ROB ADLER PECKERAR ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is April 30th, 2018. I'm here in Los Angeles with Rob Adler Peckerar. 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?

ROB ADLER PECKERAR:You do.

CW:Great. So, I wanted to start by getting a little bit about your family background.

RAP:Okay.

CW:Do you know -- or what do you know about where they came from before being in America?

RAP:Well, my family was in America for a long time. I have one great-grandmother who was born, actually, in Indianapolis. Her family had gone from New York to Indianapolis to open a hardware store, and then they moved back to New York. But 1:00her family had come from the Russian Empire and from a Polish-speaking area of the Russian Empire. We're not sure, 'cause it was really far back. And their last name was Bugaslavsky but when they moved to Indianapolis, they became Bryan. And she married my great-grandfather, whose name was Morris Peckerar, who came from Bessarabia and he came from a town called Falesht', which is not far from Belz and not that far from Kishinev. They came very shortly after the Kishinev -- his brother first came shortly after the Kishinev pogrom, and then the family came just a few months later, and those were the Peckerars. And then, my other grandparents, my other great-grandparents -- one who I'm named after, her name was Rae, and she came from a town in Galicia called Dukla, which is now in the sub-Carpathian region of Poland. And her husband was Sam, and he is from 2:00a town called Czyżew, which is today also very close by in Poland. But it was more of a border town on the Austro-Hungarian Russian Empire border. And that's my dad's side. And my mom's side, the family came from -- my mom's father came from a town -- well, his parents came from a town called Kalnybolot, which is in Kiev Gubernia, and it's not far from Uman. It's close to this town called Talne and -- I think. So, that's both of them. And then the other great-grandparents came from a town called Aniksht, which is in Lithuania, and is actually Anykščiai today and it's the town that bears the name of -- the Lithuanian national epic poem is called "In the Aniksht Woods," and that's where my great-grandparents on that side came from. And am I missing anybody? That seems 3:00like all of them, yeah. That's all of them. So, Lithuania, mostly Russian Empire, Lithuania, Bessarabia, Galicia, yeah.

CW:And did you grow up knowing that? How did you find all that out?

RAP:My grandfather, my mom's father, was really -- history was very important to him and he sort of had marked me as being the guy who would remember these things forever. And he told me all of the things about my mother's side of the family. And that sort of made that an interest to me, just that I was going to be the one who knew that, who would always be the one you could turn to to know that stuff. I remember he told me -- he was like, "You'll always remember the name of the town that the Drusses came from because it sounds just like garlic blood." And then, that's all I remembered for a long time because it was actually Kalnybolot, which sounded like "knobl blit [garlic blood]" in Yiddish. 4:00But I didn't know Yiddish at that point. But he just told me, "It sounds like garlic blood." And I thought it was maybe like, Garlicbluda. I don't remember what it was but that's how I remember. And he always told me -- there's a family legend that he told me about the Druss family, how they got their last name, which was always something that stuck in mind as a --

CW:What is it?

RAP:So, his great-grandfather's great-great-great-grandfather was living in Kalnybolot, and a wolf was terrorizing the village and eating up all the poultry and things like that. And it was causing a real nuisance. And my ancestor, the story was that he went out into the woods one night and found the wolf and he killed the wolf with his bare hands and brought back the dead wolf to the village and that all the goyim in the village shouted, "Drus, drus," which is 5:00the locative form, "You're our friend!" And that became his last name, Drus. And then, when he came to America, it became Druss, D-r-u-s-s, and that was the family legend. And everybody who has that last name knows that legend. And people who we've connected with, all these other people -- and they're like, I don't know any of your relations, but do you know the story about the wolf? And we all know the story about the wolf, yeah. So, he always told me all these stories 'cause he said, "You'll be the one who maintains all of that." On my dad's side, I found out about it later. After I was already traveling to Eastern Europe, it became more interesting to me to find out where these people came from. And I grew up with this last name Peckerar, which was always sort of a strange name to have. And then, I found out that that was a Jewish quarter in the town of Iași and that the family came not far from there. So, it was interesting to figure out the relationship between having an unusual sort of family name and figuring out it was located in a particular geography after kind 6:00of the questions of geography and of place became much more important in what I was studying and what I was doing.

CW:And do you know much about the person you're named after?

RAP:Yeah, that's my dad's grandmother. He was very close to her. Her name was Rae, or name was Rae Wollack and then she married a guy named Sam Sturm. And the two of them ran -- well, my great-grandfather ran an Italian grocery in Brooklyn, 'cause he was from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he emigrated via Trieste and stayed there for long enough to learn Italian. And my grandmother and her brother, Ted, grew up speaking Italian in the store. And the parents only spoke Yiddish as a way of having the customers not understand what they were talking about. And my dad was quite close with his grandmother, who died just the year before I was born. And she was sort of -- for my dad, I think, was 7:00sort of a representative of the Old Country in a very particular way, even though she came when -- she was a kid when she came to the States, but he had a real warm relationship with her, which was sort of at odds with a lot of the other kind of stuff in my dad's house, I think, that he kind of looked at her as a kind of source of warmth. And yeah, and I forget how she met my great-grandfather, but they met in the United States. And she lived up until the '70s when, yeah, when she died. And they lived in Brooklyn and then she moved to Long Island with my father, when they moved to Long Island.

CW:And how did your family end up in Silver Spring?

RAP:My family ended up in Silver Spring because my dad got a job at NASA upon 8:00graduating from university. My parents got married right after they were in college. My mom also is from New York, from Queens, and my dad grew up mostly in Long Island. And then, it was the Vietnam War period and my dad got a job, a government job at NASA, and he did stuff with the lunar exploration 'cause it was '68 when he moved to Washington. And so, they initially moved to Greenbelt, Maryland, which is where NASA's Godard Space Center was. And so, they first settled there and then shortly after, my brother was born. And then, after that, they moved to a town called Bowie, Maryland, which is -- I was born in Silver Spring but then we lived in Bowie, Maryland. And then, I think in 1978 we moved to Silver Spring, to the house that I grew up in. So, just kind of floating around, moving upward in the suburbs of the DC area. So yeah, from Greenbelt, 9:00they moved to Bowie, then Bowie to Silver Spring. And I was there until I was seventeen, when I left home.

CW:And can you describe the home you grew up in?

RAP:Yeah, it was very suburban and we lived in what everyone -- they called it a development. (laughs) And I always talked about it that way. And there was a handful of houses that were very similar to one another and, yeah, there were a lot of kids in the neighborhood. I remember we played a lot outside and hung out after school and went to each other's houses, which now, when I think about it, is sort of surprising 'cause it's not something my own son had. And, yeah, it was mostly a kind of a middle-class, upper middle-class neighborhood. My mom was 10:00a schoolteacher in a high school and my dad was an engineer and a physicist. And it was a kind of an -- it was an interesting, mildly diverse neighborhood. Yeah, and it had that kind of feeling -- like, it was all built up in the late '60s, so it had that kind of a new feel to it when I was growing up. And I lived right around the corner from my elementary school, which I would walk to every day. Yeah.

CW:And inside your home, what was Jewish?

RAP:Well, my parents maintained kashres [kosherness] in the house. My mother had an idea that she wanted to have a house that anyone could eat at. And this was sort of a little bit different from the way my grandparents on both sides lived. My dad's parents were not kosher in the house and my mom's parents were kosher 11:00but they had a treyf [not kosher] set of -- they had paper plates and things like that which they would eat treyf off of. But my mom was a little bit stricter in this and wanted to maintain a much more strict sense of being kosher in the house. They actually had two sets of dishes and two sets of silverware and they even had -- also a Passover set that had milk and meat and silverware. It was a lot of dishes for just four of us. But so, there was that. That was kind of a big feature, 'cause we were treyf out but we were kosher in, so we could never bring home our takeout into the house. So, there was a clear mark that our house had a different set of rules that we operated by that were defined by its Jewishness, although we were very -- we ate everything outside 12:00the house while I was growing up. But the house itself was that kind of space. My aunt actually became very Orthodox and I don't believe she would ever eat off of my parents' dishes now, which I think was always given as the reason why we had all these dishes. But I don't believe that they believed that my parents uphold a sense of kosher status that's high enough for eating off of their plates. But that was certainly one of the main ways that our house was sort of marked as being Jewish. We did Shabbos on Friday night. Every week, we did basics for that, although there was like, specific family things. Every Friday, we also always had mandarin oranges. That was a thing that we did that was 13:00special. We knew that it was our family's thing.

CW:Why?

RAP:We have no idea. I have no idea. I think my mom liked it, so we did that and that was always this part of our family Shabbos thing. There was candles and challah and a kiddush was said, a blessing on the kids, all of that was done. But that was it. There was never a grace after the meals or anything like that. It was always very kind of contained. My parents were very into Reconstructionist Judaism. And my mom had gone to this proto-Reconstructionist summer camp when she was a kid called Cejwin, which was very formative for my mom -- and that sort of view of evolving tradition like bringing in the mandarin oranges as their thing. That kind of was a piece of their approach to modernizing Jewish practice for them. Yeah. And it's not something that I kept 14:00up at all after the day I left the house.

CW:And would you go to shul?

RAP:We occasionally went. Certainly we went on High Holidays. I went to Hebrew school, which was twice a week and felt like the most terrible punishment in the world. And I had this group of very rascally, mischievous friends who terrorized the Hebrew school teachers. And that became sort of my thing of how I dealt with Hebrew school. I didn't learn, I feel like really almost anything. I'm sure -- I learned the Hebrew alphabet, which was a part of it, but I can't -- aside from the terrible things we did to the teachers in Hebrew school, there's very little I remember. We went every Wednesday and Sunday to Hebrew school. So, we went to 15:00the shul, called Mishkan Torah, which was in Greenbelt, which was the first synagogue I think my parents joined when they moved, which was a Reconstructionist-Conservative mix, like a blend. And yeah, we went there. Occasionally, we went for other things, too, like holidays. I remember a couple holidays. They had a big thing for Simchas Torah there that they would do. But yeah, so we went there occasionally and my brother and I both had our bar mitzvahs there. So, yeah, there was a lot of -- since we did that twice a week, that was a big part of our experience, was going to the terrible experience that I felt Hebrew school was.

CW:Can you give an example of your terrorizing?

RAP:I don't know if I would want to have that go down in posterity, but I --

CW:You don't have to. (laughs)

RAP:So, I was also very little and I think that that -- being a real kind of 16:00mischief-maker was a way of doing something about my height, my lack -- I was making up for a lack of height. So, yeah, we were really terrible to one poor teacher in particular. I remember we would lock him out of the classroom and throw all of his belongings out the window. And we were really quite terrible. In fact, they told me that I wasn't gonna be allowed to have a bar mitzvah because I was so terrible to the Hebrew -- I was gonna be kicked out of Hebrew school. And I remember saying something completely snide to the principal, like, "I'm certain that I will still have a bar mitzvah," and then -- I was that terrible in Hebrew school. So, Hebrew school was really something that gave me a very bad taste in my mouth about Jewish life. I really disliked it. And that was during the year, but then during the summer, from the time that I was nine years 17:00old, I went to a Jewish summer camp, which was an entirely other kind of experience.

CW:That was Habonim?

RAP:Yeah. I went to Habonim camp because, actually -- 'cause I was short, my pediatrician suggested -- a lot of kids went to sports camps and I was certainly not a sporting type. So, he suggested that I go to where his sons went, which was non-competitive by nature. I think that's how it was pitched. And I don't think my parents really had any idea that it was a Socialist Zionist summer camp. It was just a camp where I wouldn't have to worry about competing in sports. That was the real, main thing. And it was a Jewish camp. And I started going there in 1984, when the camp was in -- first it was in West Virginia and then it moved to outside of Baltimore, north of Baltimore. And that was 18:00life-changing for me. It became the main thing I was sort of -- I'd wait all year to kind of go to summer camp and my friends were really drawn from my camp experience. And it also kind of just shaped my view, I think. It was one of the kind of really profound things that shaped my view of the world, about politics in particular. I remember coming home in '84 and talking to my parents about the war in Lebanon and talking about ideas of socialism that we had been exposed to. And there were people who -- we'd have these interest groups, these "chugim," they called them, that we would have poet-- we had a beat poetry group. It was incredible. It was exactly what I had always wanted in a certain way, even though I might not have known that. And I stayed there from 1984 -- and I worked all the way into the '90s and helped open a camp here in Southern California or 19:00reopen a camp that had been closed -- which my son now goes to, that camp.

CW:And I guess looking back at that time, how did you -- what was your understanding of Jewishness between these two poles of Hebrew school and Habonim summer camp?

RAP:I mean, I think that as a kid my understanding was just like, what we do as a family with ritual observance and going to shul just -- it never resonated with me. But this kind of lived cultural experience that was what we were exposed to at camp really did. And it was filled with all this interesting music, 'cause we sang -- the camp I went to, which was called Camp Moshava, was kind of known as the more singing Habonim camp. We sang a lot of Hebrew songs 20:00and they were Hebrew songs of the first and second aliyah from the '20s and '30s or even earlier. And they all had these Russian, Ukrainian folk melodies that were underlying them. And there was something that was just amazing about that to me. And while I didn't like the folk dancing part of summer camp, it was still something that was interesting to me. I remember thinking about how all these different -- even as a little kid thinking, Oh, this is a mix of all these different cultures that are thrown together and they're calling it folk dancing. I don't know exactly what it is but it's a mix of all these interesting things. And all that was so rich. And the political piece of it, too, they really -- the big issues that cropped up when I was going to Habonim camp were -- I started in 21:00'84, so in '87, the Intifada started. And so, then the question really remained: Can there still be a Socialist Zionism, which became the kind of central question, I think, of all the activity. Like, there's all this social justice programming, politically active programming, asserting a certain type of progressive worldview, and then at the same time being highly aware of what was happening with Israel-Palestine and having to reconcile that at a pretty young age. And that was really always appealing to me. I felt like it was connected to the world in a really deep and profound way. And the other piece of it, the stuff at home and synagogue, never really had that same draw for me.

CW:What Jewish culture were you exposed to growing up, if anything, beyond what 22:00you've mentioned?

RAP:So, it's hard to say, 'cause camp was such a big part of the experience. And being at Habonim, even outside of the summer, other aspects of Jewish culture that I was exposed to -- I mean, there was the general sort of culture of my family in a sense, like the kind of -- and then the way that there was always a sense of -- the only Yiddish that I heard, for example, was my grandmother speaking to her sister. And there was always this sense of there was this other piece of it that wasn't the synagogue piece or it wasn't the camp piece. But it was this very kind of homey quality of it that I always felt was sort of at a remove, that I never had real access to. There was that piece of it, and then my aunt's family was the other piece of it, I think. And my aunt became Orthodox in 23:00the late '70s. And then, around the time when the Intifada really heated up -- and they lived, actually, on the West Bank. And then, when everything heated up, they moved back to the States and moved to Baltimore. So, they were actually a lot closer to where I was growing up, which was the new level of kind of being exposed to an entirely other kind of Jewish way of being, which I really did not like. And yeah, seeing Orthodoxy really close up in those ways was something that I was kind of confronted with quite a bit. We would go there for holidays, for one of the holidays, maybe the second night of a High Holiday or we'd go 24:00there for one of the seders and it would always be this experience where I would always feel very ill at ease about the experience of being around ultra-Orthodoxy in that way. And that was another -- I think that was a big presence of just like, this also exists. There's this kind of progressive Reconstructionist, post-'60s Jewish synagogue life that my parents really enjoyed. There was the kind of historic socialist Jewish piece of it from camp. And then, there was the part of it also there that was associated with what it meant to be sort of ethnonationally Jewish in the Zionist framework at camp and seeing how that played out in secular Israel. And then, there was this other piece of it which was the ultra-Orthodox and even ultra-Orthodox settler way of 25:00being that my aunt and her husband and all of her kids had come out of. And that was something that was always really -- it always just was there and stood out to me as something that I knew that I had to deal with in some way. Yeah, and then, also I remember having those kinds of -- the same sort of feeling like when we'd visit my great-aunt in Brooklyn and seeing the Hasidim crossing over in Williamsburg when we're driving on the highway and having that same sense of feeling that's the world of my aunt and her family and having a real sense of discomfort with that as a kid. Really only as a kid, but I felt that very sharply, a sense of kind of being embarrassed by it when I was a kid.

CW:And do you remember -- how did it work that you made the decision to go be on a kibbutz for a year?

RAP:So, in Habonim, it was sort of -- that's what we did. (laughs) I mean, not all of us, certainly. But you finished high school and then you did this program called the workshop and you went to the kibbutz. Generally, most of the kibbutzim were kibbutzim that were founded by people who were in Habonim or in one of their kind of -- the sister youth organizations that are related to Po'ale Tsiyon. And so, I ended up going to Kibbutz Urim, which was in the northern Negev. And I went there just after I graduated from high school. So, I was still seventeen and I worked that summer at camp and then I was off and I 27:00was there for almost a full year. And it was something I never even questioned doing. It was just always, Oh, that's what you do. You finish school, you go off to workshop, and then you come back and you go to school. You apply to school, you defer your admission, you go off and you do this. And it was quite a year (laughs) for me.

CW:So, what year would that have been?

RAP:So, I got there in 1992, in the summer of '92, and I was there for almost a full year after that. So, a lot was happening politically that year in Israel and its relation to the occupied territories. And we were sort of close-ish to the border at Gaza. And, in fact, they were bringing workers from Gaza to work 28:00in the fields on the kibbutz. And we would actually have to -- one of the short shifts that I had to do as a work detail was actually to go and drive to the border checkpoint and pick up workers and drive them onto the kibbutz. And that was sort of the beginning of a kind of a political awakening for me. That experience in particular was the first time that I sort of felt really confronted with the reality of what Israel was. And then, on a day-to-day basis, I was assigned to work as a machinist in a textile factory on a sort of a new machine that filled pillows with synthetic polyester fiber. And I would operate this machine and then I would have to take out the pillow and weigh the pillow and make sure that the weight was correct and then I'd give it to a seamstress who would sew it up. And I would do that for full day shifts, six days a week. 29:00And it was really grueling. And I did that for a long time until I started developing a kind of an industrial illness because I wasn't wearing a mask or a clean suit or any of the things that now I think that they would require. But I was inhaling a tremendous amount of these polyester fibers and so I started getting these nosebleeds. And their response was, Oh, he should work in the fields and clear out his sinuses or something. So, I did that. I worked out in the fields for a little bit. And then, by that point, I had learned to speak Hebrew 'cause there -- even though I was with a group of other Habonim kids, I was sort of isolated in the factory on the machine floor and I just had two or three other people who I was talking to who did not speak English, which is not a common experience to have, I think, for many in Israel. But I was working with mostly immigrants from North Africa who lived in a nearby -- what they call a development town, who came to work on the kibbutz and worked doing the sewing 30:00work in the room that I was in, in the factory. And there was this woman, Varda, who was my seamstress. And I listened to the radio all day and talked to Varda and then to these other people from Tunisia and Algeria who also spoke in a mix of French, which I had studied in school, and in Hebrew to me, and kind of bonded over liking the Talking Heads and stuff like that. It was a strange experience, but I learned Hebrew really well while I was in isolation in the factory. And so, then, after I was in the orchards and field for a little bit, they moved me to work at a children's house where I worked for the last few months of the year, which also really improved my Hebrew, too, just speaking 31:00with kids at the nursery school. I worked with three four-year-old kids while I was there. But most of it, I would say eight months or so, was spent really just working in the factory, operating the machine. And yeah, that experience, too, just seeing the way that the kibbutz movement, which had been really idealized in Habonim, was actually functioning was a real letdown for me. And it was hard to kind of grapple with those things, seeing the way that they brought these workers in from these nearby towns or the way they exploited Palestinian laborers from the territories. And then, there was -- during that year, they deported four hund-- they shut down the territories. I think it may have been, I'm not sure, but I think it was one of the first times they ever closed off access or entry between the Gaza Strip and into Israel. And then there was this 32:00closure and then the kibbutz couldn't really -- didn't even know how to cope with the lack of workers and they actually mobilized all of us and these volunteers to come and work picking corn and doing the things that the Palestinian laborers were doing. And I just remember being astounded by the way that they talked -- the way the people who worked in those fields were talking to us about the way that they treated the workers, the Palestinian workers. And then, they deported this mass amount of Palestinians to the northern border, to the no man's land on the northern border of Lebanon-Israel. And I went and I protested it. And it was just me and one other person from our group, just two of us went up to protest. And that was sort of the turning point in my kind of political life. I was there and there were all these people who were from the real far Israeli left and Israeli-Arab parties that were there protesting. And 33:00they came right up to me and they were like, What are you doing, you Amer-- what are you possibly doing here? And I was like, "Oh, well, I'm part of this Zionist youth organization." And they were like, How do you do that? Tell me more about that. And then, I started talking to a lot of these people who I met up there -- and realizing that I had a lot to learn politically, which really shaped what I did when I got back to the US and went to college. But it really shaped -- that year itself, aside from all the kind of crazy social stuff that happened from being a group of Americans and Canadians that were -- it was more Canadians than Americans but it was all of us living in these very, very basic living conditions, packed together on this little corner of the kibbutz. So, there was all sorts of kind of social drama as well as the background of all of the 34:00political piece of it, which became the real pressing piece of it for me as soon as I left Israel.

CW:So, then that sort of translated into what you studied next at Brandeis?

RAP:Yeah, so I went to Brandeis and the idea was immediately I was gonna study Middle Eastern Studies. And they had a program at that point called Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and they were starting a new major called Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. And my experience on the kibbutz and in Israel made me want to do both. And I double majored in both Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and Near Eastern Judaic Studies and focused on doing both Arabic and Hebrew. My sense was that -- one of the things I learned about myself in Israel was that I had a facility with languages, that I loved learning them, and I loved speaking in a language. I just loved that part of what I was doing. That was the 35:00highlight of the experience in Israel. And so, as soon as I got to Brandeis -- I was still taking the Hebrew classes 'cause they have an excellent Hebrew program at Brandeis. And then, I really loved taking the Arabic, too. So, they had a modern standard Arabic class, which was a little bit eccentric in retrospect. The class itself, it wasn't your standard approach to teaching Arabic. We had a great professor whose name was Holly Davidson, Olga Davidson, and she really loved using this classic textbook from Princeton from, I think, from the '40s or '50s, which was by these guys Ziadeh and Winder. And it was clearly made for people who were gonna be in the Foreign Service. Yeah, and I remember memorizing all of these dialogues and memorizing -- there was a tape that went along with it and I remember listening over and over again to really master my pronunciation of Arabic. And I really devoted myself to doing both the Hebrew 36:00and the Arabic during that time and studying all of that. And my idea, I think, was that in some way I was going to go and deal with something that was related to whatever was coming out of my interest in Israel-Palestine work. But then, it sort of evolved into -- the more I was there, I became more interested in language collisions that started becoming much more intriguing to me. So, I started studying North African Jewish life. That became my area kind of of focus, partly 'cause I had the French and now I was doing the Arabic and the Hebrew. And I started reading the writing of these Hebrew poets from this political sort of Mizrahi identity politics movements in Israel who were kind of reclaiming the use of Judeo-Arabic in their writing. And that became really interesting to me. And so, I really pursued that. But I started getting 37:00interested more, I think, in the thematics of what it meant for languages to come into contact with each other in all these different complicated ways, from the colonial languages of French and these languages of these ethnic national religious languages like Hebrew, the way Arabic function-- and local Arabic and Berber. And all these languages all intertwined with one another became really what -- I knew I wanted to work in some way with the ways that cultures worked with one another. What happened when all these different cultures come into contact with each other. And I hadn't kind of put together what that meant, but I knew that that's where I was gonna go with this.

CW:So, how do you get from that Judeo-Arabic-Mizrahi mix to Yiddish?

RAP:Well, first, after I finished Brandeis, I worked at Human Rights Watch, which -- I got an incredible opportunity there partly because I had a professor 38:00who taught in the Middle Eastern Studies program who was an exile from Iraq called -- his name was Kanan Makiya and he wrote a very famous book called "Republic of Fear" about Saddam Hussein's regime. And he was a fascinating guy. He sort of got a very bad rap later 'cause he supported the US invasion of Iraq. I feel like he's one of the people who claimed that the Americans were gonna be greeted as liberators kind of mentality and was proven very wrong. But he was very active in human rights work and helped me get this job at Human Rights Watch where I worked in -- mostly, I worked in the United States division, but I also worked doing translation for the Middle East division. One of the big reports I worked on was a report there about Lebanese civilians who had been kidnapped and tortured in northern Israeli torture facilities. And then, I also 39:00worked on this very big police brutality report. And somehow, I think all these ideas were still churning around in my head about what I was studying and the ways that these languages -- it was really fascinating work to be -- even though only a part of my work was doing the translation piece of it, that sort of was what I was really into when I was working at Human Rights Watch. I mean, I also love doing the research on the police report. But there was this other piece of it which -- I just remember reading the transcripts of these depositions that were being taken between these Lebanese guys who were being tortured -- and again, it was this way that language was working, that these depositions were written in Hebrew by an Israeli human rights organization but they had been translated for use in Israeli courts but the people were speaking Arabic and the torturers were speaking in a mix of Hebrew, 'cause there was a Hebrew-speaking soldier there, and also a southern Lebanese army guy who -- they were speaking 40:00this mix of languages and I was thinking about this as being this -- almost the flip side of what I was seeing with -- how languages coming together could have this productive, creative potential, and here I was seeing this very devastating, absolutely appalling violence and seeing how it also played out in this mix of languages. And while I was there, I applied to Berkeley, to graduate program in comparative literature. And the idea initially was to continue working in this language mixing material, to work in French and Arabic and Hebrew, Judeo-Arabics were especially interesting to me. And when I got to Berkeley, the person who is assigned to be my advisor, graduate advisor, was Naomi Seidman. And she said something like, "Well, if you're doing Jewish 41:00languages, you have to take the Yiddish class. You just have to. You have to take the Yiddish class." And I think it was under-enrolled was part of the reason. But she was like, "No, you have to do that. You can't -- we don't offer Judeo-Arabic. You'll do an independent study in Judeo-Arabic, but you should take Yiddish." And so, I went to Yiddish, which was being taught by Eli Katz. And I remember it was the first day of the class and he introduced himself and then we started. And I was like, Oh, this is fantastic. I had never -- there were people who were really into it at Brandeis and I never took Yiddish at Brandeis. But I loved Eli also. I could just tell there was something about him, that he had a story to tell, that he was sort of at the end of his career. He'd already retired as a professor at Sonoma State and he was now teaching at Berkeley. Yeah, and simultaneously, there was stuff going on in the Arabic seminars which I did not like. It was sort of at the -- now we see it, I think, 42:00in full blossom. But the rise of kind of identity politics in the classroom and in area studies and in cultural studies was really taking on a new tenor, and I felt very isolated being -- taking classes in the Arabic program in the graduate seminars and in the languages classes where I felt like there was a lot of suspicion about who I was and why I was there. And I didn't want to have to answer those kinds of questions. I didn't feel like I needed to answer, Why do you want to study Arabic, which is funny 'cause it's actually something that I never do now, almost in reaction to what happens in Yiddish studies where everyone's always like, Oh, why do you come to this subject? I'm just like, No one asks that about people studying Italian and French. I don't ever ask that of 43:00my students for Yiddish. And it was part of that reaction of what happened when people had these suspicions about me, why I was in these classes. Was I Mossad or working for -- what was I doing there, which always felt really bad. And there was something about Yiddish that -- the more I stuck with the Yiddish classes, the more I felt like I didn't -- it was an entire world that I did not know anything about. Even though we sang one Yiddish or two Yiddish songs in Habonim, I didn't have this sense that there was this whole world. And I had a flash of it. There was a flash when I was -- the year I was in Israel, it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Dror played a major role. And Habonim and Dror had merged in the early '80s. And we went as a group to represent Habonim Dror at the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto 44:00Uprising. And there was --

CW:In Warsaw?

RAP:In Warsaw, yeah. And we went with this -- we were Habonim Dror but we also were in with this group called the Mishlachat HaTakam, the Takam, which is the United Kibbutz Movement delegation to the big ceremony. And there was all this controversy about things that Marek Edelman had said about -- and he was speaking in Yiddish on television. I think it was on TV. And I thought, This is incredible. This is -- that's what people sounded like, that's what people spoke like. And I remember having that feeling and then, also on that trip, they also allowed us to visit places where -- if people had relatives or grandparents who were from places. And we went to -- I want to say that it was in Yiddish. We say "Rudem," like Radom, for this guy who was a part of our group. And we went to his grandmother or -- I guess it was his grandmother's childhood apartment where 45:00she played and I was like, Oh, this is a place where people lived. This is a whole -- and I remember having that moment then, which when I was back in Berkeley studying this stuff, I was like, There's an entire history here that I don't know anything about and I want to know everything about it. And I ended up sort of kind of latching myself onto Eli. And I took all of the Yiddish classes that were available, independent readings with him. I spent a lot of time at his house. He lived on Prince Street in Berkeley and I had just -- I loved him so much and it was such an experience to have him there and to hear his story. He had such an incredible history, his experiences being a blacklisted professor and -- he was fired from the University of California system for having been a 46:00member of the Communist Party in Los Angeles years before. And he sued the university system and was reinstated, but his career sort of had already been damaged. And it was this whole other world that really spoke to me, not just the sense that -- kind of it felt like this was the real content. There was that piece of it, that there's all this material in Yiddish. And also, Yiddish itself was what I had been looking for in a sense. Here was a language that showed something about what happens when all these people are speaking together. And the big piece -- people often talk about, Oh, Yiddish gives lie to a lot of different things about Jews living in isolation, but there was that sense that people were living together and talking with one another and all these words 47:00were slipping into this one language. And then, kind of the ways that it evolved, like the way there was American Yiddish and there was the way that all these things would fill into this language that became this kind of vessel for creativity because it was so open, because it was so porous. For me, that became this perfect symbol of what I was interested in. So, kind of the combination of finding this professor who I loved and then the material -- and then, the more I studied it, my professors, the people who were working in Yiddish at Berkeley and in Jewish literature in general were just incredible. And it was such a community of people, too, that -- and I had always had interest in avant-garde material and in kind of modernism. That was always sort of my love artistically. And so, that's what Chana Kronfeld was most interested in, was in modernism, 48:00avant-garde work, and she was doing it with this Yiddish material. And it just felt like it was the perfect sort of coalescing of all of my interests -- just came together perfectly at that moment when I first got to school at Berkeley.

CW:I'm curious, when you sort of gained access to this whole world, as you were saying, what were the particular artists or works that you latched onto?

RAP:I remember very early I became really, really intrigued by Perets Markish. That was my first real love. And, I mean, maybe it's 'cause he's also really dashing, but there's also -- which is -- you see this poet and you're like, Oh, that's the poet. But there was also something about the poetry that reminded me 49:00-- it told me that there was this intensely vibrant, modernist, totally modern way of being in Yiddish that was revolutionary. It was infused with a revolutionary politics. It was exciting. It was actually genuinely exciting, the poetry. And that was, I think, the first poet that I was like, This is amazing. This is great stuff. As soon as I started being able to read -- I mean, obviously I had to learn Yiddish before getting into all that. But that went a little faster 'cause I spent a lot of time with Eli, trying to learn as much Yiddish as possible. And so, yeah, the poets who were the first -- the ones that were kind of being read at Berkeley who were the interest of Chana, especially, of the time -- people like Izi Kharik and Kulbak. Kulbak later becomes, for me, 50:00the kind of big poet in my life. But at first, it was that -- and that was the first poem I translated, was "Fargosn hot a veykhe fintsernish di velt shoyn bizn kop [Then a tender darkness flooded the world right up to its head]." And I translated that with Eli for a conference on translation. It was the first thing -- I sat with him, we translated that together. And so, that really also has kind of a nostalgic, sort of sentimental quality of it, too, even though it's not a sentimental poem. But there's a way that that was the first time I really just sat down with Eli and we just worked through this poem and tried to play with it for translation purposes. So, that was really the early piece of it. And then, the more I studied it, the more I got really excited about Kulbak, who I just thought was -- I had developed this real interest, also, in I guess what we call "folkstimlekhkeyt," the way that there's a pseudo-folksy or folks-ish 51:00quality of a certain type of modern Yiddish writer. And Peretz sort of has it, but then it kind of really comes out in Manger, where the poet sort of corrals a folksiness for a very revolutionary purpose. And I thought that was amazing. And I especially liked what Kulbak did because, again, it was the relationship with the neighbors and Kulbak that spoke to me, that it was that people were talking to each other in all these different languages and that was amazing to hear in the poetry. You would hear the Belarusian mixing with the Yiddish and it just felt like that's what these spaces sounded like. And, at the same time, the beauty that's created, the poetic beauty that comes out of it was just unparalleled to me. It was just something that was really, really incredible and 52:00I was just in love with that from the very beginning, I think, that those were the writers that really appealed to me, yeah.

CW:How, if at all, did that work kind of feed back into your own sense of self or political sense of self?

RAP:Well, part of it was that it was -- (laughs) I mean, there was a way that what we did at Berkeley also was sort of like -- the selection choice was sort of guided a little bit politically, that the interest of the people who were studying there and of the faculty, in Yiddish in particular, were definitely drawn to the revolutionary. And so, certainly that piece of it -- already, I was -- from the time I returned from Israel, I was already very strongly identifying 53:00with the Left. And this was something that also allowed me to have a strong identification with a leftism that was not about Israel-Palestine. That was a part of it for me. I didn't like how central that had become to all discussions of all things that were Jewish and all things that were political. And the more that I studied Yiddish, the more I always thought -- I would realize, Yeah, there were major Zionist parties but often they were smaller parties and the bulk of people were probably apolitical or non-partisan or working and didn't have time to spend arguing politics all day. And then, there was -- Bund and all these other movements that -- they were all in the air and often more dominant kind of -- not dominant necessarily in ascendance in the political mood, but 54:00they certainly -- the plurality of voters in various places were part of these ideas. And they were part of the ideas that I was reading, that people were swept up in revolutionary passion. And the hope for a new world was exciting to these people. And that was something that I wanted to have for myself. I think that a lot of the kind of political climate of growing up in the '80s and the '90s was really sort of like a politics of desperation, of despair, of the end of the Left in a certain sense. And there was a way that this breathed new life into possibilities, like that there was endless possibility in all of this material. And that was unbelievable for my sense of the world and how the world operated. But it's not necessarily that it's always hopeful. It definitely -- 55:00being around these poets for so much of the time is also something that I think -- it doesn't necessarily make you more cynical but it definitely leaves -- you definitely feel like the work that you do in this field is often overshadowed by tragedy no matter how hard you try to be focused on the creative piece of it, that the writers that I worked on were murdered and then the people who loved these poets were also murdered, by different people. And that never is not present for me when I'm reading this work, no matter how much I kind of -- a lot of the work I do here, specifically at Yiddishkayt, is often about focusing on the living cultural piece. But, of course, part of the insistence on that is 56:00because of the awareness of its terrible end and the political reasons that it ended, which are deeply -- I feel those very deeply.

CW:I'm curious -- and maybe this isn't happening in the chronology that we're talking about at Cal, but how, for you -- if that poetry and study of the past is brought into the present for you and, if so, how is that material used in sort of your contemporary political --

RAP:Yeah, I think that part of the way that it now functions for me -- and I don't think it's the same as when it was -- yeah, I think it's shifted since I was at Cal. At Cal, there was a piece of it that was sort of -- a big piece of it was just -- a sort of a vicarious political education. I really learned about 57:00the politics of the Bund through reading Bundist writers. I learned about kind of Soviet revolution through reading these revolutionary Yiddish poets. And that was really just kind of this -- a real education into that. The way that it evolved, I think, was seeing the ways that Yiddish itself was so tied to place and to a present. And this is sort of separate from the kind of Bundist retrospective political terming of doikeyt [Bundist concept of "hereness"]. But it's doikeyt in a larger sense than I think that the Bund ever meant it, that when we think about the idea of what it means when we say "S'iz do," it is, it exists, it is present. That kind of present-ism became very charged for me, the 58:00idea that Yiddish as a language of this poetry just reflected the lived experience at the moment that it was being created. There's something very -- I don't exactly know how to express it, but there was something about that that was very powerful, that it was tied to a place and it was tied to a time. And that idea really also resonated with -- that I felt work needed to be done. Work needs to be done today in the same sort of way. And this also, I think -- (laughs) this is what sort of caused problems for me trying to be an academic in a lot of ways, that I felt that one of the things that I felt like I was learning from the material was that this kind of work, this awareness of our present moment, of what is happening here and now, it's so part of the material 59:00that I'm studying, something needs to be done today, in the here and now. And that became both exciting for me, but it also became a problem because I was less interested, I became less interested over time about -- certainly about writing academic work, which I did very little of in my time, about the past. And I sort of lost interest in sort of explications of texts or of examining -- even though the main thing I did was cultural history, it became much more about, What does this mean now? And I think that's part of, also, the experience at Berkeley, is -- there's so much critical theory that we were exposed to at Berkeley. And the critics that meant the most to me -- the critic that meant the most to me was always Benjamin. And even though I think now maybe "The Angel of 60:00History" has become a little bit clichéd, there's this idea that's raised in the theses on history that never leaves me, that idea that the reconstruction of history is happening at the moment and it's always in flux, but the wind of progress pushing the angel of history backwards and recollecting the past, that this act of recollection is an act of creation that's always happening. And that really shapes, I think, what I now -- at least I try to do today with varying levels of success.

CW:I just wanted to fill in a little bit about Eli's background. So, can you just briefly --

RAP:Yeah.

CW:-- say who he was?

RAP:So, Eli grew up in Brooklyn and he had a sister and he lived with his 61:00grandmother and his parents in Brooklyn. And his family was very active with -- I guess it's now -- it would be the IWO, the International Workers Order. And he went to Camp Kinderland and was active in leftist politics. And he moved to Los Angeles as a young man and worked with the lithographers' union here in LA and then was a student in Germanics at UCLA, where he got his PhD. And yeah, he grew up in this world of the International Workers Order, which splintered from the Workmen's Circle early and had a real allegiance to the Soviet Union early. And Eli even went and he was a representative of the World Youth -- I feel like 62:00it was called -- I can't remember exactly what it was called. The World Youth Congress? Something like that, where he lived in Prague. And when he returned from Eastern Europe, his first wife was pregnant and they returned to the United States. He had received a draft for the Korean War, but when he returned, they seized his passport, which he did not receive back until passports were given back to people in the mid-'70s, for being a member of a communist organization. And Eli was active, an activist. He left the Communist Party. He went and worked -- his first job was at Berkeley and he taught in the German department. And then, that was the time where there were loyalty oaths, which Eli signed 'cause he was no longer a member of a party. Signed them honestly. His story, I 63:00remember, was that he was called into -- I think it was the chancellor's office, who told him -- I think his story was he told him that, "We can't have three things on our faculty. We can't have communists, homosexuals, or alcoholics." And Eli said, "Well, who are you going to have left teaching your classes if you fire all of them?" And I don't think that that glibness was necessarily appreciated, but even though he was no longer a member of the party, he was denied tenure, he was fired from the university. And he actually went and he taught at Case in Cleveland before -- and then came back and there was a court case, I think it's Katz v. the Regents of the University of California. Was reinstated but was denied tenure later. And then, he went and he taught for 64:00many, many years at Sonoma State, where he was in their ethnic studies department and he taught European culture. And my memory of it is that when they were cutting the ethnic studies department budget, Eli said, "Well, if you're gonna be cutting budgets of ethnic studies, then I think that the European position should probably be the first one to go." It might not have actually played out like that but that's how I remember it. And so, he retired from Sonoma State. And as soon as he retired from Sonoma State, he started teaching Yiddish classes at Berkeley. And yeah, he had -- he was really interested in Germanics and in German linguistics. It was interesting 'cause my whole way of 65:00teaching, I've always taught -- when I was in graduate school, I taught middle school and I always was interested in teaching at different levels. Pedagogy's always been something that's been really interesting to me. Eli was not interested in innovative pedagogy. It wasn't something that was interesting to him. He taught from the Weinreich textbook and he refused to change his word processing program, which had been obsoletized, so I used to have to come to his house and do all sorts of stuff with his computer all the time. That's one of the main reasons I spent a lot of time with him. He would call me to help fix his computer problems. But yeah, he had this incredible kind of -- and he always remained active in progressive politics his whole life. He played the viola and he was just -- had this amazing warmth about him. And one of the things that I 66:00think that I saw in him that I had never seen really in a politically active person was just that he had this deep concern for humanity. It was just genuine. It just felt like he really cared. And that was what motivated his -- and it was always there. I remember seeing articles of speeches that he gave when he was a young man in Brooklyn, and it would just be like -- this guy has always been there and he always cared in this way. And he was an incredible person. Yeah, I stayed in touch with him. I moved to Amherst when I was writing my dissertation to work at the Book Center, and I would always be in touch with him. The whole time I was there -- I was asked to do those recorded books series and I'd always go over them ten times with him on the phone before I would go and record them, 67:00and he would correct my pronunciations and give me tips and things like that. And then, Eli had a stroke when I was working at the Book Center, I guess, so around 2001, 2002. And he became aphasic and I think that was extremely hard for such a verbal person to have lost the ability to speak. And I flew out and I visited him after one of his major strokes. And yeah, I remember we had this -- the last conversation we had, he was explaining to me that I had to finish my dissertation but none of the words were coming out in that way. And he was like, "You have to finish" -- I can't remember what word he used but he kept using some other word that wasn't dissertation. And I was like, "Oh, no, are you 68:00talking about my dissertation?" He's like, "Yes! That's the word I'm looking for." And I was like, "All right, okay, maybe. I'll try to finish it." And then, actually, the first time I ran a program that took people to Eastern-Central Europe was at the Book Center. I started this program there called the LiteraTour. And I was in L'vov, L'viv, Lemberg, and they called me to tell me that Eli had died. And I remember I stayed up and I wrote a eulogy for him that was read at his funeral. And it was so surreal 'cause I was out there teaching -- that day before, I was teaching Itzik Manger, "Out in the Fields." Yeah, and it was this real sense that he was gone. I guess that was 2002. And that was 69:00really hard.

CW:So, one of the other mentors that you named is Benjamin Harshav. How did you get to know him?

RAP:Oh, so I got to know Benjamin Harshav -- so, the person I studied the most with at Berkeley was Chana Kronfeld, and Chana was a student of Binyomen, Benjamin Harshav in Israel. And the other person I worked quite a bit with, although I didn't ever take a class with him but I spent a lot of time with him, is Uri, Robert Alter, at Berkeley. And we had an interesting relationship because, I mean, his son was in Habonim with me and we lived together on the kibbutz. So, my relationship with Uri Alter was mainly through my relationship with his son, which is probably why I never took classes with him because it was kind of awkward and weird. But Uri asked me if I would be -- so, Benjamin 70:00Harshav was coming for a semester to give this series of lectures at Berkeley and he asked if I would -- he said he needed an assistant for the time that he was at Berkeley, and would I do it? And I just remember him being like, "Let me tell you a story about Benjamin and if you understand the story and still want to do it, you should do it." And I was like, "Okay." And the story was this: he said that the way he had been told, when Benjamin Harshav was a small child, he returned home from school and his father, who became a famous teacher in Israel, told him to pack up his stuff and they were gonna get on the train. And he said to his father, to Hrushovski, "Can I bring my stamp collection?" And his father said, "No, you just need to pack a bag and we're going to the train station." And there's a very complicated story about them getting on the train and it gets 71:00stopped at the border and they walk around and they get back on the train and get into Russia, into the Soviet Union and escape Vilna. And then, I remember Uri Alter said, "Benjamin has spent his whole life upset about the stamp collection. That always -- that's gonna be there. I just want you to know that, that story." And I was like, "Okay, that seems okay. That seems fine." But then, the more I worked with him, the more I saw that that sense that Uri Alter was trying to convey to me was definitely a part of our relationship that developed over time. We got very close over the semester that he was at Berkeley. We had a great time together. He did all sorts of -- and I also became very friendly with his wife Bobbie during that time. He would call me to get to his apartment very early in the day and he would read me his entire lecture, just read it to me, 72:00sitting across from him, and read it to me and ask me what I thought. And I didn't have a lot to say, I mean, because he was a genius. And he would read this to me and then I would just be like, "Oh, maybe you could shorten this part" or whatever I would give him. And he was like, "Okay," and he would take all my criticism. And then, he would get to the lecture hall and he wouldn't read a word that he had just lectured to me. He just wouldn't even read a word of it. He just ad-libbed the entire lecture. It would be based on the text that he was supposed to be talking about, but not a word -- there was not a word of it that -- he had just made me come at six in the morning to his apartment and listen to the entire hour-long lecture and then he would not read a word of it. It was great. It was a great experience. And he would call a lot to make sure certain things would happen or get done and just to talk about certain things. And then, after that, we kept in touch for quite a while after. He developed an 73:00idea around the same time that the "Comprehensive Yiddish" dictionary was being put together, and he wanted to put together his own take on how a Yiddish dictionary would operate. And his view on it was -- he had a sort of a -- he would always talk about, There's gotta be a maximalist Yiddish dictionary. And the way a maximalist Yiddish dictionary would work is basically -- I mean, he's like, "We have to figure out how we'd contain it, but basically every word in Polish, every word in Belarusian, every word in Ukrainian that was used in Yiddish would be a part of this dictionary. It would just be -- 'cause it's part of Yiddish. It's all part of Yiddish." And I remember he would send me -- we'd work together on the beginning of the letter pey to create a sample for him to shop around to publishers and he would call and leave me these very long messages on my answering machine about the ideas about the dictionary. And it 74:00was just kind of exciting to be around somebody who was so, so excited about this project. But the idea behind it was so incredibly interesting to me, that there was something about this need -- part of it was this idea that no one was gonna be able to create a dictionary like this. So, the project was always sort of impossible at the same time and so it always just functioned in the realm of the imaginary. And at the same time, it was very real. We were talking about -- and putting together proofs of real pages. But the idea of how he thought about it, that every word that's spoken is Yiddish, every word that comes through a Yiddish speaker's mouth, it becomes Yiddish, had this amazing kind of poetry behind it that I loved. There was just something -- that's the thing about Yiddish he believed, that it was just fully open. There were no limits. There were no borders on it. And he didn't like any of the kind of dogmatic ideas 75:00about Yiddishisms that kind of felt inorganic or that just felt forced or -- these kinds of forced distinctions between things that I really -- that I really got from him. And that's certainly my approach and always has been in all of my work with Yiddish, has always been the background of it. When people get into these discussions about -- I hear people on the internet complain about where does -- Oh, that's just a German dialect, have these discussions about it. And I just don't care, and that's the Harshav sense of it. He was like, "Yeah, it's all part of Yiddish." To draw these lines is antithetical to the very idea of what Yiddish was. So, there was something kind of amorphous and borderless and anarchic about his very approach to it. But at the same time, it wasn't 76:00anarchic. And it was anarchic, really, in the sense of a real liberated sense of how to understand language and the way it worked. You could see that in his very earliest essays, like his essays on free verse and prosody. It's all about, how does free verse work in prosody? What's the prosody of free verse? And he always would talk about kind of the physical -- the heartbeat of the poem in his lectures and in his work that -- he taught a reading group when he was in Berkeley and he would always have us feel out the way that this felt, just the felt sense of the poem. And being around, also, just a working, multilingual poet who kind of worked with Yakobson and all -- it was just an incredible experience to spend time with him. He was an incredible guy. He also was hilarious. And I remember we had this -- I can't remember which birthday it was. 77:00It was a Sutzkever event. We had it at Berkeley. And I was assigned to read the "Ver vet blaybn [Who will remain]" poem, one of Sutzkever's famous poems. And I remember that I -- there's a recording of Sutzkever reading it and I listened to it over and over and over again and I recited it. And first, I read it for -- he was like, "You have to read it to me first before you read it, 'cause I'm going to tell you how it's supposed to be read." And I read it and he was like, "No, you're reading it completely wrong." And I was like, "I'm not reading it wrong. I'm reading it exactly -- the inflection and the intonation of Sutzkever!" And he said, "No, it's supposed to be much more cynical at the end. It's like, 'Iz dos genug [Is this enough]?' Really, it's not" -- and I remember we were in my car and I put on -- I had burned it on a CD and I turned it up and had him listen to Sutzkever. And he's like, "Sutzkever's reading it all wrong," which was great. And then, when I met Sutzkever in Israel -- Sutzkever was very ill 78:00when I saw him. He had his nose removed from cancer, and when I met him he was in a nursing home with this television blaring, with all these people making a lot of noise. And he kept saying to me, Sutzkever kept saying, "Ikh bin tsu shvakh tsu redn [I'm too weak to talk]." And I was just like, "Okay, it's okay. Maybe some other time." And he was like, "Who did you study with?" And I was, "Oh, I studied with Binyomen Hrushovski -- Hrushovski." And he was like, "Oh, Hrushovski, a geyen, a geyen [a genius, a genius]!" I just remember him saying that. And it was incredible that he was just -- and he kept bringing me back to talk to him even though he'd be like, "Oh, but I'm too tired, I'm too weak to talk." And then, he would engage me again. But I just remember him -- that Sutzkever's reflection on Harshav was that he was an absolute genius.

CW:What language did you speak to Harshav in?

RAP:Oh, in English. We spoke almost entirely in English. But during the seminar 79:00-- so, we would have these seminars with him and we had one on the poet, the Hebrew poet Avot Yeshurun, who's also a multilingual poet. He switches between quite a lot of Yiddish, Arabic, and Hebrew in his poetry. And those discussions we would have in Hebrew when we would talk about the poems. But even when we talked about the prosodic elements, those would all be done in English. When we would read the Yiddish -- I mean, he would always recite the poems in Yiddish and talk about the words in Yiddish, but then when we would talk about them, it was always in English 'cause -- I remember having a very lengthy discussion with him about amphibrachic tetrameter, which is a favorite meter of Yiddish poetry. And having that discussion -- I know that that discussion only would have happened with him in English, although in the Hebrew one, I remember him speaking more in Hebrew. He was also in Vilna. The summer I was in Vilna, he 80:00came to -- so, I was there for the second year of this Vilna Yiddish program and he came and that --

CW:What year? That was --

RAP:Ninety-nine. I remember because there was a big clock counting down to the millennium. And I always spent a lot of time -- and Harshav was there and his son came, too, from Israel. And I remember walking with him and he would point out all these different things. And that was really the first time I had actually -- then was the first time I had really heard him speak in Yiddish. Yeah, he spoke this beautiful, very -- but he also always would say that he spoke an educated Yiddish, that he spoke a school Yiddish 'cause both of his parents were educators. And he spoke in -- basically, he was one of the few kids who just grew up speaking klal-shprakh [standard language]. He spoke in standardized Yiddish that -- he'd kind of eschewed all sorts of dialect pronunciations, although you would catch him saying "eykhet [also]" and "eykh 81:00[too]" and things like that every once in a while, switching into Litvak a little bit, but not much. Yeah, he really spoke a beautiful, very standard sounding Yiddish.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:This idea of these programs that would take you to Eastern Europe, where did that start for you?

RAP:I think it started -- because when I started studying Yiddish, people would -- I was becoming familiar with the landscape of Eastern and Central Europe. And one of the critical texts that I was really interested in at the time was this Mitchell book about landscape and power. So, I was very interested in questions about physical space and movement in space when I was working at Berkeley. And one of the things I always noted was that people would say to me, they would say, Oh, my family comes from this town but it doesn't exist anymore. I'd be like, "It exists. The town exists." And they'd be like, No, no, it doesn't exist. "It might not exist the way it was but what town exists the way it was a 82:00hundred years ago, fifty years ago? But it exists." And they'd be like, No. And there was that sense of it what was just -- I think people -- I came across that tendency to want to make -- the nostalgic tendency to believe that these places really aren't real, that these are places of legend. And there're so many legends that become part of this kind of American Jewish story, like we all know -- no, we all don't know, but a lot of people now might become aware are not true, like things about people believing their names being changed at Ellis Island. And I always say, "What if a TSA guard decided to change your name at the airport? You think that would happen?" And they would say, Oh, that seems strange. And I would be like, "Why do you believe the Ellis Island officials were changing people's names? I mean, they had documents." And they'd say, Oh, but that's just what I was told. That was the story. The stories about anti-Jewish violence inspiring people to move to the United States, which often 83:00turn out to not have really happened and all these kinds of things disconnect people from a real lived sense of experience, of history. So, part of it was that sort of kind of dafke [contrarian], kind of -- I want to take people to these places and show them that these places exist and that this was a real place and that there's something both -- it's not only the political but it's also just there's a tremendous value in recognizing this is human history. There's material history here and something bad happens when we ignore it, when we pretend that these things are just the stuff of legends or that -- and I think that when we believe in these as legends, terrible things can happen from them. And also, the consequences of what happened in history also somehow gets -- the amazing complexity of history gets erased by all these stories or the 84:00kind of belief that these places are just legendary. And so, I was really taken with the poets like Manger, also Molodowsky and Kulbak, in particular, there was something about their work that seemed so tied to places and that I just thought, There's something here. I want to take people to these places. And my experience was that -- so, I designed this trip to go to -- and also, I have all sorts of eccentric interests in travelogues and in maps. And at the time, also, my partner Nomi was a cartography editor at a travel company, so I was really 85:00interested in the way that maps show something and also show change in interesting ways. So, I had this idea that I would create a tour for the Yiddish Book Center where we would go to Galicia and Bukovina. We were just going to go to two provinces of the Austrian Empire and we would use the Baedeker from the 1890s as our guide and we would also use that as the physical guide and we would use poetry as the kind of spiritual guide for the trip. And some prose. But I didn't know if it would actually -- but I went and I scouted it before the trip, and I had this experience where I brought this story "August" by Bruno Schulz to Drohobych. And the guide, local guide, took us to Bruno Schulz's family's apartment house, a townhouse. And the person who was accompanying me and I read 86:00"August." And I'd always read this Bruno Schulz as this fantastic kind of magical realist sort of piece. And I looked around and I thought, This is describing this view. This is the way that the street dips down into the horizon and this is the way the heat looks on the side of the road. And I thought, This is a whole other layer of this, where you think of this as being surreal but it's not surreal. It's just a painterly view of this very scene right here. And I thought, People have to come and see this. So, then I led this trip for the first time and it was profound for me -- I think for some of the people on it. I mean, I remember it was also pretty profound for Nancy from the Book Center who came on the trip. I think that it made this all real. This world was, for a lot of people, even people who worked at the Book Center, it wasn't real. And 87:00suddenly, everything was made so real for me by this experience. Even being at the Book Center and surrounded by all those books and I would think -- I remember me thinking, These are the Belarusian forests that Kulbak talks about and they're all lining these shelves in these pages that are printed at the Kletzkin Press. And I would think, This is what it is. This is where it's from. And that trip was the first time I was really able to kind of -- just to do exactly the kind of fantasy trip that I would have wanted to take people on, where -- we had this experience on that trip where I said to our bus driver, "I want to visit this town called Stopchet. It's mentioned in this poem by Manger." And they looked on the map and they couldn't find where I was talking about and I was like, "Look, if we go to the Kolomyya station -- it says, 'If you turn 88:00this way from the Kolomyya station and go seven miles, you will reach Stopchet.'" So, the driver was like, "I don't care. All right, we'll do it." So, he turns off of (UNCLEAR) Kolomyya and we drive seven miles from Kolomyya and we see the sign and it says Stopchativ. So, it's Stopchet and it was there. And what was seven miles from the railway station was the cemetery, which was what was being described in the poem. And the poem is about Itzik Manger's grandparents coming from the cemetery in Stopchet and meeting him at the train station. And we went to the cemetery and we walked into this overgrown cemetery and we read this poem about these people rising up from this ground and meeting their young grandson poet. And it was just -- something clicked for me, that 89:00this was something that needed to be done. This is something that is an experience to be had. To share this material in the place where it's describing is incredible. And then, all of the layers of history on top of it, the fact that the cemetery was fully overgrown -- and then the keeper of the cemetery came out and thought we were there because it's a site of a massacre. There had been a mass shooting that happened in the cemetery there. And that's part of the story of the space now, that the Jews were taken out of these towns, right there in Stopchet, and they were murdered right here. And these bodies were buried here in the same cemetery as Manger's grandparents. And all of that is there now to be understood in some new way, and to understand what it means for us to be standing in these places, and reading it was a real changing point in how I 90:00understood what the power of literature was. It sort of started to transcend the sort of specificity of Yiddish for me. It just became -- there was something about going to places that were so laden with history and being able to access these works of art that were created in these places. And to engage the surroundings in that way became really what I knew I just wanted to work on forever, which I guess I did. (laughs) But not forever. I mean, it's not been that long, but --

CW:(laughs) But so, that concept sort of transformed into the Helix Project.

RAP:Yeah, I had this idea when I was working at the Book Center that I had proposed at some point before I left there to create something that would be like the year abroad in Yiddishland. And it was sort of an extension of what we 91:00had developed the Steiner Summer Program into -- and to have a summer program and then have a year program. And so, that sort of was the beginning of, I should take students of culture, students of culture in different ways, and we'll do this all through the lens of Yiddish and we'll go to these places. Then I left the Book Center and I finished my degree and I went and I taught at Boulder, where I started a program that was sort of a very similar program. I started a study abroad program, a summer study abroad program in Venice, Italy, where the main piece of it was also going to sites of culture and reading poetry that was created there. Or I remember we went to Ferrara and we read "The Garden 92:00of the Finzi-Continis." And we just did all the same sort of things but in Italy, which was really nice, I should say. That was a really nice place to do it and the food was far better than anything that I ever experienced on any of my Eastern European adventures. But that's probably just 'cause my great-grandfather owned that Italian grocery, so I have that personal love. But that program sort of also was another piece of it, seeing that this program could be done in another context and it can be done -- but part of the drawback of the program I did in Venice was that it was extremely expensive for students, which felt very unfair. And it was when I came back from that program that I got a call from Yiddishkayt. And I had been kind of just mulling over what I wanted 93:00to be doing upon my return from Venice and thinking, I want to start something that's -- the core of it is about engaging culture where it was created, engaging multiple strata of history simultaneously, looking at multiple cultures at once. I felt really hemmed in in a certain sense by being a university professor at a state university where the classes that I wanted to teach also are being dropped because I wasn't getting over twenty students to attend a Yiddish literature class, so they would drop those classes and make me teach -- "Representing the Holocaust" was their fallback always for me, which upset me. That was not what I wanted to be doing. So, the opportunity of creating new programs was really intriguing, and that's sort of what began my new program, that -- when I started this idea for a program that I called Helix because of 94:00the spiral sort of nature of the idea of it and also the kind of -- this idea about embodiment with the helix and the idea of the double helix and all that kind of -- there was something specific about it, although everyone likes to read all sorts of other things, ancestrally, into it, which I now regret. But that became what I developed over the past seven years when I got to LA. Yeah, that was sort of the core of it, was the experience I had the very first time. Actually, now that I'm talking about it, I realize the core of it probably goes back to that first time I was in Poland at Danny's grandmother's apartment and just saying, Oh, this is where she played. And that experience was probably the seed of it all. I don't know how -- but it just lay dormant for a while until it became the program that I began here.

CW:Now that you've been doing this kind of thing for a number of years, what are the echoes of having this very specific short-term site-specific experience?

RAP:The goal --

CW:What are the echoes or impact after coming back?

RAP:Well, we always ask people who come back from the trips that I now run to reflect at different points after the trip on what they experienced. And the program that I started has changed significantly since I first started it. It's now no longer just for students. It's for students, artists, educators, activists. And the nature of the responses is often very different from the point of life that people are in when they come on the program. For some people, 96:00it's really been a very deep immersion into a culture that they really wanted to learn about and has shaped their interest in pursuing this academically often, or career-wise. So, we've had students who finish the program and then immediately went off and did Fulbrights in Eastern Europe and are interested in -- some people were interested in sort of East-West policy as a result of it. So, people take it in very interesting directions that are unexpected. But one of the things that I've noticed that people, I think, grapple with the most on the trip and are often, I think, confronted with after is the nature of being in places where we talk about real beauty and art and we're surrounded by a history of devastation. And that is, I think, too big for anyone to wrap their head 97:00around. And I think that when you ask people about the experience, that is something that's really hard to cope with. And I think -- I don't have answers as to what that does for people, but it definitely shifts one's perspective. For me, personally, it's really shifted my perspective. I mean, profoundly. Doing this year after year has really changed the way I think I operate in the world and the kinds of identifications I make with others has changed as a result of these kinds of experiences, especially of reading poetry in places where terrible things have happened -- has really -- there is a kind of a 98:00mind-expansive experience there. It really expands your understanding of what it means to be a person. And I think that is one of the things that is -- a lot of the participants have -- we debrief at the end of the day and often we have these very long, difficult days of travel together on our programs. And holding those kind of things together at the same time, with the recognition -- that's how it always is. There's always all this stuff we're putting together, like we learned -- I don't know why I'm thinking about this but we went -- I remember we were in Shklow, which is the hometown of Zalman Shneour and we learned his 99:00famous poem, "Margeritkelekh [Little daisies]," and we sang it. And then, we went to this very ancient cemetery. And it had been the site of a mass killing and I also had a poem that he wrote upon hearing the news about the liberation of Shklow. And I read it there. So, we had had this experience of seeing this kind of quasi-folksong -- although sinister in weird ways, also, that song. But then, there was this, which was being confronted with genocide. And the description really is -- you could look out and see what we -- he was remembering Shklow and he was remembering the cemetery. And it was that kind of an experience of just being, like, all of that exists here. It is both this kind 100:00of quasi-creepy romantic poem and also this kind of upbeat sort of singing and song. And at the same time, there's this here at the same time and there's also the strata of these graves, of people who've lived here for hundreds and hundreds of years. And they're not here now. But we're here now. And all of that, it's very difficult to express what that does to a person to have that experience. But my hope of it is that it makes people kinder, both to their own sense of history and to themselves, that people recognize that there is a tremendous amount of sadness and sorrow but that that never fully can eclipse all this other stuff that's happening. And I think that is the challenge of our 101:00program, too, is how to keep the balance of those things and people without it being overwhelmed, yeah.

CW:Yeah. I'm wondering if there's anything else you want to point out about places that have been personally transformative or experiences in places?

RAP:Yeah. I mean, on these trips that I've done -- the first time I led what we now call this Helix program, we went to these woods outside of Minsk, on the outskirts of Minsk called Kuropaty, which was the killing field of the NKVD. And a big part of my dissertation is about Kulbak, Moyshe Kulbak, the poet, and it's 102:00where he is believed to have been shot. And when I met Moyshe Kulbak's daughter, Raya, before she left Minsk she went to Kuropaty before she went to Israel. And she had told me that when I met her. And so, it was important for me to include this on the trip. And I remember we went to this forest and Dovid Katz has put a monument there, in Yiddish. It's surrounded by all these crosses which mark where human remains have been found and they've put names on all of these to match up with Belarusian and Polish and Jewish writers and poets who were all murdered there in the Great Terror in '36, '37. And I don't know, I had an experience when I went there where I just remember I read -- we read the Kulbak 103:00and then we just gave people the chance just to be at the place. Yeah, and I remember having this experience there where I thought -- I don't exactly know how to put it, but there was something about my own way I viewed all this suddenly shifted. I was no longer -- I think you spend a lot of time identifying with the people who you study and I would always think, (clears throat) In this story, I'm like Kulbak. I'm the young poet teacher guy. But then, there was something about being at this place and I thought, I don't know why I identify in that way. There's all these other people who were present right here on this ground, from these Belarusian poets and these Polish poets and writers and the young NKVD officer who shot these people. And I don't know why I think -- it's 104:00just a fantasy that I'm more like the innocent poet who was shot and I don't identify with the other part, the darker part, the shadowy part of humanity that led to his death. And I remember feeling that very strongly when I was in Kuropaty. And it's moments like that that I feel like -- I came back home and I thought, I don't know how, but I feel changed by this experience. Yeah, I don't know what that was. I came home and I stopped eating meat. My whole -- and I can't even exactly put in words what it was that happened to me when I was there, but it was something about that experience that shifted my viewpoint to -- and it was about being in a place where something had happened, where lives had ended and where growth continued to happen. And it just shifted my way of 105:00viewing the whole world. And I don't know how or why. It's difficult to express. But yeah, the goal of the program then became, if this program can do that to me -- like, I was a cynical kind of -- (laughs) I used to be much more cynical -- and then turn me into this, I feel like there's something of value here, that when people observe their bodies in these new places and these places where these works were created, where they describe, something amazing happens.

CW:Have you had experiences like that in the US?

RAP:Yes, I have had experiences like that in the US. It's interesting, something like that happened here in LA, which kind of became a weird little scandal, which is that -- I went to the place where this poet, Lamed Shapiro, was buried. 106:00And his cemetery is now -- was a ruin. And I remember having that kind of -- again, this moment of awareness of, What has happened here? And this is my own city. And having that full sense of being aware, being surrounded by the traces of what's forgotten or intentionally erased has become -- yeah, I think that I'm accompanied -- that sense was very strong when that experience happened to me. And I think that those things happen quite often now to me. We run these programs and the program often begins in the Ojai wilderness. And there's a longstanding history of thinking about -- in that region, in particular. And this has to do, I think, with the New Age-iness of that area, but there's a kind 107:00of a consideration of American Indian people who had been in these spaces and a discussion about their presence or their absence, which has become sort of striking to me in California, in particular. And again, I remember -- and the kinds of experiences of being in place and hearing people sing at work or working in fields and singing, which is an experience that you have when you're in the Eastern European countryside, and then also having those here, those kinds of moments always really deeply resonate ever since I've started doing this kind of work. Those experiences have become really profound: moments of engagement with place and with art in those places, yeah, since I started doing this kind of work.

CW:Well, I have some sort of -- a different line of questioning that I want to end on. But I'm curious if you want to talk about that one bit that we sort of skipped over, the sort of creation of the Steiner Program --

RAP:Oh, yeah.

CW:-- at the Book Center?

RAP:That was a very interesting time. My son had just been born in January of 2004. And I was supposed to be writing my dissertation and, again, this was 'cause of Naomi Seidman. She apparently gave my name to the people at the Book Center as someone they were looking for in this new position. This was kind of newly conceived, of this director of education. And I came out and I interviewed for it and I remember I was meeting with Aaron Lansky and Nancy Sherman and the 109:00question was, What would you want to do here? What can you foresee? And I was like, "Well, you need to start with this internship." And I remember them being like, Oh, yes? What would we do? And I was like, "It can be turned into something incredible." And I gave kind of an outline of how I thought this could be. I had been to YIVO and their summer program and I had been to the Vilna Yiddish program. And I thought, This could be done entirely differently and it can be done in a way that's really interesting. And it could be about community building and it could be about creating these collaborative experiences of learning and it could be done with really interesting, kind of really experimental pedagogic techniques that are not at all used if you went to YIVO 110:00or a standard language learning classroom. And yeah, it was an incredible experience because when I got hired and I moved to Amherst and -- yeah, I was basically given free rein, just like with the travel program, to create something that was going to be great. And from what I hear, actually, a lot of the kind of elements of it are still in place, the kind of collectivist sort of spirit of the group of people, the kind of -- the rotating faculty approach, the -- I don't know how much, 'cause so much of what I was so concerned with was the creation of a community feel that would enhance learning was so much a part of what I was doing. That was a real big piece of it. And then, to create an opportunity that, again, just like the one that -- the program I run here where that -- students who cared about something or were passionate about a subject or developing a passion for a subject would be encouraged to do this and they would 111:00be able to do it without worrying about paying for it. That was my biggest -- I knew that I wouldn't have been able to pay for a summer off. I worked every summer at summer camp to be -- when I was in college. To be able to take a full summer off and just do something that I loved would have been great -- and get a stipend for it. And so, that was the initial pitch, that we were gonna create this next generation of people who were passionate about Yiddish culture, and basically, we would be treating it like work. They would labor in the warehouse and they would do the intellectual labor in the other part of it and then they would have experiences that would be infused with just a tremendous amount of joyous activity. That was sort of the plan for the program. And it was great to start that program. It was the first time I was ever given just basically a green light to just be like, Here's your budget. You can do what you want. And 112:00then, I think that that was an incredible learning experience, just also the trial and error of seeing how programs worked like that, what would work with these kinds of -- what kind of teaching styles worked best with this kind of a summer atmosphere. And then, of course, the fact that it got funded, that was amazing. And it gave me a kind of a hope that this was something -- there's someone out there who has the money and cares about the stuff. Yeah, and that was an incredible piece of it. And then, going around and talking to people about the program and talking to potential people who would help sponsor individual students on this program, it was incredible. And then, I still am in 113:00touch with some of those same people who were in the first two years of that program. And I think 'cause it was also just a really -- I think what was so incredible about it was that I was able to see how you could create a learning program, a summer learning program that was entirely filled with joy. So much of the experience of doing these summer intensive programs was the experience of not joy. Like at the Goethe-Institut or at YIVO, it never felt like a pleasure. There was always the pleasure of language learning for those people who get that sort of a pleasure. But it wasn't just the kind of unbridled sort of fun of it that I thought would also really enhance the experience of the learning of it, that people would stick with it if they felt there was something great about it. 114:00Yeah, and I think that that's what I brought along with me to -- when I started the program at Yiddishkayt here in LA. I wanted to create programs that got at the root of people's passions for a subject, which is generally one of real interest and of pleasure and not of tedium or misery. And that was definitely a big piece of what working -- the creation of the Steiner Program was. It was about: how do you create something? We have all these models for how to do Yiddish summers, but how do you do something that would be that you would create a new community of people who have a great time doing it, that I'd want to be a part of. And it was a real pleasure, that piece of it at the Book Center. And it was sad to leave that. That was the sad part to give up, yeah.

CW:And I realize we haven't talked about the other part of your work that -- here at Yiddishkayt, about the virtual world --

RAP:Oh, yeah.

CW:-- that you were building. So, do you want to talk about that?

RAP:Sure. I mean, I started doing work, website building and web development when I was -- it was a way I made money when I was in grad school. So, it was something that I did. I've always had an interest in design work and in -- especially in computers and design and graphic design. It's sort of always been a piece of stuff that I did creatively. But then, also, it was a way that I was able to make money, by creating websites. And when I got to Yiddishkayt, people kept telling me -- they were like, Oh, you're the new director of this thing. 116:00You need to create a real web presence. Yiddishkayt has no web presence, we have no social media presence. And this was not something that, being an academic, I had been trained really to do. So, I sort of dove into that. It was actually one of the first kind of real -- so, I was simultaneously sort of trying to create the summer program but also, on the day-to-day basis, I was trying to take the idea of how Yiddishkayt was founded as a cultural festival, which we no longer were receiving funds to do. And so, I thought, What if we transitioned this festival to the internet and had a continuous festival of Yiddish culture on the web? I don't see other sites like this, that are just sharing songs and sharing the histories of various people. And so, I started by actually -- this thing on Facebook. We started doing this thing where we would just have a "Today in Yiddishkayt" piece, which -- within a few months, we started doubling and 117:00tripling our numbers because we were producing content and people were following it. And I was very surprised. I just had no idea. And it continued to grow, and to the point where I thought, Well, we should have a place where this can live. And so, I forget when this was at. It was a year or two into my time here, maybe two years in. I basically would work the full day here at Yiddishkayt and then I would spend the second part of the day until I would fall asleep building a website. And so, I built -- and Yiddishkayt, when I got here, had very meager resources when I got here. So, I built it on a WordPress base. We had a guy here, Wes, who was working in WordPress. We had a WordPress website and that's 118:00what we had. So, I thought, I feel like I can get behind this and figure out how to do something interesting with it. And then, I spent -- I mean, it was months, but I remember I took an online thing, little class in PHP writing. I did all of this to get to the ins and outs of how to create a really beautiful looking website. Making something that looks beautiful was really important to me, that I felt that that was something often missing from -- especially in Yiddish stuff, that the graphic, the aesthetic was never really what I felt like it could be, that it sort of had peaked in the '30s and then no one had really thought, We should make these things really beautiful again. That was actually something else when I was at the Book Center and I was charged with creating a new Yiddish language textbook. And I was like, "It has to be in color and it has to be beautiful." And everyone was, like, Why? And I said, "Look at textbooks 119:00today for languages! They're amazing-looking! Nothing looks like Uriel Weinreich. Nothing looks like this." And so, that was always important to me. But creating this thing on the web was also a new challenge 'cause it was a translation kind of of how you translate what's interesting about a culture to a wide-ranging audience. And that was incredible. So, I built that site and I started loading it up with the kind of -- first, the big piece I was loading it up with, the information that was from that "Today in Yiddishkayt" stuff but then also having all these other features to it, like a kind of an articles pieces of it -- and unfortunately, I haven't been able to keep it up to the same degree that I had wanted -- I'd always hoped to. But, yeah, and then we were honored with the Webby, which was amazing, for net art, which was the weirdest category. But we got that one because, I think, what was unique about it 120:00actually was about the visual representation of this information. And then, there was a burgeoning of other sites that were like, Oh, look what they're doing and we'll make things that look just like that, too, which was tough. And I know that's the nature of how things work, but it was a little bit rough for me to just be like, I just spent a year building this, and having kind of copycat sort of sites crop up and other sites that were kind of like, Oh, we'll do interesting stuff in Yiddish, digital Yiddish stuff, too. And that was sort of part of the whole -- that's something I've come into contact with more as being the director of an organization, is sort of the kind of lack of collaboration between organizations and sort of zero-sum attitude of other organizations, which has been disheartening. And it's sort of what was disheartening about what happened with the development of the site, but I'm still pretty proud of the site. I think that it -- even if it's now starting to 121:00become a little dated, it was something that was really exciting -- about having people be able to turn to this website and be, like, Oh, I remember there used to be a Yiddishkayt festival one day a year, every other year. But now I can go to the site at any time and I can read twenty-five articles about great Yiddish writers or listen to a selection of workers' music on the first of May. And that's really been a pleasure. And seeing the number of people who love it, it's been incredible. It's also incredible how many -- being involved in that online world and seeing the number of really terrible things that people write has also been interesting. It's something that, in my job teaching at the University of Colorado, I never really imagined that there would be people who had such vociferous opinions about the various things that I'm interested in. But it's interesting to come into contact with that and to see -- on the site, we're 122:00often called terrible things. When we post something about a Soviet Yiddish writer, people will say terrible things about that person. And it's interesting to see the way people use the memory of these moments. And to have tens of thousands of people accessing it really gives you insight into what's interesting to a wide variety of people, and in ways that I would expect and be disappointed often by and also in ways that I never would have expected. Yeah, it's always surprising what people respond to when we post stuff or get stuff and we get ten thousand engagements in a day and we're like, I don't understand what this is. But it's interesting to see whatever's bubbling up in the consciousness of the culture.

CW:Where do you see Yiddish in the world today?

RAP:Yiddish? Well, there's the part of it that's the Yiddish language piece of it where, for the most part, I see it in the -- kind of the main places where I see the Yiddish languages flourishing -- maybe flourishing isn't the right word -- but are in the academy, in the Orthodox world, and in the sort of -- and kind of insular Yiddishist communities. And that's where I feel like the Yiddish word is sort of flourishing. And it's complicated, 'cause I run a Yiddish cultural organization and those are three domains that I'm not particularly interested in spending a lot of time. Because what I see in Yiddish is this potential for something that tells us something about the nature of humanity, I'm less 124:00interested in spending a week speaking in Yiddish and talking about how to translate words about trolling on the internet into Yiddish. That's not particularly -- and I understand that it's interesting to a lot of people who are really interested in kind of keeping a living language alive in a new way. But that's never been really particularly my interest because I've always been so much personally interested in the kind of organic nature of language. And there are aspects of that that always have felt a little bit synthetic. And so, I've sort of always kept a distance from those things. And I think that it's interesting to see what will happen with the emergence -- like what happens with America, especially with American Hasidic culture? That's interesting. Again, it's not a group of people, well, I want to hang around with, but it's 125:00interesting to see what's happening there and to see the way that Hasidic culture and Yiddish is grappling with a certain idea of itself and of its past and producing works and continuing in a certain way. That's interesting to me. It's nothing I want to, again, hang around with. And then, the academic scene, it's the one I'm obviously closest to 'cause my entry to Yiddish was through the academic world and it's where I certainly have the most amount of contact. But, again, I think that what's interesting about Yiddish will not necessarily emerge from any of those places. I think that there's a way that Yiddish tells us something about the nature of how people get on in the world. And when people 126:00kind of tune into that, they get something out of Yiddish and Yiddish culture. And, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of interesting things happening with Yiddish all the time. I mean, I was helping out with "YidLife Crisis" for a while and it was interesting for me just to see both what they were up to in that but also to see what people made of that experience. And it was more interesting than I would have expected, and to see the ways that people got really interested in that program, especially when it overlapped with or became really close with a mainstream cultural phenomenon, like when there was the episode that -- with Mayim Bialik. And that was this really interesting moment where all these people 127:00tuned into this because of the nature of her being on an extremely popular television show and recognizing that there is something in Yiddish that was bubbling up. But again, it was so amorphous, whatever it was that was coming out of it, that I think it dissipated rather quickly. But it was interesting to see. And I think that one of the hopes that I have for what I do is that people will engage with Yiddish culture and produce new works about culture that use the lens of Yiddish as a model. I'm not sentimental about language preservation and I think that my time in Eastern Europe and other places in the world has only reinforced ideas that things are ephemeral, including languages and belief 128:00systems, and to hold onto those things is not necessarily something that I find to be of great value. But to, in fact, let those things go and see what you can do with them is really where the interesting stuff happens, and much less so in the clinging to it or in the conservative or preservative sense of it. So, those kinds of domains where I see Yiddish active today sort of sometimes feel like they're a little bit at counter purposes to what I see as the potential of Yiddish culture.

CW:Is there anything else you want to say? (laughs)

RAP:No, I can't think of anything.

CW:Well, I guess maybe then we can end with just expanding on what you just last said. If someone were wondering, why do a project like Helix or why look to 129:00Yiddish, what would you say to them?

RAP:I think Yiddish shows us something about human potential and creative potential. Yiddish very, very clearly can show us the incredible beauty that can be created, the incredible beauty that happens when we are open to everything that's around us, when we are -- we allow ourselves to be porous and let all sorts of influences come in and don't reject things for not being something. It is an incredible model for how we can think about ideas of identity and 130:00difference, that -- what happens when we don't necessarily demarcate various fields or what is ours and what is not ours. And Yiddish shows us the incredible, burgeoning, amazing things that can come out of that kind of a view of the world, that kind of an openness. And I think that that is deeply rooted in the history of Jewish experience that has prized openness and questioning of a certain type. Isaac Deutscher points out even in the most kind of Orthodox systems, they still taught tractates about heretics who violated the laws of the Sabbath and -- they taught him that. He said, "That showed me that that was a 131:00tradition, that there's a tradition of heresy." And I think that that is part of what is encoded in this kind of Jewish cultural system that Yiddish reflects so clearly and that Yiddish shows us that kind of a potential. But it also bears with it everything that the twentieth century did, what happened in the twentieth century, that what we also can see in Yiddish is what happens when societies close off, what happens when societies really firmly mark us versus them and create borders and say, This is not us. And what it leads to is always terrible and it's always destructive. And I said the thing about kind of the contemporary -- the thing that I've always kept at a distance in the contemporary Yiddishist sort of scenes, the kind of drawing lines of, This is 132:00Yiddish, this is daytshmerish [peppered with Germanisms], this is not Yiddish, this is an Americanism. I think that's a very contemporary perspective and it is shaped by the experience of the twentieth century. And I think that Yiddish can show this for all sorts of groups of people and it can really serve as a very clear model for what can happen in incredible and beautiful ways. And it can also show us what can happen in the worst possible way with unfathomable results. And that's what I really feel like Yiddish does, what it can do for people. There's a way that it is instructive to think about things through that 133:00kind of a Yiddish lens and to -- even if people aren't necessarily interested in learning the language -- but to recognize something about the nature of this open language and to bring those things into themselves, to be open to what's around them, to appreciate the sounds of the cultures that surround them, the sounds of people's neighbors and neighborhoods. And I think that's all part of what we learn from Yiddish. And that's what I hope Yiddish can continue to do. That's certainly what I hope to bring to other people through Yiddish.

CW:Great. Well, thank you.

RAP:Thanks.

[END OF INTERVIEW]