarbn. Vayl ikh be geven a kleyne kind ven zey hobn geshtarbn -- ikh hob gehat elf yor alt, fuftsn yor alt. Ikh hob gelernt yidish -- tsu redn yidish -- ven ikh bin geven in universitet. So, yo. [I knew my father's father and my mother's mother. And the two of them, they spoke Yiddish, but I didn't know Yiddish when they were here, on this side of -- how do you say it? When they were alive -- and they were living here in America. Before they died. I was a young child when they died -- I was eleven years old, fifteen years old. I learned Yiddish -- to speak Yiddish -- when I went to university. So, yeah.]

CW:Un vos zaynen geven di parnoses, di parnose, in mishpokhe, veyst ir? In eyrope, heyst es? [And what what were the occupations, the occupation, in your family, do you know? In Europe, I mean?]

AP:[In eyrope, veys ikh nit vos iz vos zey hobn gemakht un getin in eyrope. Neyn. [In Europe, I don't know what their work was and what they did in Europe. No.]

CW:Un zenen di mishpokhes geven frume [And were the families observant]?

AP:Neyn. Zey hobn -- mayn mames mishpokhe, zey zaynen geven -- well, tsu zayn d'eynike yidishe mishpokhe in a kleyne shtot in viskonsin, s'iz geven zeyer 3:00shver. Zey zaynen geven kasher in der heym. Vi zey zaynen geven kasher, veys ikh nit. Ikh ken az zey hobn gekent firn kayn miluaki tsu koyfn flaysh, oder -- un mayn tate iz gegangn in shul oder nit a frume shul. Er iz geven in shul in bruklin, un er iz geven a tsienist in der nayntsn hundert draytsikn un fertsikn yorn. Mayn mame iz nit geven -- zi hot nit gehat a tsieniste ideologye, oder ven zey zaynen geven -- zey hobn gehat fir un tsvantsik yorn -- zey hobn gemakht 4:00aliya kegn yisroel far eyn yor. [They were -- my mother's family, they were -- well, to be the only Jewish family in a small town in Wisconsin, it was very hard. They kept kosher at home. How they kept kosher, I don't know. I know that they went to Milwaukee to buy meat, but -- and my father went to synagogue, but not an Orthodox synagogue. He went to synagogue in Brooklyn, and he was a Zionist in the 1930s and '40s. My mother wasn't -- she didn't have a Zionist ideology, but when they were -- they were twenty-four years old -- they made Aliyah to Israel for one year.]

CW:Hobn zey geredt vegn dem [Did they talk about that]?

AP:Cómo [Spanish: What]? Vos [Yiddish: What]? (laughter) Cómo, cómo, cómo.

CW:(laughs) Cómo.

AP:Cómo. (laughter)

CW:Tsi veyst ir epes vegn dos yor in palestine [Do you know anything about that year in Palestine]?

AP:Ah, yo, es iz geven zeyer vikhtik in der mishpokhe vayl zey zaynen zeyer [Oh, yes, it was very important in the family because they were very] -- I forgot this -- involved, but they were very involved with -- what's the word -- [zey zaynen geven an anteyl fun di partey komunist, oder zey zaynen nit geven in di partey komunist, oder zeyere khaveyrim zaynen geven komunistn, do in los andzheles. Un in der yorn fun mekarthy, in d'fuftsike yorn, s'iz geven zeyer 5:00shver tsu zayn a komunist un a yid do in los angeles, un zey hobn bashlosn tsu forn kayn yisroel, vayl s'iz geven tsu shver do. Mayn tate hot -- s'iz geven in eyn un fuftsik. Mayn tate hot gevolt forn kayn yisroel ven biz zayn a kind, oder far mayn mame, zi hot gezogt az zi iz gegangn kayn yisroel vayl zi hot nit gevolt blaybn in di fareynikte shtatn. Es iz geven tsu shver, tsu shver. Un nokh a yor, zey zaynen arayngekumen kayn los angeles, vayl mayn mame iz geven mit kind] [they were involved with the Communist Party, but they weren't in the Communist Party, but their friends were communists, here in Los Angeles. And in the McCarthy era, in the '50s, it was very hard to be a communist and a Jew here in Los Angeles, and they chose to go to Israel, because it was too difficult here. My father -- they went in '51. My father had wanted to go to Israel since he was a child, but for my mother, she said that she went to Israel because she didn't want to stay in the United States. It was too hard, too hard. And a year later, they came back to Los Angeles, because my mother was with child] -- how do you say "pregnant"?

CW:Yeah, "mit kind."

AP:Zi iz geven mit kind, un s'iz geven mayn shvester, un di -- zey zaynen geven in ulpan, mit di irakishe mishpokhe, di irakishe mentshn, vayl irak s'iz geven di groyse eksod [She was with child, and this was my sister, and the -- they were in Ulpan, with the Iraqi family, the Iraqi people, because that was the big exodus from Iraq], "exodus," fun irak, un di iraki mentshn hobn gezogt -- zey hobn gemakht a [from Iraq, and the Iraqi people said -- they threw a] -- fiesta [Spanish: party], um -- (shakes his head) a fiesta. (Whitney laughs) Ikh trakht oyf shpanish. Zey hobn gemakht a simkhe un zey hobn gezogt az di kind fun mayn mame darf khasene hobn mit eyne fun di irakishe mentshn. Un finf un tsvantsik yorn shpeter, mayn shvester hot khasene gehat mit an irakishe fun yisroel, un mayn brude oykh [I'm thinking in Spanish. They threw a party and they said that my mother's child had to get married with an Iraqi person. And twenty-five years later, my sister married an Iraqi person from Israel, and my brother as well] -- (laughs) so it's -- s'iz geven vi di dibek ven di eltern hobn bashlosn az di 7:00kinder darf zayn eyne mit di andere [it was like in "The Dybbuk" when the parents decided that their children should be together] -- like a vow that is made before, yeah. Interesant. Ober mir zaynen do in los andzheles, mayn mame in tate zaynen gekumen in los andzheles in zibn un fertsik, zey hobn bakent oyfn ban in dem veg kayn los andzheles [Interesting. But we're here in Los Angeles, my parents came to Los Angeles in '47, they took a train to Los Angeles]. How's my Yiddish?

CW:Good.

AP:Like, I'm so rusty.

CW:English is also fine.

AP:No, it's kind of fun, but -- I'm gonna switch later, but --

CW:Okay. Gut [Good].

AP:Mir kenen vayter gayn [We can continue].

CW:Tsi zenen do mayses vegn eyrope, vegn der alter heym vos venen bakent in ayer mishpokhe [Are there stories about Europe, about the Old Country that are known in your family]?

AP:Neyn. Di mayses -- s'iz geven zeyer interesant, vayl di mayses zaynen nit 8:00geven do, un ven ikh bin geven a kind, mayn tate hot mir gezogt, "Du darfst makhn an intervyu mit dayn zeyde." Ikh hob nit gevolt makhn un ikh hob gehot moyre. "Vos vel ikh fregn?" Un ikh -- di zelbe zakh mit mayn bobes. Neyn. S'iz nit geven, s'iz geven zeyer shver -- s'iz geven shver far mir tsu farshtanen vi -- vos iz geshen far di milkhome, far di ershter milkhome, di ershter velt milkhome, far di tsayt ven zey zaynen gekumen kayn amerike, vayl az dos iz geven in nayntsn hundert finf, nayntsn hundert tsen. [No. The stories -- this is very 9:00interesting, because the stories weren't there, and when I was a child, my father said to me, "You should do an interview with your grandfather." I didn't want to do it and I was scared. "What will I ask?" And I -- it was the same thing with my grandmothers. No. They weren't there, it was very difficult -- it was difficult for me to understand how -- what happened before the war, before the first war, the First World War, before they came to America, because this was in 1905, 1910.]

CW:Un tsi kent ir shildern ayer heym do in los andzheles [And can you describe your home in Los Angeles]?

AP:In --

CW:Shildern. Vi hot es oysgezen [Describe. How it looked]?

AP:"Shildern"? Vos iz es [What's that]?

CW:"Describe."

AP:Oh! I would have used another word. What would I have said? "Dertseyln [To tell]"? Okay. Mayn lebn do in los andzheles [My life here in Los Angeles]?

CW:Ayer heym [Your home].

AP:Mayn heym [My home].

CW:Ayer hoyz, yo [Your house, yeah].

AP:Mayn heym. Ikh hob a shpanish hoyz, a shpanish-shtil arkhitektur, fun dem yorn nayntsn hundert draytsik. S'iz in "los felis" in shpanish, "los filis" oyf english. S'iz nit vayt fun dem tsenter fun dem shtot. Un es iz an interesanter [My home. I have a Spanish house, Spanish-style architecture, from 1930. It's in Los Feliz in Spanish, "los filis" in English. It's not far from downtown. And it's an interesting] --

CW:Gegnt [Neighborhood].

AP:Gegnt, gegnt, yo.

CW:Un der heym fun di kinderyorn [And your childhood home]?

AP:Mayn heym fun di kinderyorn iz geven in van nayz in dem tol [My childhood home was in Van Nuys, in the valley] -- San Fernando Valley -- un s'iz in, mir kenen dertseyln az es iz in di [and it's, you could say it's in the] -- the suburbs of Los Angeles -- un ven ikh bin geven a kind, s'iz geven zeyer kalm -- zogt men af yidish, "kalm"? Zeyer pasifish, zeyer -- s'iz geven shver tsu zen andere zakhn, vas iz geven hayzer, un hayzer un hayzer, un tsu geyen in krum, s'iz a mayl, oder draytsik minutn oyfn fus. Oder mayn tsenter, di [and when I was a child, it was very calm -- can you say that in Yiddish, "calm"? Very peaceful, very -- it was hard to see other things, because there were houses, and houses and houses, and to go to the store, it's a mile, or thirty minutes on foot. But my Center, the] -- the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center -- iz 11:00geven finf minut fun mayn heym. Ikh hob gekent shpatsirn fun mayn heym biz der tsenter -- ven ikh hob gehat zeks, zibn yor alt, hob ikh gekent geyen aleyn in tsenter. Un dos iz geven mayn lebn -- nokh [was five minutes from my home. I could walk from my house to the Center -- when I was six, seven years old, I walked alone to the Center. And that was my life -- after] public school, yedn tog, bin ikh geven in tsenter, far ale zakhn. Mayn mishpokhe, zey zaynen geven zeyer [every day, I went to the Center, for everything. My family, they were very] -- (sighs) "involved with." That's that "anteyln, anteyl"? What's the word I'm looking for?

CW:"Zey hobn onteyl genumen [They participated]"?

AP:"Onteyl genumen [participated]"? Is that the word, like, to have been involved with? Zey hobn onteyl genumen mitn tsenter yedn tog, yedn nakht fun nayn un fuftsik kayn tsvey toyzn nayn. So, fuftsik yorn. Mir zaynen geven [They 12:00were involved with the Center every day, every evening from '59 to 2009. So, fifty years. We were], uh -- (whispers) oh my God. "Members," like --

CW:"Mitglider [Members]."

AP:Mitglider. I'm just -- the words are, like, right there. Mitglider fun dem tsenter [Members of the Center] -- and that's a very complicated story, because the Jewish community decided to sell it out from under us. So, after sixty years of our community making this Jewish community center and making it the center of all of our lives and having it be this amazing cultural asset, the Jewish community sold it. So, it's kind of the -- it broke my father's heart. He literally had the keys to the center. He was the architect, and he was the guy who -- since we lived around the corner, if you needed to go to the center, it 13:00was like, "Well, Les has got the keys." My father's name was Lester. So, we had the keys, and we opened it up. If something needed to happen -- and we could make anything happen that we wanted to happen, which is actually why the very first Yiddishkayt festival was at that Jewish community center. It was our center to do anything with.

CW:When you were growing up, what did you do there? What were the activities?

AP:So, it would be -- I mean, literally every day after school I went there. So, school would end at two-thirty or three, and then I would be there until five-thirty or six, and that was Monday through Friday. And then, we'd go on Saturdays for shule [secular Yiddish school], yidishe [Yiddish] shule, yidishe folkshul [Jewish school], kindershul [elementary school], mitlshul [high school]. So, that was also in the center. So, I would go for -- like, Monday would be -- one day would be boys' club, just the club with the kids. And 14:00another day would be science club. And another day would be arts and crafts. And another day would be drama, and another day would be music or something like that. And it would change all the time. And I did that continuously. So, my whole public school world was what I did during the day, but all my friends were in the center. So, there were all these -- basically my life was -- there was -- okay, so here's my family, and we're members of the center. And we're also part of the shule movement, kindershul. And some of the people who were at kindershul were members of the center, and some weren't. A lot of people felt the center was too conservative for them. Because at the center you would light candles, for example, for a Jewish holiday, whereas at kindershul, that was way too traditional to light candles. It was considered far too reactionary to do 15:00something as -- like that, like light candles. We're gonna celebrate the holidays in a radical way, and we're not going to do them the way they used to -- in that way. So anyway, so there were a whole bunch of -- so shule was more left-wing than the center, but the center was -- so the center housed the shule. So, the shule would rent from the center. And then, there was camp, and there were two kinds of camps. There was family camp and summer camp. And family camp was kind of a manifestation in a place of my community. So, the center -- all these people, camp, the shule, and the center, we're talking, like, hundreds of families, like three hundred families?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

AP:Like three hundred families or four hundred families? And I knew all these people, and I knew all their kids, and they were all this kind of -- it was like 16:00a little shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community] in the Valley, but people drove, right? So then, we would go to family camp for a week. And it was like the -- "Brigadoon"? Do you know the movie "Brigadoon," where this mythical place emerges once a year? So, it was like that. It was like we would have our shtetl in the mountains for a week where we would all live together and eat together. And every night, there was programming and music and theater and -- these people were enormously creative. It's hard to explain just how creative they were. And everything was infused with music. We were singing all the time. Lots of Yiddish, lots of English -- a little bit of Hebrew, not very much. But Spanish too and other things. I mean, we would sing a song from the Spanish Civil War -- (sings) "Vive la quince brigada [Long live the Fifteenth Brigade], dum da da dum da da dum." You know, we'd sing that, and we 17:00would sing American folksongs from the nineteenth century, like, (sings) "I've been workin' on the railroad." And we would sing -- this entire folk movement would kind of move through song, and there was always a reason to break into song. Like, always. I think I probably know a thousand songs by heart. It was what -- it was our poetry. I didn't really learn poetry -- although we did learn -- in Yiddish, we got some things in shule driven into us. Like "S' brengt di nakht der zunenshayn/der yid, der partizaner [The Jew, the partisan/brings sunshine into the night]," you know, things like we would learn that we would perform. But it wasn't like growing up in my parents' generation where they would learn poetry and recite -- but we'd learn songs. So anyway, all this -- I lived in this amazing, very fertile, fecund, rich cultural life that was group-centered, and I had no idea how weird it was until I went to college, and 18:00-- I thought everybody grew up like this. I really thought everybody grew up with all these people, just hundreds of people around them. So, I had lots of adults as models. And there was also the grandparents too, who were around. They called them the Best Years Club. It was like, Oh! And there were all these kids. So, I knew just a huge range of people. And that had a major influence on my life, I think. Everything I've done since then is about creating situations where people can meet and get together and celebrate, kind of inspired by the way I grew up.

CW:So, what is the camp -- what was it called?

AP:There was family camp, which was part of the center. And that was at -- it was just the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center family camp, and it was for a week, and it was around Labor Day, and that was at Camp Radford, which was up in 19:00the San Bernardino Mountains, about two-and-a-half, three-hour drive from here. And then, the other camp, the summer camp, was part of the Jewish Centers Association, which was what the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center was part of, the JCA, Jewish Centers Association, and that was called Camp JCA. And that was also up just, like, half an hour from the other camp. So, at the end of a summer, if we had gone to the summer and worked as counselors, we would then get our own special bus to take us from one camp to the other, and then we would just stay another extra week and have this camp with adults. Which was actually so much fun. It's hard to describe how fun it was, that -- have an intergenerational camp. I think it was definitely more fun than summer -- kids' summer camp. I mean, it was -- the adults were doing things that were much crazier than kids could ever have done. (laughs) And doing things, and we were 20:00-- growing up, it was always getting entrée into that world.

CW:Like what?

AP:Well, they would do these crazy performances every night. The performances were -- basically in our community are legendary, what happened. And as a kid, you -- I started going there when I was in diapers, at age two. So, it was like growing up and finally getting -- you're five, you go to bed at -- early, and then at a certain point I got to stay up for a late ni-- a program. I got to go to one, and then I got to go to all of them, and I got -- then I got to be in it. It was kind of like introducing me to the world, right? There were definitely these layers, getting into the adult world. Yeah.

CW:And then, the shule, was it part of the Ordn, the -- which shule movement was it a part of?

AP:Oh, I wish Robby were here to talk about this, 'cause he knows it better -- (laughs) he knows it better than I do. It was part of the IWO. It was a breakout. My understanding is -- 'cause they didn't talk about this when we were growing up, they did-- but my understanding is that we broke off from the IWO. And that we then formed an independent shule here in Los Angeles called the -- there was the LA kindershul and mitlshul, and then they formed the Valley kindershul and mitlshul. And then, the LA branch didn't have enough members at one point, and they then merged with the Valley, and it's ironic because then the Valley became more -- usually the city wins out over the Valley. So, the people in the city had to drive to the Valley to go to shule. It was a very left-wing -- basically I would describe it as socialist, non-Zionist, atheist, Yiddishist.

CW:The IWO is the International Workers Organization.

AP:-- Organization. Yeah.

CW:Oh.

AP:But my -- that's -- Robby has a much better sense of how these things worked out in history. Because we weren't -- we didn't talk about any of these things. We were just, like -- there were other shules, and so when I was a kid, there were still other shules around. And there would be, like, a --- all-Los Angeles shule event down the street on Wilshire Boulevard at the -- oh, what's the name of that temp-- that theater? I'll remember. Anyway, at this theater down the street on Wilshire Boulevard. And I remember being seven or eight and doing something in Yiddish on the stage for a thousand people and having this sense of being part of a larger group. But then, that basically got smaller and smaller and smaller the older I got. Like, the large -- our footprint. And we were this tiny minority within the minority of Jews, right? So, Jews are a minority within 23:00LA, and then we're this -- I remember going to -- I grew up in a very Jewish neighborhood. And in my high school, maybe half of the kids were Jewish. But out of those half of the kids, which was -- I'm talking about -- my graduating class had thirteen hundred people in it. So, 650 people -- the people who were in my group, twelve, right, out of the 650. So, we were this little tiny group. Everybody else went to synagogue. And they were normal people, and they went to Hebrew school. And we were -- we didn't do that. So, we met on Saturdays. And we did have Yiddish, eyn shtunde yedn vokh far yidish. Un -- m'ken nit lernen a shprakh fun eyn shtunde a vokh [Yiddish one hour a week. And -- you can't learn 24:00a language in one hour per week] -- yeah. It was just impossible. So, I would say out of all the people who went through the program -- there were thirteen people in my class. There were maybe, like, a hundred people in the whole school, and maybe a couple hundred people went through the Yiddish -- through the folkshul that I was a part of. I don't think anyone speaks as well as I, and I don't speak that well. And I had to learn it -- later I went to university, and that's when it really -- I got a chance to learn Yiddish every -- an hour a day for a year. And that was like, Oh, this is the way you learn Yiddish. You have a textbook, and you practice.

CW:Do you -- who was your Yiddish teacher?

AP:Well, the -- Rose Cohen was my first Yiddish teacher, who was ancient when I 25:00had her. I think she was probably seventy-five when I was seven. And I know that she had been a teacher in the Los Angeles shule movement going back to the '40s or the '30s. 'Cause I knew -- yeah, the '30s, because there were people who were -- Ethel Rosenfeld, for example, who grew up in Los Angeles, she also was one of my teachers. And I believe that -- oh, no, she -- no, who would have been at -- I'm trying to think of who would have had Rose Cohen. Maybe Sabell Bender. There were people who were parents who had had Rose Cohen when they were kids and going to the shule in Boyle Heights. 'Cause there were a lot of people in my community who were -- the LA people were pretty much all from Boyle Heights. So, the people who then moved to the Valley and became part of the center or the shule, who were LA people, were Boyle Heights. And the others were -- they were from Chicago, or like my parents, from New York or wherever, from other places. 26:00But the LA contingent was all Boyle Heights. So, Rose Cohen was my first teacher. Ethel Rosenfeld was my second teacher. And then, Fima Chesnin. Did you -- you didn't get to -- you've heard about him, right? So, Fima is -- I'm just gonna cry, thinking about Fima. Fima is just legendary in LA because he inspired so many people because he was just so good, and he was such a great man. And Fima was from Vilna and was educated, I think, through tenth grade, in Yiddish. And then, in eleventh grade he did -- that's when the -- eleventh grade for him would have been, like, 1939 -- or no, '38 -- and then he did it in Lithuania, and I think he did twelfth grade in Russian or Polish. And then, the Germans 27:00came, and he was on the -- he escaped to the East, to the Soviet side, and was in Kazakhstan, in a labor camp. But he had this -- he grew up -- by the time he came to the United States in the '40s, he spoke Hebrew and Russian and Polish and French and Spanish and Hebrew -- I already said that -- and Yiddish. He also knew Belarusian and Ukrainian. So, he was somebody who he could look at these texts, and he could say, "Well, that word is definitely Polish, that's Belarusian, that's Ukrainian, that's Russian." So, he was able to parse these things. He'd go, "Well, that's Aramaic, that's Yiddish, that's Hebrew." He had this amazing linguistic knowledge, which was very impressive, 'cause I forget words all the time now, and I'm constantly thinking about how we would basically 28:00say, just offhand to Fima, How do you say this? What's that? And he would -- he just had all the words at his fingertips until he died. So, he was an architect who worked for my father. My father had an architecture and engineering office. And my father knew that Fima -- knew Fima's history, and asked him to teach Yiddish. And he said, "I don't want to do it." And my father convinced him. He said, "We need -- we've got this shule going." And Fima was not -- at first was very reluctant to take this thing on. I think he had not wanted to -- I mean, it was a very painful past for him to have lost his whole -- his family, his friends, and everyone in Vilna. Before I went to Vilna in 1994, I sat down with Fima to talk to him about -- I wanted to find his house, I wanted to talk to him about the neighborhood. He drew me this very detailed map of Vilna, like, 29:00everything. And he had never gone back and never wanted to go back. He had gone to Poland -- actually, you can find this in his Yiddish interview that he did with Miriam Koral. He had gone to Poland after the war to actually be a revenge partisan and then escaped to Switzerland and then to France -- or Germany and then to France. So anyway, Fima was -- then became my teacher from -- I think sixth grade through ninth grade. And he was also just this -- and I also got a chance -- I worked for my father in my father's office, so I got to hang out with Fima there for a while. And I just knew Fima. And then, I would see him around, and he was part of the center. And he also -- there's -- I didn't talk about the other group, which is the erev shabes [Shabbos eve] group. So, besides the -- if you had -- so my parents created a group with their close friends, and 30:00all of the people in the group had to have had kids in the shule. And then, they basically said, We wanna -- basically when we were in shule, they said, Why don't we learn something? So, they set up this Friday night erev shabes group to -- basically for them. So, it became a once a month group for -- forty-five years it lasted? And it's still going. And it's actually -- now it's going on with whoever's left from my parents' generation and us and our kids and the next generation. So, we're keeping it going. But the erev shabes group -- he was part of that group. So, I would see him -- they would do things, and there might be an erev shabes thing at my parents' house, and so I'd see him. Later, around 1991 -- so I'm living in Los Angeles, and I'm working in the arts; that's what I do, and I speak languages. I learned French really well, and I was learning Spanish. And I spoke -- I'd gone to university, I went to Berkeley to learn 31:00Yiddish, and then I studied Yiddish in France, and I studied Yiddish at YIVO. And I was like -- I wanted to learn -- I wanted to speak. And I remember hanging around the center with my parents' friends who did speak Yiddish, 'cause my parents don't speak Yiddish. (laughs) That was the joke about this for me, setting up Yiddishkayt. People would say to my father, So, you must speak flu-- you spoke Yiddish at the home. That's how Aaron learned Yiddish. He said, "Of course we spoke Yiddish at home!" My father's only sentence he could say in Yiddish was "Sami est frishe fish [Sammy eats fresh fish]." 'Cause his father spoke Yiddish, but his mother did not. His mother was a Yankee. She was born in New York. But I remember, I was talking to Ethel Rosenfeld, Sabell Bender, and Fima Chesnin. And all of these people -- Sabell is with us. But they were all shtark [ardent] Yiddishists, right, the people who really knew Yiddish. Fima was 32:00the only native-born European of the three. But we were hanging around. I said, "Why don't we ever speak Yiddish to each other?" We were at the center. I said, "Why don't you guys speak Yiddish to each other?" Oh, it's so hard, you know. It's complicated. And I said, "Well, why don't we start a group where we would talk Yiddish once a week." And we were like, Fima, could you help us with this? (laughs) 'Cause Fima was -- everybody knew Fima was the expert. And Fima said, "You get the group together, I'll do it." So, we started in 1991 this group, which then lasted twenty-five years. It was an intergenerational shmueskrayz [conversation group] -- leyenkrayz [reading circle]. That was what Fima said. "If I'm gonna do it, we're gonna read text. We're gonna read. And so, you have to be able to read, and then we're gonna discuss." So, we went through thousands of pages of text. And we read novels, and we read short stories, and we read all 33:00kinds of things. And we laughed, and it was -- I was the youngest when it started. So, in 1991 I was thirty-four. And they were sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five. And so many of that -- so that original group then started transmogrifying or evolving and permutating -- Dan Opatoshu became a member. Ethel Rosenfeld, Miriam Koral -- I don't think -- I can't even think about -- Mark Smith -- I mean, I have a list of all these people, who all, in many ways, shaped Yiddish culture in our generation in Los Angeles. And it all came out of that. They all had their own Yiddish sensibility before the group, but the group was really important. Because we met religiously. (laughs) And actually, we even had some frum yidn [observant Jews]. It was very interesting. We'd have very 34:00Orthodox people, a couple of them, who were -- it was fantastic 'cause, for me, it was like going into another world. And we'd go to their house, and these people would knock on the door, and -- there would be these really interesting (laughs) moments for all of us, sitting around, speaking Yiddish in different homes in Los Angeles. And having a great time -- laughing uproariously and -- we would do -- we then developed our own seder in Yiddish and translated basically a version of the hagode [the book of readings for the Passover seder] oyf yidish [in Yiddish] that Fima worked on for years that's really beautiful. So, there were great traditions. And out of that, then later, that's when Yiddishkayt came out of that. Miriam Koral's cycle came out of that; Mark Smith's work leading to his thesis came out of that.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:What were your associations with Yiddish when you were growing up?

AP:Well, it was really -- we were taught how important it was. So, we were -- it 35:00was part -- so we sang in Yiddish, we learnt Yiddish, we could read Yiddish, and we felt it was -- I mean, there was something sacred about it. I remember -- we were very radical in -- and it was the '60s, and so it's kind of like now; they would play "The Star-Spangled Banner," and we wouldn't stand up. I remember in second or third grade I refused to put my hand over my heart for the Pledge of Allegiance, and I got called into the principal's office, and I basically described my philosophical issues with putting my hand over my heart for this flag, for this country that was fighting against people who I didn't believe we had any business fighting against. And I got excused from having to put my hand over my heart. And so we never stood for anything. But we stood for "Zog nit 36:00keyn mol [Never say]." So, it was kind of like that kind of a sense that it beca-- it's visceral. So, I understood as a little kid how important it was, because that's the only thing we stood for, and it was in Yiddish. And it was "Zog nit keyn mol." And that was the national -- that was our national anthem. That was worth standing for. And it was -- even though we didn't -- as a group weren't -- my friends, we weren't conversing with each other in Yiddish, we could play around with it, and we knew it, and we knew songs. We could sing whole songs, many, probably a hundred songs in Yiddish and all kinds of things. So, I also knew, though then grow-- later, going into the larger community, I 37:00remember in my twenties being very aware of how Yiddish looked to the wider world. So, I remember there was this -- so I got involved in the arts world, in producing arts festivals in Los Angeles in about 1982. So, I started -- and that's what I still do. So, that's thirty-six years later. But I remember in the '80s, all of my parents' friends were still alive, and I was now working in the arts. And there would be -- I'd go to city meetings or some kind of big community meeting, and there would be somebody from my world, from my Yiddish world, would show up, and say, "We want to do Yiddishkayt!" And it looked so old-fashioned and so -- here we were, people were all involved with what's contemporary art mean in Los Angeles, and they were talking about these things 38:00that were from the 1920s or something -- it just seemed very parochial, and I felt like, Oh, my God. I remember this moment in this public meeting when Estelle Busch got up, who was somebody from my community who was very involved with theater and who probably had this incredible history of Yiddish theater which I don't know about. And she stood up in this meeting and talked about how she wanted to do Yiddishkayt. And I just thought, Oh, my God. It just -- it just sounded so uncontemporary. And it took me -- so I would say that was 1988 when that happened. So, it took -- I started Yiddishkayt in 1994. So, in that six-year period, I had this kind of coming to terms with my own culture, which 39:00was to say -- I would be sitting around in meetings where people would say, I'm a Chicano activist. You'd go around the room and say, "What do you do?" "Well, I'm an arts administrator." And somebody would say, "Well, I'm a Chicano activist." And somebody would say, "Yeah, I'm working in the black community, and this is what I'm doing with the arts in the African-American community. And I -- it took me six years to be able to say, "Oh, I'm actually doing this for my community." And that was this big shift for me to own it. And then, I realized -- it was at that point that I realized how much shame was embedded in American culture about Yiddish. Which I didn't understand. I didn't understand just how much it was shameful to everybody else. I kind of -- because the way I grew up, it wasn't shameful to us. And I just had a little -- I remember that moment with Estelle Busch in that public meeting, I had ne-- I don't think up until then 40:00that I had ever tried or had Yiddish as part of the world, right? It was kind of our own little thing that we did. And then, it was like, Oh my God, this is really -- this is really screwed up. Our world, the Jewish world, looks down on Yiddish. They are ashamed of it. And it took me a long time to understand that psychologically. And then, it was the thing I got. It was like, Well, now -- I felt like I had a secret that people didn't -- the rest of the Jewish world doesn't even know. To this day, I'm still talking about this all the time. And Jews are like, What do you mean, we're ashamed of Yiddish? (laughs) Oh, let me explain it to you. And then, I have to explain the entire sequence of things and -- from calling it jargon to calling it dead, basically to -- there's an unconscious dismissal of Yiddish that happens in American culture from the 41:00Jewish side that the rest of the American culture doesn't get. When I speak about this with people in my world who aren't Jewish, they completely understand why Yiddish is important. It's the Jews (laughs) who don't get it. So, that was a really big revelation. That was a hu-- and that was the key to the birth of Yiddishkayt. 'Cause I'm thinking about this -- as an adult now -- now it's 1994, so I'm thirty-six years old. And -- do you want me to go into the origin story now?

CW:Well, I'm actually wondering if you can explain a little more about the shame thing. How would you explain that to me if I didn't know what you were talking about?

AP:Okay, if you didn't know? I have this conversation with people -- I think I just had this conversation with an Armenian-American woman the other day. And she was saying, "So, is it a threatened language, is it a dead language?" And I 42:00-- "How many people speak Yiddish?" I said, "No, it's not threatened, it's not dead." She says, "Really? I thought it was, like, a dying language." Says, "No, no, no, it's fine. (laughs) It's actually -- that's the myth." And she said -- anyway. So, I explain it all the time. So, what I would say is -- I'm trying to think of how -- what role I'm gonna pretend -- so I'd say (pauses) -- so the Jewish world -- and this actually comes out a lot through us at Yiddishkayt going out and asking people for support. Basically I describe it historically as -- it's a class thing; it's a gender thing; it's a political thing. So many things conspired to make -- to put Yiddish in its place -- that it's really hard 43:00to unwind, but so, in the United States we have -- (sounds of honking outside) Hey, that's really good.

CW:(laughs)

AP:We have this whole generation of people who come who are from Eastern Europe who are trying to assimilate into United States culture. And they're coming at a time when it's super important for Americans to see immigrants as being assimilated, right? So, it's kind of a moment like now. It's very important to speak without an accent; it's very important to move forward in the culture. And the more that you stand out, the less accepted you are as an American. Right? And here -- I was a part of a group that had deliberately chosen to keep its culture, to keep its language, and to do all the things that were against those kinds of things. So, as Jews, Jewish Americans wanted to put their past behind 44:00them. They wanted to be American. They wanted to put Yiddish behind them. And if you spoke with an accent and had this -- Old World tendencies in any which way or form, whether it was being Orthodox or whether it was playing klezmer music, it was all kind of heaped into the same thing. It was like, We're Americans now. And there was a class issue about that. You know, the people who spoke Yiddish were from the working class, and they -- there was a political thing about that too, because people who kept -- many of the people who held on to their Yiddish were forming unions and using Yiddish as an organizing tool, and they were the people who were kind of the grandparents of the people -- or the parents -- who set up my shule. So, we felt like -- we sang union songs, and we talked about how important that was to organize. But from a perspective of the United States, those are all things that are still putting you on the fringe. Then I would say, 45:00on top of it, second languages are not respected at all in this country. So, it's not respected -- and it's only, I would say, in the last twenty years that I see a shift in that, especially in Los Angeles. Here you have a very different culture, where the fact that you speak -- I think half of Los Angeles speaks a different language at home right now. So, it's a very respected thing -- it's a normal thing to speak a language at home that's not what you speak -- that's not English. And you kind of expect that. Every other person you meet in LA is speaking a different language at home. But when we were growing up the idea that that would happen was anathema, and it was considered repugnant to Americans, and you would deny your own language. So, the fact that we were holding onto it, that was another thing. So, that's the American context, I would say: to assimilate, to be American -- and then you have Israel coming in. Well, first 46:00you have Stalin. And you have Stalin decimating the Yiddish culture of the Soviet Union. And then, you have Hitler and the Holocaust and the annihilation of basically, what, 5.5 million Yiddish speakers out of the six million, something like that? Whatever it is. An enormous group of people. And so there's an amazing amount -- and then out of that, we have the rise of Israel. So, the narrative is that Yiddish is the language of defeat, Yiddish is the language of weakness, Yiddish is the language of death. So, why would you want to associate yourself with that? I remember -- I went to Israel for the first time in 1992. I was turning -- I was fourteen, and people would say, You speak Hebrew, and I would say, "No, I learned Yiddish in Los Angeles." And somebody spat on me for 47:00saying that I speak Yiddish. Like, (spits) like, "Feh." So, the idea of strength and the new Jew and the new future became very wrapped up in Israel, the Israeli ethos, which then traveled over to the United States. So, we stopped saying "Good Shabbos," which is what we said when I was a kid -- everybody said "Good Shabbos." And then, all of a sudden, the people who went to shul -- at the synagogue started saying, "Shabbat shalom." It was like, "What the -- where'd that come from?" (laughs) How come you started -- and we would say "Sukkos." There was a lot of "Sukkot." Everything changed, right? And that's because that -- we as American Jews looked to Israel as our compass. And we as part of the center shule movement were fighting for the right to be a Diaspora Jew. We were 48:00saying, No, what's important is for us to have our identity here. We had a philosophy of doikeyt [Bundist concept of "hereness"] -- which I didn't even hear that word until I was doing Yiddishkayt -- probably around 1998 is the first time I heard the word. I didn't even know. But that's the philosophy that we practiced, which was you celebrate your culture wherever you are. You create the revolution and create a better world wherever you are. You fight for that wherever you are. Here. You fight for it here. So, the Holocaust and the rise of Israel and what was happening in the Soviet Union also was a combination of things that drove people away from Yiddish and made people think that Yiddish was not respectable. And then, you had an entire -- basically by the time the 49:00'70s and the '80s roll around, Yiddish is just languishing. It's like crumbs in the corner of the American-Jewish world. It's as forgotten as possible. We as -- growing up here, our -- being Yiddish and having Yiddish in LA was an in-- we were invisible. Nobody knew about us, nobody heard about us, nobody knew that there was Yiddish theater here, that there were Yiddish libraries here, that there were Yiddish schools here. We were invisible. And that's the way the community wanted it, 'cause the Jewish community wouldn't fund us. We went to them and said, Will you fund these -- this is like, in my parents' time -- will you give us money as part of the Bureau of Jewish Education for our Jewish school? No! We're not gonna give you money. Will you support our Jewish center and what we do, which is actually working with not just Jews, but non-Jews? No! We won't allow that. I mean, they basically -- they defunded Yiddish. Yiddish 50:00was actually the language of instruction for Jewish schools in Los Angeles in the teens and the '20s and the '30s. But all that stopped. And then, it was forgotten; people didn't even know that that whole history existed. And then, there really is -- in that, it's not just -- these are not ideological things that are -- there are ideological things driving it, but the most important thing is the emotional shame, which is unconscious and is somewhere deep in people's mind, like the way you have some -- you might have a weird sexual fantasy, and you'll have this shame associated with it, and you'll never talk about it. That's how powerful it is. And it's in a way that when you speak to people, when I speak to people, when I speak to people in the Jewish community, they don't even -- they can't even recognize how much they hate Yiddish. They 51:00don't even know it. They'll talk about it in ways, and they'll say, No! It's like people who say, I'm not a racist. I'll never -- not me. But they despise it. And so, we do projects at Yiddishkayt, and we'll get remarks from funders in the Jewish community, and they'll say, There's just not enough death in what you do. We say, Oh no, we were talking about why Yiddish is important as a living culture. Yeah, but we want you to talk about the Holocaust and all the people who died. So, well, we actually want to dwell -- we want to talk about -- we don't want to dwell on those thirteen years between '36 and -- or between -- whatever, nine years -- between '36 and '45 or between 1933 and 1945; we want to dwell on a thousand years of vitality which led us -- which actually informs all of Ashkenazi culture, which is seventy-five percent of American Jews or more. And they're like, No, we don't want to talk about that. We want to go from the 52:00narrative that we have, which is -- this is the other thing I explain to non-Jews, is that everybody thinks Jews are historical people. But we are practicing absolute amnesia. So, basically the new narrative is, it's the temple, and then we fast-forward to the rise of Israel, and somehow we're all here. There's no sense of how we became the Jews we are and how -- and so Yiddish is the key, for me, to our DNA, to unraveling who we are as Jews. It explains so many things. But if you don't want to look at your history, you can't see that. And I find that the shame issue has not extended to the new generation. So, it's basically millennials -- people born after, I would say 1975, don't have this shame. And it's all wrapped up in American -- kind of like 53:00Milton Berle on TV and kind of like Jewish vaudeville characters who made it into American Jewish cinema too, and culture, I think it's all wrapped up in that too. But I find that talking to anyone born after, like, '80, they don't know what I'm talking about. They go, Wha--? 'Cause they don't even know -- it's brand new for them. So, there's this, I feel like, new generations of people who are excited about Yiddish in a way that I can't get people my age to be excited by. They just don't get it. Did that explain it?

CW:Absolutely. So, how come you took Yiddish in college?

AP:I loved languages. I remember -- I'm the youngest in my family, so I'm in second grade, and my brother's in fifth grade, and my sister's in seventh grade. And they go to shule on Saturdays, and they learn Yiddish, and I want to learn 54:00Yiddish. I'm just like, "Why can't I go to shule?" They go, You have to wait until third grade. I remember wanting to learn how to -- I wanted to learn other languages. Period. But Yiddish was the first one that was put in front of me. I was like, "I want to learn that." I loved learning to write in this other alphabet, and I loved learning it. And I was diligent. I did my homework, my -- mayn heftn zaynen gefilt mit mayn shrift [my notebooks are filled with my handwriting] -- I mean, you know, I'm there. And we didn't have -- you couldn't take a foreign language in school in Los Angeles until -- I think ninth grade was the first year you could take a foreign language. I was dying by the time I was in ninth grade. I didn't take French until tenth grade, and I then dove into French with ferocity. And so, I now speak well enough so that French speakers 55:00think I'm a native speaker from somewhere, maybe -- Are you from Switzerland? Are you from Canada? But they can't believe I'm an American who learned it as an adult. 'Cause I really dove into it, and then I -- I think that if I had grown up in another world, I would speak seven or eight languages now. But I don't. So, I was very thirsty for languages. And Yiddish was right there, and I was really excited by it. And when I found out that there was a college textbook -- so my sister -- when I was in high school my sister was at UCLA, and she took Janet Hadda's class. And she came home with Weinreich. I was like, (dramatically) "Oh my God. There's a book? (laughs) There's a whole textbook?" 'Cause we had these mimeographed sheets that we would get at shule that were hand-done. I was like, "Wow. And there's a method?" And I just read the entire book and did all the exercises myself -- before I went -- and then I got to 56:00Berkeley and -- oh my God, who's my teacher at Berkeley? Janet Ha-- no, um -- (sighs) I can't believe I forgot her name. She was also Robby's teacher too, the professor of -- she's from Israel. Anyway, I'll have to remember her name. I'm really upset that I can't remember her name.

CW:Yael Chaver?

AP:Hm?

CW:Was it Yael?

AP:No.

CW:Oh.

AP:No. She was -- she started the first Yiddish class. It was 1978, it was the first time Yiddish was offered at -- and we would meet after hours in the -- what is that called? The language arts building at four o'clock. And it felt like we were all alone. And it was kind of like, Yeah, you guys, just clean up after you're done and close the door. 'Cause it was kind of -- it felt 57:00unsanctioned, even though we were getting credit for it. (whispering) Oh my God, I forgot her name! I'm sorry. She was a great teacher, and she really sent me to the next level that I needed to go to. And then, I moved to France, and I studied Yiddish at Paris Cinq?, at the fifth university, Paris Cinq, and I then -- with a mother-daughter team, which I also would have to look up to find their names. They were amazing. And then, I moved to New York for a year and studied at YIVO. And then, came back to LA and then a couple of years later founded the group.

CW:So, sort of going back to what you were just talking about earlier, your own realization about the shame --

AP:Um-hm.

CW:-- and sort of undoing of that, can you talk about what -- were there moments, important moments, where you became aware of this? Yeah, can you describe that personal journey?

AP:Of the shame? I think that moment that I was talking about, about Estelle Busch getting up and talking about Yiddishkayt -- which is actually written about in one of Sandra Tsing Loh's books. Because this was a very important meeting. It was about setting up -- there was a festival that grew out of the Olympic Arts Festival, and we were creating this -- Peter Sellars was -- the guy who -- you know, MacArthur Fellow, opera director -- he had come to Los Angeles to create this thing called the Los Angeles Festival -- or to become the director of the LA Festival. And I was directing what was called the Fringe Festival, which was the alternative to all of these. And so, we were there up on stage together. And we were running this meeting. And there were, I think, three hundred people there, and it was at Barnsdall Park. And so, Sandra was there. And so, she does write about this moment, actually, in one of her books. So, that was a key moment for me, and I did think about it for a long time. Because I remembered thinking, "Oh my --" and dismissing it. I remember dismissing, kind 59:00of like, "Oh, Estelle Busch, my past and those people. Yeah, that was nice, but that's over there in that box. That's over there in the Valley. That's my Jewish community center. That's not part of the art world. That doesn't fit here." And it took me -- over the course of the next couple of years, as I became involved as an arts administrator or producer or arts activist in getting very engaged with the arts in Los Angeles, I started to think about it over -- I was thinking about it all the time. Because I lived -- we had our Yiddish group that we started. I had a chavurah [Hebrew: fellowship] group that my friends and I started, the young people's chavurah, which was -- we did all kinds of things in Yiddish and with Yiddish. We had my community. So, I was living this kind of closeted life, if you want to say -- if you want to use that kind of terminology, where Yiddish was, for me, a private thing that was in one corner, 60:00and then there was the rest of the world. And I was thinking about it a lot, and I was thi-- there were a couple of things that happened. There was a -- my parents' friends were very involved, and Sabell Bender did an exhibition of Yiddish theater posters. That happened at the Skirball, when the Skirball was still at Hebrew Union College. And there was another thing that happened -- there was a Yiddish Folkways festival that Michael Alpert worked on. 'Cause Michael's from LA, and he actually worked with people, and that happened early on in Fairfax. So there were these things that happened that were like, Oh, that's cool. That's cool. And I remember seeing Brave Old World play, and then I went to KlezKamp. They did KlezKamp on the West Coast. It was 1989. I went to that. So, I was kind of getting involved with things and realizing more and more 61:00that there was this divide between what I was doing and what it looked like in LA. And it was becoming clearer to me just how -- as I said to you before, how invisible we were. So, here was this whole culture. And there were tens of thousands of people who were involved with it at that time in Los Angeles, and it was invisible. And my world was invisible to those people. And I realized I needed -- at a certain point I realized I needed to start doing something about it. And that was when -- and this is the origin story. So, now it's like -- so I'm involved in the arts, and I'm working on all these different things -- 'cause I worked in Dance Theater Workshop in New York, and I got my MBA in nonprofit arts management at UCLA. I worked at the Craft and Folk Art Museum. I worked at MOCA in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art. I got a job in Los Angeles, and then I started -- I met my business partner, Katie Bergin, at 62:00the Craft and Folk Art Museum, and then we started our own business, Community Arts Resources, in 1989, almost thirty years ago. And so, we're like -- by 1990, I'm one of the most experienced festival producers in LA. And Katie and I have our company; we're doing all the stuff. And I'm seeing this -- I'm producing things about African-American culture, Chicano culture in Los Angeles. We do Persian American, we do Guatemalan American. We're looking at -- we have a database of every single community in LA and what they're doing, right? We're going from Chamorro to Zapotec, from -- things that are -- just all the different small subgroups. Like, they might be Oaxacan as opposed to Mexican, 63:00right? Or they're going to be -- maybe they're Mexican or versus they're Mexican American or Chicano. They're kind of different layers. We knew all of these different variations and distinctions, and we were learning all about the cultural variety that was LA. LA was exploding at that time in terms of cultural diversity. So, I'm more and more aware of this. And now -- I had been working -- I had met this woman named Elise Bernhardt, who founded Dancing in the Streets in New York City, and I met her through working at Dance Theater Workshop in the mid-'80s, when I was working there. And I kept in touch with her, and then she had me come out to New York to be on a panel for this site-specific grant, where you -- they were giving money to dancers to do site-specific projects all over the world. I was on the panel that gave the money out, and we decided who would get the money. And we read the grant proposals, 'cause I had -- did that kind of 64:00thing. And then, Elise got pregnant, and she called me up, and she said, "I can't go, and I need a site visitor to go to Belarus to see this piece because we need to report to the funder about how we've spent their --" -- I forget, it was like $250,000 or something. And this was 1994, so it was like -- and I said, "Can I take my wife, Judith?" She said, "Absolutely." So, we said, Great. We're going to -- all-expense-paid trip to Belarus. What the hell. So, we go to France, of course, first, 'cause that's like, my second home. We go to Paris, we see our friends, and we board an Aeroflot jet for Vilna, Vilnius, right? But Vilna. And I'm going home, right, I'm going to -- (sighs) I'm going there, right? And it's just amazing. I told you I interviewed Fima, and I talked to him, and I get a map. And we sit on the plane, and I meet this woman, and we 65:00speak French together. And her name is (UNCLEAR), who -- and she's Lithuanian, and she invites us to her place, and we become good friends with her, and she gives us an apartment in Vilna. But before all that happens, once we arrive, we're going to see Tamar Rogoff. And Tamar is from New York, and her family on her father's side was from Iwye. And Iwye's a small shtetl about maybe a two-hour drive from Vilna, on the Belarus side of the border now, but of course originally all of this was inside what was Lithuania, independent Lithuania, at the time. And she read her father's diaries and had her father's films from when he visited Iwye in the '30s, 'cause he was going to med school in Switzerland; he was American. And he went to see his uncle, who was still living in Iwye, so he had all these reports about the community and all these details and home 66:00movies. And then, of that community, I think something like thirty of her relatives were killed in the woods right outside the town. And I think of the town of something like fifteen hundred, twelve hundred of them were shot in the woods. So, Tamar has decided to take her money from Dancing in the Streets to create this site-specific dance theater music piece in the woods where the massacre took place in Iwye. So, we meet the company in Vilna, where they're rehearsing in the opera company, in the opera house. And Tamar, who is a couple years older than me -- I'm sixty right now, so maybe she's -- maybe she's seventy now. I'm not quite sure how much older she is than me. But she's older. And she's a director, and she's a choreographer. And she has this vision. And she's a contemp-- she's somebody I get. She's an artist from New York. Totally 67:00understand -- and she's taking this vision and making it happen in Iwye. And Iwye's now a small town in Belarus with maybe five or ten thousand people. And she's got so much money. She's got hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is an enormous amount of money for Belarus. And she's set up an entire summer workshop with the town. And she has invited artists to be in this production who are from Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, the United States, Ukraine, Russia, Australia -- all over the world. And she invites them to come take place. And then, she's got musicians, dancers, actors, set designers, costume, everything. And she hires all the local people to cook for us, right. So, there's this production. There's like, fifty people in the show, performers, and then a 68:00hundred -- it's an enormous thing, and we're all set up in the elementary school, and we're there, we're -- my wife and I, when we drive over the border, we're in Vilna first, and we're kind of -- meet them there, and then we're getting on the bus, and we go over the border to Belarus, and we have to bring all our water because it's right after Chernobyl so everything is radioactive, and we have to bring our own -- all kinds of things. And we go to Lida, which is where we're staying in this kind of Soviet awful hotel. And really, these countries have been independent for ten seconds in the Soviet -- you feel Stalin in the Soviet Union all over the place. And Lida's a twenty-minute, half-an-hour drive from Iwye, but we're staying in Lida, and we go to Iwye every day. And it's magical. It's absolutely magical. I meet the music director there, Frank London. That's the first time. And I was like, "So, Fr--" -- I'm meeting this 69:00guy, he's really cool, he's my age, we talk. So, I said, "What do you do?" Said, "I play klezmer." "Great," and, "What group are you in?" "Probably you've heard of us, the Klezmatics." I said, "Who?" I had never heard of the Klezmatics. I had heard of Brave Old World, but I hadn't heard of him. (laughs) He was, I think, a little disappointed. "Really? You haven't heard of us?" He was the music director. And (UNCLEAR) and his wife Tina were there. And we just bonded. And then, the -- Tamar -- Tamar is masterful. And she created a masterpiece, an absolute masterpiece in the woods, that was contemporary, that was incredibly smart, that was everything a piece of art can do. It pushed your boundaries. And you -- basically it was a site-specific piece. All the people who came -- and people came from all over Eastern Europe. There were -- people came on trains from Minsk and from Saint Petersburg. I mean, people came to this show. It was 70:00on the media all over Eastern Europe at the time. And maybe a hundred and fifty people at a time could experience it. And I think I saw the show five times. And you would wear a sheet. If you were an attendee, you wore a sheet to distinguish yourself from the performers, who all were dressed in normal clothes. And we were in the woods, and we moved through. And the action took place in Yiddish, in English, in Russian, in Polish, in all these different things. And it was musical. And it was this celebration of life. It was all about the magic of this community and the magic of their lives. And of course -- you knew that all these people were dead. I mean, there were survivors from Iwye in the piece. And it 71:00was incredibly powerful. I remember feeling like I -- moving up to this. We would go to the rehearsals, and everybody was dressed as Jews. And we would walk through town. And people would say, There, the Jews are here. And we got into all these conversations, literally with the townspeople, about the Jews are back and what did it mean and who knew who. And there was still a couple, an older couple, who lived in this house, like, a shtetl house, like I would have seen in a book that I studied about, and it was all in color. I felt I was on an acid trip because I went to their house, I spoke to them in Yiddish, there was a wooden floor, kind of a radio, and it was like being in 1890. But they were still there. They had come back. So, there were a lot of people from Iwye -- there was a man from Australia who came back, and there were people who -- she brought all this -- it was an amazing healing moment, too. An incredible moment. 72:00And it happened over and over again. And every time it happened, it was magic. And I just realized, just -- giant lightbulb. This is the way to bring Yiddish to Los Angeles, to bring Yiddish to the world. Actually, we need to work through contemporary artists because they know how to rein-- to take this culture and make it part of what we -- make it part of our lives right now. Make it relevant. Make it real. Translate it for us in a way that we can't understand. I had never felt Yiddish to be as vital and as relevant as that moment being with Tamar in the woods in Belarus. So, I came back with this giant lightbulb, that I'm gonna create -- 'cause I know how to create festivals; I know how to work with contemporary artists. This is what I know how to do. That's what we're gonna do. And so, I came back to LA, and I said, "We're gonna do --" -- my first 73:00concept was, We're gonna create a festival of amazing Jewish new work based in Yiddish, and we're gonna commission this, and we're gonna move it around the world. And it'll go in LA, Saint Petersburg, Paris, Melbourne -- it'll move to all the great capitals. And in every place, there'll be a set of core things that are commissioned that are amazing that travel, and then each city will have its own thing. Like, New York will have its own things that are -- they produced in Yiddish. And I remember conceptualizing this very large-scale thing that was gonna cost millions of dollars. And I had raised money up until then and done large-scale things, and I thought, Oh, okay, we can do this, we can do this. (claps hands) And Murray Brown, who was my father's friend, who was the -- Sylvia and Murray Brown were part of my group, part of the erev shabes group, and Sylvia was the music teacher and Murray was the guy who directed all the 74:00shows that I was talking about at family camp. So, Murray says, "Aaron, we have this center, and we have this resource. Let's use it. I know you're thinking big, but let's just start with LA. Let's just start with the center. Let's do a festival. Just make it happen here." So, I said, "Ah, okay." (laughs) It was a reluctant compromise. "I guess you're right. We'll just start here." So, we created a committee, and we brought together all the people involved with Yiddish in LA. So, they hadn't spoken to each other in fifty years because basically these people had been divided ideologically for years and it was like, Oh, we're too -- in my world, growing up in the shule, the Workmen's Circle was -- they were di rekht. They were the right wing. So, we weren't gonna talk to them. (laughs) And we already -- let alone anyone else who was part of mainstream society. We thought the Workmen's Circle was right-wing. So, we all 75:00sat down together, and I brought all these -- I asked people, "Who are the people I need to bring to the table?" 'Cause I didn't know the Yiddish world. So, Lilke Meisner has to be there. Henry Sapoznik has to be there. Hershl Hartman has to be there. Then the people from our group, like Ethel -- hey, whatever. We kind of brought -- it was kind of like a United Nations thing. And I think it was -- oh -- I think it was Ethel Rosenfeld who -- who said, "Let's call it Yiddishkayt." I'm trying to remember if it was Ethel or Sylvia Brown who's the person who first came up with that. Or even Hershl Hartman. I bet I have it in the notes. I didn't even know what Yiddishkayt meant. It wasn't a word that I had used growing up. I was like, "What?" And I was like, "Oh, we can play with that!" I was very excited, like, "We can do a little kite thing." And actually -- we'll take a little break, and I'll get the early thing. But we actually started -- the first logo is with a kite. 'Cause I said, "We have to 76:00spell it, of course --" -- 'cause Hershl was there -- "-- we have to spell it YIVO transliteration, it's gotta be K-a-y-t." And I said, "Nobody's gonna (laughs) understand how to pronounce that properly. So, we'll put the kite in so they'll get it. It'll be Yiddishkayt." So, that's how we came up with the name, that's the first meeting -- which was at --

CW:This was '94, right?

AP:Ninety-four. It was end of '94. I went to the event and this thing in Iwye in the summer, in July, and I came back, and then in the fall we had the meeting, and we came up with the name, and we did the first festival a year later in 1995 at the Jewish community center. So then, it was moving forward and making this happen. And then, the first festival it was, "Nobody's gonna come." It was all like, "Nobody's gonna come." I talked to the press, and they were like, Who's gonna come to this? And I remember talking to individuals saying, "I'm gonna invite my grandmother." And I said, "I want you to invite your kids. This is about the present." 'Cause we were -- I did this with my partner, Katie, and my 77:00whole company. We produced the festival. And we had produced by that time -- we had already produced twenty-five major festivals in Los Angeles. We had already done the Santa Monica festival. We had already done the Festival of Masks. We had already done all these crazy -- the Fringe Festival, the Open Festival -- we had done stuff. We knew how to do festivals. So, we're gonna make this kick-ass festival. And there were five thousand people there. And people were telling us we'd be lucky if we got five hundred. And it was everybody, and it just blew everybody away how excited they were. And that was how we launched the whole project.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:How did you feel when five thousand people came?

AP:Well, it's so funny, because I've been asked this after many different projects I've done. When I produced CicLAvia, it was like, "How did you feel when a hundred thousand people showed up?" I really was absolutely confide-- I knew how many people were gonna show up. I knew we were gonna be packed. And I 78:00-- I just knew it. I wasn't -- I didn't think, Oh, I'm gonna put on a festival and nobody's gonna come. Because we actually had experience of how to do this, right? My company is called CARS, Community Arts Resources, and now after thirty years we have this reputation, when we put something on and we say that ten thousand people will be there, ten thousand people will be there. And so, we're like -- we just knew it. We just knew it was the right product. We knew it was -- first of all, we did it in the Valley. And you have to understand the psychogeography of Los Angeles. There are over a million people who live in the Valley, and there's almost nothing cultural there. They always have to drive into town to do anything. So, to do a major cultural event that we would produce that would be -- have all of these elements to it and to do it in the Valley and to -- it's free? It's a no-brainer. Everyone's gonna come. Why not? Why wouldn't 79:00they come? All we had to do was get the word out to people. And this is before social media, so we had to write postcards and a flyer. And then -- here's the brochure for the first one. I just want to show it to you. 'Cause I think -- it's kinda nice. We commissioned the -- is this good? We commissioned Nancy Nimoy, Leonard Nimoy's daughter-in-law, to do the logo. And it's based upon a -- it looks like a woodblock cut, has that kind of feel to it. And it's got the kite. And it had this -- this was the way it came, like that, kinda the red, white, and blue. And it was written in -- we made a big point to have Yiddish as part of it. So, it's like -- here's the introduction in Yiddish and English. So, "Welcome to Yiddishkayt, a family festival in English and Yiddish. We invite you to join us on September 16th and 17th, 1995, at the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center, for a community celebration of the culture, stories, crafts, 80:00film, history, and music inspired by the Yiddish language and its culture. The festival offers a window into this vibrant culture for non-Yiddish speakers, Jews from other backgrounds, and to the entire Los Angeles community. Yiddish is undergoing a renaissance around the world. Yiddish culture, as reflected in klezmer music, film, song, literature, and theater is burgeoning with new artists, new voices, new audiences, and new Yiddish speakers. From Montreal to Buenos Aires, from Paris to New York, Yiddish is alive with a youthful dynamism unseen for half a century. Come and be freylekh [cheerful]. Join us at the simkhe [joy] of Los Angeles's own salute to the vital world of Yiddishkayt." And then we translated that into Yiddish -- or -- 'cause I think we wrote that in English. And then, who we do have? Archie Barkan is our -- is with Ellis Island Klezmer Band, Lisa Wanamaker, and Leonard Nimoy. That's the opening night. And that -- so the center auditorium holds five hundred people. I think we had seven 81:00hundred people in there. And we had to turn people away. And they were so disappointed. Everybody wanted to be there. That was opening night. And then, the next day we had a free family festival. We had storytelling: Uncle Ruthie, who had a radio show in Los Angeles on KPFK, so she attracted people; We Tell Stories -- this is an interesting thing. So, I went to We Tell Stories, which is the premier storytelling group for children in Los Angeles. They're amazing. And I talked to -- I'm forgetting everybody's name now, 'cause it's -- I'm just having that moment. I'm talking to the guy from -- the leader of the group, who's Jewish and grew up in a Jewish background here in LA. I said, "Have you ever done Yiddish stories or any--" He said, "No, we've never done anything Jewish." I said, "Well --" He said, "Okay! Let's do something Jewish. Let's do -- why don't you do Chelm stories?" And it was the first time -- and we did this over and over again with scores of Jewish artists in LA, where we got them to 82:00talk -- to actually engage with their Yiddish roots and to discover things that they had no idea about. So, they then became -- all of their -- they then introduced Yiddish stories into their lexicon, and that became part of their repertoire. But that was the first time they had ever done this. And we kept doing that over and over again. So then, we had hands-on crafts. So, Gail did this Yiddish home thing. We had a paper-cutting project with [Gerry Navor?]. We had Yiddish calligraphy with Vicki Reikes Fox. We had a tsadke pushke [charity box] with Edmon Rodman. And we had a klezmer workshop with Yale Strom. And we had a Yiddish dance workshop, and -- and I haven't even started. Then we had cooking classes, mandelbrot and blintzes. Then we had music, Risa Igelfeld, my 83:00sister Cindy Paley, this group called Best Friends, and Sylvia Brown. Then we had concerts with Golden State Klezmers and Yale Strom's group Zmiros. Then we had films playing. This is all in one day, right? We had "Tevye"; "The Last Klezmer," Yale Strom's film; "Dybbuk"; and "Yidl mitn fidl [Yidl and her fiddle]." Then we had a forum on Yiddish humor and proverbs with Archie Barkan. We had a thing on Jewish genealogy. And "From the Shtetl to Broadway: The History of the Yiddish Theater," with Sabell Bender. Then we had an exhibition on Yiddish on the internet and Yiddish books, and then the collection of Yiddish theater posters and Jewish folk art. We had a "How to Say It in Yiddish" booth. We had a "Lomir redn yidish [Let's speak Yiddish]" table. And then, we had booths set up. I mean, it was so much stuff in this little -- in our Jewish community center. People of cour-- yeah. There was enough stuff to keep everyone happy. There was food, there was music, there was dance, there was things you could get involved with. Yeah. That was the first one.

CW:So then, how did the -- how did Yiddishkayt develop into an ongoing organization?

AP:So basically, Yiddishkayt stayed in -- was a project of my company. So, we volunteered all of our time to do it. Yiddishkayt -- there was not enough money to pay us. So, this was something that we were -- that I wanted to do, and so I had all my staff, who weren't Jewish, who learned how to type in Yiddish and to understand how to read and write Yiddish and who -- or who knew all about klezmer music, who became experts on this. And they still are, to this day, these people. And they knew all of my parents' friends and everybody, all these regulars. So, we basically organized as a nonprofit. Interestingly enough, I had created a nonprofit called the Fringe Festival. It was the first Fringe Festival in the United States. We organized in 1986, and the festival was in 1987. And it 85:00was a major thing in Los Angeles. But it had become dormant. And the board -- I had been the director, and I still had the paperwork for the nonprofit, but we weren't doing anything with it. And so, I asked the board of that nonprofit, I said, "Can I actually change the mission statement from doing a Fringe Festival to doing a Yiddish festival?" And they said sure. So, I basically took this nonprofit that was in a drawer and changed its mission, and it became Yiddishkayt. So, Yiddishkayt, which technically began in 1994, has paperwork with the IRS starting in 1986. So, we had a nonprofit. We of course just started the board based upon that group that I had brought together of my parents' friends and these other people who were involved in Yiddish. And then, we started to raise money in the old-fashioned way that you raise money, like asking for donations. And we weren't really yet -- at the very beginning we were just asking people to give money, and it wasn't writing grant applications yet. 86:00But we started really soon after that to write the grant applications and going after larger funds. And we went to the Jewish Community Foundation, which is the giving arm of the Jewish Federation here, and got a major grant to start doing other early festivals after that. And then, we made a point after the first festival to do -- we said, We have to do this bigger. We just got -- I don't know. It's part of me. I just like, "Let's go bigger!" So, the next festival after that was -- we brought Brave Old World and the Klezmatics. And it was the first time that they had ever appeared in a non-Jewish institution. And we produced them at UCLA. And so, putting -- they had come before, and they had performed for a synagogue or a Jewish community center. But they had never been produced by a mainstream institution in Los Angeles. So, we were the first to 87:00bring klezmer in the modern era into mainstream LA. Like --- oh, my God -- the singer -- Mickey Katz, of course, had performed at the Santa Monica Civic and things like that. But that was another era. That had been thirty years or forty years prior. So, we were now doing this and bringing it back and saying -- and again, we sold out two shows at UCLA with this double bill. Think about doing those two groups in one night. It was, like, too much. But having those two killer kind of mega Yiddish music groups, Brave Old World and the Klezmatics -- they were on one bill, and we sold out, and then we had them do a Yiddish -- we had them do a set of klezmer workshops the next day at the Skirball. So, my 88:00company had opened the Skirball in 1996. And so, we actually did this right after the opening at the Skirball with them. And we knew all the people there, 'cause they had been our clients. So, I was like, "Oh yeah, we'd love to do that." So then -- so that was called YidFest, or actually KlezFest. That was called KlezFest. And then, we did a 1998 festival and said -- which one is that? Oh, I don't know if I have that one here. Oh my God, I don't have that one here. The 1998 festival. So, that then goes -- that's in, like, twenty-five venues. And we have Yiddish poets on the stage. So, my goal was to integrate Yiddish into the fabric of contemporary Jewi-- of contemporary Los Angeles. So, not to put it in this Jewish ghetto but to say, "Oh, you want to see Yiddish, go to the library, the central library downtown. We're gonna have Yiddish poets for the 89:00first time speak in Yiddish on the stage as part of the ALOUD series and do a public presentation about Yiddish poetry. We're gonna have Yiddish at the Skirball, but we're also gonna have Yiddish at UCLA, and we're gonna have Yiddish at" -- where else did we do it that year? You know, we basically used mainstream institutions. And that was our philosophy. We said, We don't want to have this -- in order to break the stigma, it's gotta be presented just like everything else. It's gotta be seen as part of mainstream culture. Because that's what I absolutely believe. And that's what the -- kind of the transition that I had gone through was I had gone from that feeling of becoming aware of the shame of the culture that I had also actually -- absorbed and internalized without knowing, to turning around and saying, "No, actually, actually, this has 90:00so much to say to Los Angeles right now." LA is an immigrant culture. It's an immigrant city. It's people who are coming to this city, and they've come from their countries, and they're trying to figure out how to keep their culture going. We've got something to tell them. This is their first time setting up a diaspora, leaving El Salvador. They have no idea about what it means. And here's Yiddish, which is a thousand years old, which is about how do you live in a host culture and be a minority. We have a lot to say to a city of minorities, to a city of people from lots of places. We have a lot to teach them, and we have a lot to learn from them, and we have a lot in common. So then, it was not just Yiddish in -- by itself. It was like, Well, how does this fit in with Latino culture? So, we did -- starting I believe it was in '98 was the first time we did this -- we did a klezmer-mariachi concert, "Viva Yiddish-L'Khayim Mariachi!" 91:00I just had this insight, 'cause I had produced a lot of mariachi and I had produced a lot of Yiddish, and I was like, "These are celebration musics that are both performed at weddings. They have really similar instrumentation and arrangements. This would be really interesting to put these groups together." So, I had Barry Fisher from Ellis Island, and he worked with a mariachi group, and they spent a month together, rehearsing, exchanging their music, talking to each other. And they created an entire evening, which we premiered in East Los Angeles at Cal State University Los Angeles, at the Luckman Auditorium, which had just opened. And we also did a program in Boyle Heights at Self-Help Graphics, which was everybody who went -- who was at Self-Help Graphics who had 92:00-- these were people who had grown up when Cesar Chavez Avenue was still called Brooklyn, and they were Chicanos, but they had grown up with Yiddish because they knew -- that was when they were kids in the '40s and the '50s. So, there's like -- they said, This is the most Jews that have been in Boyle Heights in forty years. So, we did all these programs there where we brought -- recontextualized this idea about Yiddish and what its meaning is for East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights by taking it there and by doing it like that. So, we were thinking of programs like that throughout the city. So, this one in 2000 -- here it is -- this one was "A Celebration for All Ages: The New Face of an Enduring Culture." So, we had a big Yiddishkayt festival at the Skirball --

CW:Which year is that?

AP:This is 2000.

CW:Two thousand, okay.

AP:Is this one 2000? Now I'm getting it confused. I think so. I think this is 93:00the year 2000 one. I'm trying to -- no, this is the '98 one. So, this has got a map of where we are. We're at I think twenty different institutions. A through R. Figure that out. A through L is thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen -- like nineteen. So, we're at everything from Barnes & Noble to Bookstar to Cal Plaza downtown to Crossroads School to the Getty Center -- we had the Jewish, uh, Philharmonic -- what's it called? It's not called the Jewish Phil-- I don't know. I'll go through this. But for example, we had "Viva Klezmer-L'Khayim Mariachi"; we had "The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln," which we did at the LA Theatre Center with Adrienne Cooper and Frank London and Lorin Sklamberg; "Ghetto Tango," which was with Zalmen Mlotek and Adrienne Cooper -- that was at the University of Judaism; "Latinos and Landslayt" -- this was about 94:00the labor struggle and showing that the people who are living in Boyle Heights now were just like the Jews who lived in Boyle Heights in the '30s, and they had the similar issues, and they were facing similar struggles. And we kind of brought that together. The LA Jewish Symphony, we did them at the Getty. Anyway. That's the kind of contextualization that we were thinking about. Then 2000 -- is this the year 2000? I think this is now 2002. I'm missing 2000. I'm trying to see what date this is. I believe this is 2002 by the time we get to do this one. So, this one is (Whitney laughs) playing on the famous rye bread ad.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

AP:You know, this -- we're taking it big -- we're getting bigger and bigger, and we're getting lots of attention in Los Angeles for these things. Here we have a 95:00Jewish deli -- this one I think is 2000. This is the Jewish deli panel that Jonathan Gold, who later wins the Pulitzer Prize for food criticism -- so we have Jonathan Gold hosting four deli owners. And this is where we start talking about how important food is to Los Angeles and to Jews and how the delis have become the centers of tradition and legacy. And at that point Langer's -- Jonathan Gold had said scandalously that -- or after this, that Langer's was the better -- had better roast -- pastrami than anywhere in the country, better than New York. And that was -- that got picked up by the "New York Times." Actually, the '98 festival got picked up by the "New York Times." If you Google us in the "New York Times," that's when they had this whole thing about what we were doing. 'Cause now we're getting national attention. And it is this idea of, What 96:00can we teach people? And so, we start, I would say, contextualizing things. So this -- we then create a project that Tali Pressman and I -- when she starts working -- I finally get a staff person. So, you asked -- we had been doing this, and we finally get a staff person who works at my office in CARS, but she's full-time. And this is -- expect the unexpected. And there had started in Los Angeles this idea of showing movies in the cemetery, in the Hollywood Cemetery. So, we showed "The Dybbuk" in the cemetery. And eight hundred people showed up to see this at night. And it was pretty much -- I would say seventy-five percent of the people were under thirty. And that totally got the attention of the organized Jewish community. 'Cause we were saying, This is a portal for younger Jews to identify with who they are. Give them this thing. 97:00They were hungry for this. And we started a new program called the Avada Program. We thought that Yiddishkayt as a brand was maybe not working so much. And we only did this for two years, and then the funding ran out. But I think -- I mean, Mayim Bialik showed up; we had a thing called Red Yiddish, which was playing off of the idea of communist Yiddish as well, right?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

AP:Then we do a whole thing about LA, a film noir thing, "LA Confidential: The Hidden Story of Yiddish in LA." So, now I do a nighttime bus tour of Los Angeles, looking at Yiddish LA through night. I mean, exploring LA at night, on a bus, but looking at the Yiddish things that you don't know are there. So, we actually go to the Beverly Theatre, which is this really famous independent film theater which used to be a Yiddish theater, and nobody knows that. We went to Canter's at night. We did the sher, which is the traditional Yiddish dance. But 98:00we had this contemporary dance group, Heidi Duckler's company, bring eight dancers, all dressed as Cher, C-h-e-r, but from different years. Like Cher from the '60s, Cher from the '70s -- and so we had eight Cher dancers, both in drag -- women dressed as Cher and men dressed as Cher, doing the sher, perfectly, in Canter's, at midnight. I mean, it was insane how great this was. We're playing with all these things about -- you don't -- it doesn't have to be stuck. You can take this and use it as inspiration in ways that are just really amazing. So, here's the Red Yiddish thing. You kind of can see the Soviet propaganda thing. And of course it translates to "Speak Yiddish." And all these people showed up for that, like Mayim Bialik for the first one, who were kind of attracted to, like, What is this thing? And we did get a lot of attention. Unfortunately, this 99:00concept of doing these major festivals which for a while were the largest Yiddish festivals, I think, that were happening in the world, was untenable, unsustainable. We couldn't raise enough money. Every time we would do these festivals, we would be fifty thousand dollars short, seventy-five thousand dollars short, and then we weren't getting paid at all to do it. And after a while it was like, We've gotta come up with a different model.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

AP:This isn't working. And that took us a long time of struggling. It wasn't until -- I would say that was in the 2000s that we were really like, Well, how do we do this? My father passed away in 2010, and he had been the chair of the board. And I realized after that that we really needed a new model. And we looked for a new executive director. We had had Sean Ostrovsky, who now runs the Gilbert Foundation, and Dan Opatoshu, who is, of course, legendary in the Yiddish world, but is also Steven Spielberg's brother-in-law, and he brought us 100:00some great funding through Steven. But when Robby Adler Peckerar came, he had an entirely new vision, which is much more sustainable and tenable for us, which is we've moved to a digital platform; we have an amazing digital reach. It's fifty thousand people a month. If you look at the Yiddishkayt website, it's so incredibly rich with content. We're streaming podcasts and video series like "YidLife Crisis," and there's our own unique "Monsa Monster" podcast that's online as well; interactive maps. We also -- he's developed the Helix Project, which is talking about the DNA, taking undergraduate students, graduate students, academics, and artists together to Eastern Europe. And we start with them first in Los Angeles and kind of take them to Boyle Heights, and we kind of practice with, Here is a Jewish neighborhood with no Jews. Let's go knock on the 101:00house of your great-grandfather and talk in a different language and see if we can get inside and see where your great-grandfather lived. Let's go make that bridge. And you start seeing that the situation in Poland when you start going to a shtetl is not unique, that we have that right here. So, we actually do training and kind of this idea about what Yiddish really means and what it means to be -- to have that in your background, and how do you go and discover this? We do it here first, and then the next year that cohort then goes to Eastern Europe to the triangle and the borderlands between Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania. So, it's very powerful, and there's always a couple of artists, contemporary artists, who are part of the mix, which makes it really powerful. And those people then go on to -- it's a life changer for them and in terms of 102:00how they see Yiddish and how they integrate it. So, we're actually -- took it from being this thing that was reaching tens of thousands of people but in a very kind of superficial way to something where we're now working with people in a very deep way. It's just actually more sustainable as well. And honestly, basically going back to that whole idea of shame, we can't -- we're having a very hard time finding support in the community to do this work. The non-Jewish community thinks that we should be getting funding from the Jewish community. It's like, Well, you're doing Jewish stuff. And then, we go to -- but we say, Hey, this is just like Chicano work or African-American work. You should fund this -- they see it as too religious, like, Aren't you Jewish? Doesn't that mean you're religious? We can't -- Like, No, no, you -- it's cultural. It's like all those other cultures. So, we were educating them. But they still think this is a 103:00city with a lot of -- with a rich Jewish community, they should be funding you. So then, we go to the Jewish community, and they're like -- again, as I said, You're not talking about death, you're not talking about the Holocaust, you're not talking about Israel, you're not talking about religion, you're not talking about God -- what's the point? Why should we fund you? And I'm just knocking my head against it. We don't fit into any of the big buckets of what's happening in Jewish funding today in the world. So, it's a struggle every year. And now we are -- what is this? So, twenty-four years old. And I'm the chair of the board again, and I think I need to raise a hundred thousand dollars this year. I think our budget's around $350,000, $400,000, which makes us the largest Yiddish organization west of the Hudson, which I'm very proud of, which says a lot and a 104:00little at the same time. And I think the future for Yiddish is bright. I'm not -- I hope that Yiddishkayt as an organization can hold on. But I actually -- I don't know. I'm not pessimistic for Yiddish, but I don't know -- I know about how organizations work. And sometimes organizations reach a point where they've served their point and you actually need to have a new organization come along. So, I'm not quite sure if we're there or not yet. I mean, we might find a new lease on life and find a new way of -- a new stream -- a new set of funders who will be willing to come on board. I'm hoping that the people -- as the next generation gets excited about Yiddish, that they're -- and they grow up -- we've asked Mayim Bialik for funding. And this was before she was a big star. I think 105:00she came to Red Yiddish in the year 2002 -- that people like that will actually start -- who are now in their thirties and have money will actually start supporting us and take over in terms of our support from my parents' generation, who are mostly dead and are no -- can't write checks anymore. But if it works, that's great; if it doesn't work, I know that this -- our work has actually made a difference. I meet people who went to a Yiddish festival in 1998 when they were twelve, and now they're in their thirties, and they say to me, That changed everything the way about how I see Yiddish, and I'm excited about -- and I'm open to it. I know we changed -- and I know, for example, looking at the landscape of LA, we don't have to produce klezmer anymore, at all. Because it's produced in every ma-- the Klezmatics are at Walt Disney Concert Hall, produced by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. They would not be there unless we had 106:00completely changed the dynamic. As I said before, Yiddish was invisible; we made Yiddish visible. When people talk about culture in LA, we're part of the mix. Yiddish is part of that in a way that it would never have been if we hadn't come around. We put it on the map and made it visible. We made it, I think, for Angelenos something to be proud of. Kind of -- totally removed the shame in the broader context from it. It's still there in the local context. So that I'm a very happy guy to take out my Yiddishkayt card and to give it to -- I was just in Glendale, meeting with the Armenian community there, and said, "Hey, this is what I'm doing with my language and my culture." And there's this sense of mutual respect, like, Oh, what are you doing? How do you teach the kids, and how do you get people interested, and what are you doing with the arts? So, it's a dialogue of equals, and it's very exciting. I feel very -- incredibly proud of 107:00everything, of what Yiddishkayt has accomplished here.

CW:From your perspective, what is the role of Yiddish right now, in LA or in the US?

AP:I feel it's like a -- there's a political side to it and a cultural side. I think that we're really a culture of -- I mean, the way I look at Yiddish and Yiddishkayt is a sense of caring for the other, a sense of empathy for the immigrant, a sense of solidarity with the downtrodden, and a sense of alarm over the loss of culture. And then, to take all of the things that we've learned about how to defend culture, defend the immigrant, be proud of your culture, and 108:00all of those things, that's the role of Yiddish right now is to actually say that clearly. That this is what Yiddish teaches us, and this is what we need to keep saying. And we have examples from several hundred years of activists and writers and scholars and women and men who gave their lives or who spent their lives on a cause, who worked on that, worked on civil rights, who worked on cultural rights. I remember being in Peru and speaking to this woman who spoke Quechua, and she was so ashamed. And I said, "Oh my God, we need to do Quechuakayt here in Peru because these people have this beautiful language and beautiful culture, and they have no sense of how valuable it is." And that's something that Yiddish can teach them, or -- and how important it is, that if they see -- I mean, it is -- if Jews -- if we do this, and we say it's 109:00important, and we do it in Los Angeles, then it can be -- it can be a guiding light, or it can be an example. If you can do it there, then it can be done with other cultures and in other places of the world. And it doesn't have to be -- it doesn't just have to be Yiddish, this is about everything. And the Yiddish also teaches us about being open because Yiddish as a language, as a fusion language which -- and Yiddish culture, which you can see what we eat and the music that we listen to, all of these things are blends from all these places that we were open to, in the sense that we were not one culture, autonomous, alone, in a corner of Poland, but that we were fully integrated into that world, and that world was a much more open world than the world of today. It was kind of something that's based before the nation state and before we decided to arbitrarily draw lines and say, Oh, this area is this, and this area's that. You 110:00can see in the language -- you can see it in English, but we don't know it. We're invisible to it. But in Yiddish, it's so clear how all these things come together and how -- you have to have respect for that language if you're gonna use it and you're gonna put it into your language. And that has a lot to tell people right now about who Jews are and how they fit into the world, and I think it's a different narrative than the way Jews -- contemporary Jews -- many contemporary Jews in the United States describe themselves and think of themselves. And it's an important message to an immigrant culture that the United States represents about the importance of the other and the respect for each other and what the other person -- the other culture might offer you. So, there's lots of things it can do. And for me, that's the exciting thing that Yiddishkayt has done over all these years is to do everything that we do as part 111:00of the mainstream and in a way that respects and bolsters our own granary, as the quote from Peretz says. Peretz says, "If you're gonna go --" -- I can't remember, but this is something that we would say in shule, like, "If you're gonna go onto the stage of humankind, you need to come with something from your own granary." And this is what we have. We have Yiddish. And you need to show -- this is the thing that we have to show on the stage. And otherwise we're naked. We have nothing. We have no history. We have no pe-- we're nothing. And it is that sense of knowing who you are and having -- and again, it's going back to that sense of shame and not being ashamed of who you are and where you come from and how you got to where you are. I mean, this has something to say to Syrian refugees in Italy right now and to Kurdish immigrants in the United States. 112:00There's something about that that we had to learn over a thousand years and that we figured out and kind of wrote -- we brought it into a literature. We developed an entire literature on this that is the most developed, I think, in any culture of how much we wrote about this. And we have this stuff to offer. So, yeah.

CW:Well, I want to ask -- I guess go back to the personal before we wrap up --

AP:Okay.

CW:-- and just say, what is the role that Yiddish plays in your personal life, beyond the work?

AP:So, I feel like -- in my personal life I spent twenty-five years really in this Yiddish group, which was great, and I read Yiddish books and Yiddish 113:00stories, and I have a Yiddish library at home, and I collect -- and I give my life -- every day I'm working on Yiddishkayt in one way or another. I'll spend time with Robby and Clare on staff, and I'll be doing things in my role. So, it's, I feel, an obligation, and I feel -- I want to make this work, and I want to keep it going. And when I -- I do think I want to actually rekindle the leyenkrayz. I actually want to do it so in a couple years so when -- we're gonna be -- I'm gonna be as old as Ethel Rosenfeld was when we started. So, she was probably sixty-five when we started the group, and all -- that's in five years. So, I want to be the older generation and now have these people in LA who are gonna be in their twenties and thirties meet with us and we have some -- we don't have a Fima Chesnin, but we have who we have. There's that great story of 114:00-- when it's like, the person goes into the woods and says the prayer, and then the next person knows where to go, and the last person just knows -- the next person knows where this plot was in the woods and goes there but forgets the prayer, and the last person just knows the story, right? So, there's always something to communicate. So, we have great Yiddishists still who can pass on what we know and be speakers who -- people who are just learning in university can converse with and kind of better their Yiddish the way I bettered my Yiddish with people around me. So, I'd like to play that role. So, I feel like that's another thing to do. But I also feel like I -- personally, my thrust to Yiddish is probably like -- I probably spent an enormous amount of time on this, so much 115:00time between 1995 and 2005. And I'm now -- I'm never gonna be able to spend that much time on it again. So, I kind of felt like I got it started with many things and it's now going, and I do hope it continues, but even if the organization doesn't continue I know that all these different manifestations of Yiddish will continue, based upon what we did.

CW:And I'm just gonna end by asking, what would be your advice to that person who might start the next Yiddish organization?

AP:(exhales) Well, if you want to start an organization, it's -- my advice is figure out how to -- what are the dynamics of an organization? And that is advice not for Yiddish but for starting out as an organization. It's kind of -- my wife is an organizational development consultant, and I didn't take enough of her advice. 'Cause it's really hard to create an organization that has -- that 116:00is able to sustain itself. And there are things that come along with that about fundraising, about interpersonal dynamics -- so you just need to know how to run an organization. You need -- it's good to have passion, and it's also good to know, if you do start it, to not -- I think that there's -- there's a thing called founder's syndrome, where the founder doesn't ever step away. It was really important for me to step away from Yiddishkayt and not run it anymore and not be the creative director, which I was for fifteen years, and to say, "I need --" -- what Robby does, he is the director of Yiddishkayt. He sets the agenda, he makes the decisions about the programming that we do. And I needed to give that up. And that was -- that happened to me with other projects that I started 117:00as well. But you can look around and see people who never give up the organization they founded, and that turns into something -- it can be very complicated for the succession of that organization. So, that's something to also be thinking about. So, all of those issues of how organizations work are not something for the Yiddish world, but that's for the -- so I would actually say you need to understand those things, because -- Yiddish is great, but you need to understand all that other stuff too. And in terms of Yiddish, I think -- go for it, because I think there's -- as I -- if you -- I'm not sure. Everybody's got a different way of approaching the thing. I mean, the guy who started Yiddish Farm was an intern here. I can't remember what his English name was. He wasn't Yisroel Bass (pronounces with long "A"), he was something Bass. I can look him -- Bass (pronounces with short "A") -- and I -- so when he was here he was -- you know, he learned his thing, he spent, I think, a summer with us, 118:00and he clearly went on and did his own thing and had his own take on it. So, I think you need to be inspired by what works for you. I was inspired by this idea of how Yiddish would fit into contemporary society through the arts. But that was my lens. I think everybody needs to do it through their lens.

CW:Great. Well, a groysn dank [thank you very much].

AP:A hartsikn dank [Thank you very much]. S'iz geven a mekhaye far mir [This was a pleasure for me].

CW:Yeah, really an honor to hear all this story, and thanks so much for taking the time.

[END OF INTERVIEW]