MARK LOUDEN ORAL HISTORY

ALLIE BRUDNEY:This is Allie Brudney, and today is March 21st, 2012. I'm here at the University of Wisconsin in Madison with Mark Louden, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Mark, do I have your permission to record this interview?

MARK LOUDEN:Yes, you do.

AB:Thank you very much. So I was wondering if you could briefly tell me what you know about your family background, where your parents and grandparents are from.

ML:Um, my background is not Jewish at all. On my father's side it goes way, way back to the 1600s, basically British Isles. Connecticut, New York, New Jersey area is where a lot of them settled. On my mother's side it's a mixture, mainly Norwegian. And they were immigrants around the turn of the twentieth century; 1:00came from Norway to Iowa and Minnesota.

AB: Uh-huh.

ML:So Yiddish is not an interest that's born out of my personal heritage. But my wife's mother was from Toms River, New Jersey, and grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family, or her grandparents were. And so through my wife's side, we do have the heritage interest in that -- in the language.

AB:Could you describe your home growing up?

ML:I grew up in a basically academic home. My father was a professor of art history in California. I grew up in Oakland, California. And -- actually, that was where I was first exposed to Yiddish. There were some children's friends' parents, but mainly grandparents, in the Bay Area that were not only Yiddish speakers but actually active Yiddish speakers. And so that's -- I had started with a foreign language with German. And the way that I got into German was through music. I was a boy chorister in San Francisco. And so the similarity of 2:00Yiddish to German sort of fascinated me. I was just kind of a language kid anyway. My parents aren't, but I was definitely into languages. And that was because there just happened to be a number of kids and then their extended families related to our family where I was exposed to Yiddish and I thought it was kind of interesting.

AB:So these friends of yours, would you talk to their parents? Like, how often did you have exposure?

ML:Pretty frequently. A lot of them were actually -- could speak both German -- they were Holocaust survivors, a lot of them, the grandparents -- sometimes the parents too, actually, but mainly grandparents -- were Holocaust survivors who knew both Yiddish and German. And some actually came from Germany or East Germany or whatever, so that wasn't unusual. I mean, there were a lot of German-speaking Jews, obviously all throughout Germany. But there were also many 3:00German speakers who also spoke Yiddish in Eastern Europe. That wasn't that unusual. And so when I started taking German they'd say, Oh, I know German too. And then it would come up, Oh, differences between German and Yiddish. So that's how that sort of came up. But it was never with kids my own age. It was always people that were older, like parents or grandparents.

AB:Were there any languages other than English in your home?

ML:No. No.

AB:If you had these friends with parents and grandparents who were Holocaust survivors, is that how -- what was that conte-- what other exposure did you have to Jewish culture, I guess?

ML:Well, being extremely familiar with Jewish culture because I'd say most of my parents' friends happened to be Jewish. Although not particularly observant, and nobody Orthodox. I never knew, say, an Orthodox family or an -- I mean, I'd seen 4:00Lubavitchers in Berkeley because we lived in Oakland, and there's a large Chabad House in Berkeley. So I kinda knew who the Lubavitchers [members of the Lubavitch Hasidic sect] were. A good friend of mine, actually, in high school was -- his mother was Jewish, and his dad wasn't, and he wasn't particularly observant, but then he became very observant, and he's now a rabbi. But there was nothing in the particul-- there was Jewishness there, but there wasn't anything particularly Yiddish-connected on that. But he was actually one of my closer friends. We used to go to bar mitzvahs -- and then my best friend throughout elementary school was from a very -- I would say not necessarily observant, but definitely, like, Zionist family. The mother was a Holocaust survivor, but not Jewish, and then converted to Judaism after the war and married an American Jew. And their family was just very active in, say, cultural affairs. And so I'd do a lot of things with their congregation and social events, that sort of thing.

AB:Can you describe some of those?

ML:Yeah, a lot of it was for very -- well, not so much the High Holidays but 5:00for, you know, like Purim and Sukkos and so forth; there would just be a lot of fun party-type things that were accessible to kids that I became familiar with that way. And it was just essentially a lot of fun -- I don't know whether there were a lot of other non-Jewish kids that were participating, but the family was like I was a third son or something like that, and it was just a lot of fun for me. But there wasn't anything Yiddish connected with that at all. It was just basically kind of Jewishness sort of that way.

AB:Okay. So I guess I'm wondering -- so why --

ML:Why Yiddish?

AB:Why Yiddish, yeah. (laughter)

ML:Basically there was that kind of early interest in language, but then also Jewish culture. And then when I went to Cornell -- I went to Cornell as an undergraduate, and I'd say -- again, probably most of the fellow students/friends that I had were Jewish and came from greater New York City/Long 6:00Island area. And again, it was one of those things, where it's like a lot of their parents had sort of passive skill in Yiddish, and then the grandparents spoke really excellent Yiddish. That came up a lot. And so I'd get to know their families. And again, so Yiddish came up. So I started teaching myself while I was an undergraduate. And then I had a friend who was Belgian who was a little bit older who had a very similar kind of interest. And so he and I would work on it together. And so with the kind of -- learning to read the alphabet it wasn't too hard. And then again, with the background in German it really sort of helped. But then also in college I learned to speak Pennsylvania Dutch. And that's actually where my main area of published research is now. That's a language that is, again, very similar to Yiddish relative to German. It's sort of related to it, but it's distinct from it; it's not a dialect of it or anything. And it's also now today associated with members of very socially conservative, religious communities. So, like, Yiddish to the Hasidim as Pennsylvania Dutch is to the Amish, for example. And then because the German 7:00components of Yiddish and Pennsylvania Dutch are extremely similar, because they're -- it was the Rhineland area of German-speaking Europe where both originated, there's an interest that way too. And so then my interest in Yiddish really became: What was Yiddish like or is Yiddish like in the American context? And so most of my research on Yiddish is similar to what I do in Pennsylvania Dutch studies or German American studies, which is looking at how Yiddish is a vernacular language in -- as a slice of American multicultural, multilingual life.

AB:Could you briefly describe some of that?

ML:For me the major early historical interest in Yiddish goes back to, like, early twentieth century in popular culture and the use of Yiddish or the contact of Yiddish and English in popular music and skits and humor -- that kind of 8:00thing. The kind of thing that, for example, Henry Sapoznik's research also overlaps with. So it's more like American popular culture, entertainment, and music, which kinda goes back to my music interest too. Especially, you know, linguistic phenomena: if you read, for example, the "Forverts" newspaper, in the old days, like when it was founded by Abe Kahn, a lot of purists about Yiddish language would make fun of it and call it "poteyte [potato] Yiddish," right? They'd say it's, Oh, 'cause they don't know the word for "potato" in Yiddish sort of thing, so they'd say "poteyte" in English, and "di vinde [the window]" instead of "dos fenster [the window]" and "di nekstorsike [the next-door neighbor]" and "di upstersike [the upstairs neighbor]," these kinds of classic American Yiddish words. For me, I really -- I'm interested in how people speak naturally. And this is where Pennsylvania Dutch and Yiddish in America share a lot in common. It's like, just listen to the folk. Listen to the way that people talk, and you'll learn a lot about their attitudes, about cultural contact, multilingualism, multiculturalism. And then also on the linguistic-structural side, they're very interesting phenomena to look at when you have languages in 9:00contact like this. So. Language and culture contact is kind of the red thread here.

AB:So I want to get back to that, but I first want to focus more on how you learned Yiddish.

ML:Okay. Yeah, my --

AB:So other than teaching yourself --

ML:Yeah. My first teaching appointment as a linguist was at the University of Texas at Austin. So I finished my -- I started undergraduate at Cornell in 1980, finished my PhD in 1988. So bachelor's, master's, PhD, all at Cornell. My first job was in the University of Texas at Austin. The second year that I was there -- we had a Yiddish position in that department. And to my knowledge there had never been a native speaker that held that position. And maybe even never a Jew, for example. I think it had been, you know, non-Jews that took an interest in Yiddish. I don't know exactly what the background -- but in any case, they hired a man who's become one of my closest friends, a guy named Itzik Gottesman, who your project, I'm sure, is very familiar with. And he was the Yiddish professor 10:00when I was at Texas. And we were there both until 2000. I came up here to take the job, and then he went to the "Forverts" in New York. And Itzik started right away teaching an intensive Yiddish class. It was, like, six credits per semester. And it was a very small enrollment; there were maybe four or five of us in the class, including some really cool heritage speakers. There was this woman who grew up -- born and raised in Corsicana, Texas -- who spoke fantastic Texas Yiddish. And then this is where -- Itzik is a folklorist also. So I was learning Yiddish from him -- and good Yiddish, right? I mean, he's a native speaker, and he's a Yiddishist -- working through Weinreich and so forth. And then we started a Yiddish leyen-krayz [reading circle], which was basically kind of like the culture club where we go around and just kind of explore cool things in Austin and the rest of Texas. But it was also very -- kind of Jewish life in Texas themed. And Texas -- a lot of people don't realize this -- had a very large Jewish presence, going back to the same time that basically other 11:00Europeans from Central and Eastern Europe started migrating there. So, like, middle of the nine-- second half of the nineteenth century. In all those towns where you had Germans and Czechs and so forth you had Jews as well. And even though the Jewish communities are pretty much nonexistent as like, for example, parts of the Midwest here too, the cemeteries are still there; some of the descendants are still there. But usually people would move into places like Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and so forth. But I got a real interest in the whole Texas Jewish history thing. And we found Yiddish speakers there too. Really fascinating.

AB:So where did you find them, and who were these people?

ML:Basically descendants of these nineteenth-century immigrants in Austin itself; then, for example, the last fi-- I lived in Texas for twelve years. The last five years I lived on a ranch outside of Gonzales, Texas. And Gonzales had a reasonably active Jewish community. They never had a synagogue, but they did have services in a VFW Hall, and then they had, like, home services. But they had Torah scrolls that somebody kept with an old Texas gun next to it for 12:00protection. And there are still two Jewish cemeteries in Gonzales, which was typical for a lot of these little itty-bitty communities. Yeah. So it's fascinating. There's been documentaries done on the history of Jews in Texas. And basically from -- the earliest were German-speaking, and then the ones that came like 1880, 1890, turn of the century, they're all Yiddish speakers.

AB:What was it like to learn Yiddish from Itzik Gottesman?

ML:Itzik was -- is amazing. Again, because he's not just a guy that knows the language. He is a Yiddishist. And he's from a family of Yiddishists. He's very exceptional because he's basically a little bit older than I am. I'm forty-nine, and he's in his fifties, probably early, mid-fifties, somewhere around there. That's not the generation of people that -- if they were exposed to Yiddish as kids, they didn't maintain it into adulthood. Well, Itzik, of his four siblings -- he's the only one living, actually, right now, of his four siblings -- the others just had no interest in Yiddish whatsoever. And his parents even were not 13:00necessarily born to be Yiddishists, although his mother is a very important folksinger and poet and so forth. But I asked him once; I said, "Itzik," I said, "it must have been so great to grow up in a home where your parents were speaking Yiddish all the time." He said, "Actually, on my mother's side they spoke mainly German because that was classier." She grew up in Czernowitz. And a lot of them, because of that sort of stratum of society that she came from, German was more common. You spoke Yiddish to the horse traders, (laughs) that kind of thing. But his dad was from a shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community]. His dad was basically a Hasid, although he left and became a medical doctor. I met both his parents and got to know them quite well. And, you know, Itzik was just -- he lives Yiddish. And that just kind of rubs off on his students. And so, you know, it was really -- I had the sort of basic interest there, but then I learned so much about Yiddishkayt from him. And still do.

AB:So you were talking earlier about some of your linguistic work with Pennsylvania Dutch and Yiddish. Can you briefly describe what you've done with 14:00these -- your work with the Yiddish conservative religious groups, and how that --

ML:Yeah. There's two angles to my research interests, and this sort of goes with the personal interest. I like being together with people and listening to how they talk. One interest tends to be on what we say the actual structural components, or syntactic components, like how people string words together to form sentences. Yiddish syntax is a very, very fascinating area of structural linguistic interest. Yiddish spoken among the Hasidim is just naturally spoken Yiddish. It's not influenced by prescriptive norms. It's very stigmatized by a lot of people who have a college Yiddish Weinreich what-is-good-Yiddish/bad-Yiddish sort of sense to it. For me as a linguist, I'm just interested in the way that people speak most naturally. And so because the last large groups of speakers that use Yiddish under natural circumstances are 15:00the Hasidim, I'm kind of naturally drawn to how they talk and how the language functions in their society. The same is really true for Pennsylvania Dutch among the Amish. It's a language that is -- you know, it is similar enough to German that people who know German say it's bad German. And then it has English in there, and they say, Oh, it's a bad mixture, jargon, bastard language, whatever, of German and English. But again, they don't care, (laughs) right? Because their people have been -- are used to being a minority group, being used to be stigmatized, and also kind of setting themselves apart somewhat from the social mainstreams that they live in. The Hasidim and the Amish are an awful lot in common that way. And so then the other of branch of my research has to do with language and faith, language and social and religious identity, and how that goes together as sort of language becoming both a marker of in-group identity and a kind of a barrier to total assimilation to the larger world. I mean, Yiddish has really become an important marker of Hasidic or Haredic identity in 16:00a way that it wasn't necessarily before, when you had large numbers of, say, secular Jewish speakers of Yiddish.

AB:So, you've talked about the way that Yiddish sets people -- groups apart. So what role do you think language plays in identity and in the creation of identity?

ML:I think language is probably the most important kind of group identity marker that we have. I mean, basically everybody, every human being, has some sort of opinions about language and opinions, reflections on how they talk, why they talk in certain ways and so forth. And particularly when you're a member of a distinct social minority -- even among Jews, the Haredim, whether numerically or 17:00culturally or whatever, they are a minority group no matter where they are. And so that way -- it's important because you don't feel -- you don't have a chip on your shoulder because you're a member of a minority group; you assert it, because that's who you are; that's part of your identity. And so certain outward markers, like the way that you dress, the things that you eat, the jobs that you pursue, and these sorts of things are very important as kind of symbolic markers. And then language becomes an incredibly important one. It's almost like wearing a button or a t-shirt that says, This is my team. This is who I am. And even though language is not as much of a marker to distinguish, say, somebody -- an English speaker from Idaho versus an English speaker from Georgia -- although there are definitely differences there -- it's a very, very important way of saying, This is who I am. I don't feel embarrassed about this. Who cares what you think? This is who I am. And this is something that I really find fascinating as a way of kind of cultural maintenance going along with the 18:00language maintenance.

AB:What do you mean by that?

ML:Well, again, with Yiddish -- you talk a lot about with Yiddish, people say, Oh, it's dead; oh, it's been dying for a hundred years, that kind of thing. It's like, Well, no, actually, it's not. The Hasidim are speaking it, and the numbers of Hasidim are growing. They're, like, doubling every twenty years. They say, Oh, that doesn't count. Their Yiddish isn't very good. It's like, Well, it does count, right? It really does count. It really matters. Because the Hasidim matter. Because they're human beings, (laughs) and what they're doing is -- may not necessarily be everybody's choice about how to be frum [observant], how to be Jewish, but it's their choice, and I validate it, especially in light of what has happened in the Holocaust, where somebody tried to exterminate them and a lot of other people. And it's like, more power to them for enduring. And they're bringing with them Yiddish, which I think is fantastic. And it may not necessarily set well with a lot of people that have different ideas about what Yiddish should be, but that's who they are, and that's why I think Yiddish among the Hasidim today -- my more recent interest is language and faith and language 19:00and social identity. And it's just -- as far as I'm concerned, I think it's great.

AB:For your research, have you spent time studying? How do you --

ML:Very sort of indirectly because I'm not Jewish. And, you know, well, Chabadniks [members of the Chabad Hasidic sect], they're probably the most accessible, but a lot of them don't speak Yiddish, (laughs) you know, especially the younger ones. But I do have a student who is a former Hasid who I knew because he was a German major also. He came here, basically left the Hasidim when he was sixteen, from Brooklyn, went to public school for just a few years 'cause he had only gone to yeshiva before that, and then he and I have become very close friends, and his Yiddish is obviously native and so forth, and I've learned a lot from him. And then informal contacts -- not very deep, personal contacts -- with a lot of Hasidim. I'd say mainly Lubavitchers more than anybody else. But --

AB:How do you instigate those contacts?

ML:Just by speaking Yiddish.

AB:So what do you like about Yiddish?

ML:Again, what I like is that it's just -- I mean, every language is a vehicle for some kind of cultural expression. But the thing about Yiddish is that it's such a vehicle for so many cultural expressions or multicultural expressions that I personally find very fascinating. So multicultural identity in Europe, multicultural identity in the United States. I think that to understand Yiddish is to understand Ashkenazic Jewry; to understand Ashkenazic Jewry is to understand a slice of American life and a slice of European life and culture and history. And for me it's just -- it's a fascinating piece of a really neat mosaic.

AB:Could you talk more about what the multiculturalism --

ML:Yeah. Basically every Yiddish speaker, probably forever, has been multilingual. There's no such thing as a monolingual Yiddish speaker, effectively. Because everywhere Yiddish speakers have lived, in the same way that everywhere Pennsylvania Dutch speakers have lived, is in a multilingual environment. You have to speak at least one other language -- say, in the American context, English -- to be able to function in the wider society. Or, if you're in Buenos Aires, Argentina, you're speaking Yiddish and Spanish, or Mexico City; or if you're in Israel, you're speaking enough English also to be able to use there but also, obviously, Hebrew. And then the whole Hebrew-Yiddish mix is a fascinating one. I've taught myself enough Hebrew to be able to make sense of -- you know, be able to -- kind of rough reading knowledge of things. But a lot of my first exposure to Hebrew, obviously, was through Yiddish, was loshn-koydesh [language of prayer, lit. "holy language"]. And then of understanding how Hebrew, Ashkenazic Hebrew, has morphed into the loshn-koydesh component of Yiddish is also a fascinating topic for me.

AB:Could you talk about that a little bit?

ML:Well, I mean, it just -- I've taught a course, for example, here, called 22:00"Yiddish Language and Culture," a few years ago. I had thirty students. Half were taking it just because they were interested in Jewish studies -- I'm also in the Jewish studies faculty -- and the other half were kids that had had German background. And all the kids that were from the Jewish studies background had Hebrew. And a lot of 'em had Hebrew even in high school, because we have a high school in the greater Milwaukee area that teaches Hebrew. So they came into college with a fair amount of Hebrew or maybe had one or both Israeli parents or something, and they'd say, Well, that's not how you say it in Hebrew. It's like, Well, your Hebrew is not exactly the same Hebrew (laughs) that's always been used. And so that really fascinated me, that I kind of understand the whole mentality of what is Hebrew today, "Ivrit [Hebrew: Hebrew]" in Israel and sort of how people define Hebrew. Again, it's one -- there's a lot of prescriptivism there too, because there has been tension between Hebraists and Yiddishists. In the whole language-planning side of Israel, a lot of people were saying, Yiddish 23:00is the past, Hebrew is the future, and never the twain shall meet. And again, that sort of language political side of things is also of linguistic interest to me too. It disappoints me, in some ways, because I don't want to see Hebrew and Yiddish in a competition with one another. But they are, for a lot of people. But it's refreshing to see my students -- and I've taught that class, and I've taught for many years independent studies of Yiddish, so basically one-on-one -- DeeDee Hirschtritt is the student that you met before. I've been working with her this year. Worked with graduate students who worked with Tony Michaels and so forth. And we sit down; we just work through "College Yiddish" and then work on specific texts and so forth and just talk about how the language functions. And what's really cool is that you have a lot of young people that don't -- you know, Jewish, not Jewish, whatever -- who don't have hang-ups about Yiddish being sort of weird or funky. Their parents do, and their grandparents say, What? Study Yiddish? Yeah, it's dead, language of the past. But in fact enough people are sort of realizing and sort -- Wow. This is a really cool piece of Jewish culture, Jewish history -- the Jewish present, right, in terms of the 24:00Hasidim -- but also just American history and European culture.

AB:So since you've brought up teaching, two questions: What challenges and what do you like about teaching Yiddish?

ML:The challenge is having students that have German background versus those that don't, because those that have German background, once they get over the alphabet, they're just cruising. Those that don't have German background, it's a struggle, because just on the sort of the grammatical categories -- when you work through "College Yiddish," you get it, but other grammars too -- it's the same kinds of grammatical concepts, like case and so forth, that are familiar to people that have had German, that are not necessarily familiar if you've had Hebrew or even another European language like French or something. So that's a challenge. You know, it might be easier to have students that all have had some German background, so Yiddish for people that already know German well, versus those that have had no German. That's one challenge that I find here. The 25:00positive side -- and there are more positives than the challenges -- the positive side is that people are fascinated by it. And because I bring in so much stuff that has to do with not just the great works of classical Yiddish literature or the glorious Yiddish past, but I try and talk about things that have to do with vernacular culture, pop culture -- could be popular music of the 1940s and '50s, influence of Yiddish on American English, all kinds of expressions that we use in American English that we may recognize, like "shlep" or "glitch," as coming from Yiddish -- words like "boo-boo" that we don't recognize as coming from Yiddish -- yeah. "Boo-boo" is Yiddish. Do you know where that comes from? (laughs)

AB:Where -- can you --

ML:It's from the phrase, "Er hot bulbes in moyl," which means, "He's got little potatoes, or small potatoes, in his mouth," which was an old expression in the Yiddish theater, which said, He flubbed his lines. And so you go from "bulbes [potatoes]" to people hearing this and saying "bulbes" -- "boo-boo." And then "boo-boo" simply meant a small error, like flubbing your lines, and now it means 26:00a small error or a small injury. Like when I talk to kids that -- I do a lot of outreach presentations to Jewish community groups, including Jewish schools, talk about Yiddish. And then I say, "What's a boo-boo?" And they say, Oh, if you cut yourself. I say, "Well, you know, it comes from Yiddish. It means the word for 'potato.'"

AB: Oh! (laughter) Are there any other great examples like that?

ML:That's a good example. "The bottom line." That's what we call a loan translation from Yiddish into English. "Di untershter shure [The bottom line]." And "shure" is actually a loshn-koydesh word. But "untershte," the "bottom line," this is an expression that came from, originally, Torah study. So it's like you get to the end of the Torah passage, and they're: What's the main point? "Di untershter shure." The bottom line. Now, how that came into American English was that this became -- this was a Yiddish expression meaning, like, "This is what it all boils down to." And then accountants, in adding up all their numbers, would say, Well, the grand total is this." "Di untershter shure." What it all amounts to. And so Yiddish speakers, who became bilingual in English, then simply said, "the bottom line" -- or "the undermost line," 27:00literally, is what it is. And so then it goes from basically the world of finance -- originally from Torah study, basically -- to American popular culture. "The bottom line." Which still has the financial component, 'cause everybody talks about, Well, the bottom line is this. But it's also become a general expression meaning, like, what it all boils down to. I mean, cool things like that that a lot of people are just not aware of.

AB:Are there any others that you can think of right now? These are fascinating.

ML:Those are two that I talk about quite a bit. Well, expressions like, for example, in a restaurant: "Enjoy"? Right? That's something that's also considered a Yiddishism. Or using statements like questions. "You call this a book?" kind of thing. That's basically a verbatim translation of Yiddish using a declarative statement for a question. A lot of things that come into humor. "Seinfeld." Good example. A lot of things. It's not a Jewish show. It's not a Yiddish show. But it's Yiddishisms, right? Out the wazoo. And even if you go 28:00back and watch "The Three Stooges," then you realize, these guys were all native speakers of Yiddish, and a lot of their humor and that sort of thing, it's Jewish humor, which is Ashkenazic Eastern European Yiddish humor in there too. So turns of phrases like that -- so these declaratives used as questions, that would be an example of that too. These are fun things.

AB:So to go back to teaching (laughs) --

ML:Oh, so I teach also things that have to do -- not just language but also culture and the whole cultural context. And, as I say, like what Yiddish was like on the ground in places like Eastern Europe. Birobidzhan, right, the former Soviet republic that -- for which Yiddish was an official language, that also fascinated me too, because it was Yiddish out in the sticks somewhere. It's Yiddish in North America. Talking about Yiddish in South America. Again, Yiddish among the Hasidim. These interesting kind of folk cultural elements of Yiddish I bring into my teaching. So it's not just like this linear kind of progression of 29:00-- you know, from Hebrew to the Roman Empire up to German-speaking Central Europe in relationship to German dialects, that kind of thing, but really sort of talk about what was the function of Jewish languages, right, generally? And then I bring in some linguistic information about other Jewish languages, like Ladino, for example, and Judeo-Persian and Judeo-Arabic and that kind of thing. .

AB:So you mentioned Yiddish in South America and in North America and all over, where -- do you talk about the differences in languages, or in those --

ML:The varieties of Yiddish spoken in these areas?

AB:Yeah.

ML:Yeah. Certain amount of -- you can say there's Yiddish dialectology, but also examples of language contact. So, like, Spanish words that are borrowed into Yiddish in places like Buenos Aires and Mexico City.

AB:What about in the former Soviet Union?

ML:Former Soviet Union, that's interesting too. 'Cause the whole ideology where Yiddish was officially recognized, but then they wouldn't -- in the standard 30:00Soviet orthography of Yiddish, they wouldn't allow people to write loshn-koydesh words with Hebrew spelling. They had to write them as they would all other Yiddish words, with all the vowels in there, which is basically just kind of de-Judaize Yiddish as much as possible. Or to take out, I should say, the religious element. It's Judaic, because they were marking it as a Jewish language. But they were taking out anything that would smack of a religious or observant element to it, which is interesting.

AB:So, (laughs) teaching again, have you noticed that there are different -- any trends in how students have changed over time?

ML:I'd say the growth in the interest in Yiddish among non-Jews is probably something that's been particularly obvious to me.

AB:How has that manifested itself?

ML:Well, basically in the same way that you don't have to be English to take an interest in British history or culture or French background to have some interest in France or French language or anything like that; you don't have to be Jewish to be interested in Jewish studies. And I think even though demographically most Jewish studies majors are probably still -- happen to be Jewish themselves in the same way that probably more African American studies students, majors, are probably African American themselves, when it comes to just taking courses in language study, that sort of thing, there's definitely a growth in terms of, like, I'm just interested in this aspect of European or Euro-American culture, Jewish studies. And in order to understand that, I've got to know Yiddish, because there's just really no way around it. It's like saying, I want to study French culture and then not study the French language. I mean, it's sort of part of it. Now, being out here in the Midwest, where it's not as large -- there aren't as large Jewish communities as you would find on either 32:00coast, for example -- may be sort of a function of demographics. But I have a feeling that if you were to, say, look at the enrollment in Jewish studies or Yiddish-themed classes in places like UCLA or Berkeley or where -- NYU or something like that, you'd probably see large numbers of non-Jewish students there too. And I think that's really cool. I think that's just -- it's just really neat. Because what it says is here that Jewish studies is on the map; it's on the intellectual map. It's not just a feel-good thing for people who are part of the tribe (laughs) so to speak. And I just think that's really cool. I mean -- but now also, you know, because my wife -- I started learning Yiddish before I had a connection through my wife to Jewish relatives. And now what's really cool is I'm the only one -- the goyish guy that married into the family is the only one who has an interest in Yiddish, right? And so I'm sort of this curiosity (laughs) I guess, for them. It's like, This guy really is into Yiddish! It's really cool. And I have this -- a couple little copies of this book, "Say it in Yiddish," which is a little phrasebook. And our daughter is 33:00eight, and her name is Clara Rose. She's named for her Jewish great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother. And -- just to kind of honor that tradition, 'cause technically she is Jewish through the mother's line. And she saw this book, and she said, "'Say it in Yiddish.' What a neat idea. Can I have this book?" And I said, "Sure, you can have this book." And it's nice 'cause it's written in Yiddish, you know, with Hebrew letters, but it's also written in transliteration. So it's, like, "Vos hert zikh [What's new]?" Or something like that. And she goes, "Vos hert zikh?" (laughs) And she's sounding out -- "How do you say that, Pop?" It's like, this is cool, you know? Her great-grandmother, great-great grandmother, never would have guessed, right, that this little girl in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin, would take an interest in Yiddish. But she does. And that's cool. (laughs)

AB:Do you speak Yiddish with her?

ML:Yeah, I do. Yeah. And she -- we have Yiddish children's books, and there're things like that too. Yeah, I've read stories to her ever since she was little in Yiddish -- among other languages too, but Yiddish is -- happens to be one of them. And little kids suck up the language, and she happens to be particularly interested in language generally. And she knows that she's named for her Jewish 34:00great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother, so it's like -- that's neat.

AB:So as a non-Jew in the Yiddish world, what's that like? How do people usually -- (laughs)

ML:Well, it's funny. I do so many outreach presentations. And, you know, it's -- tend to be, like, older folks, like retired people. And the first thing they'll -- you know, they'll just come right out and say, And you're not Jewish? Oh! (laughs) And it's like, Oh, but you're married, you know, that kind of thing; that's okay. I gave a presentation last summer on Yiddish to a 150-person gathering; it's mainly senior citizens, retired people. And there was a question-and-answer session at the end. This woman stands up; she said, "I've known Mark for -- I don't know how many years now, and I want to tell everybody, in case you don't know, he's not Jewish!" But -- (laughs) and so (UNCLEAR), okay, whatever, you know? So it's actually a kind of a source of endearment in some ways, which -- fine! You know, it just -- I like interacting with older 35:00people of any group or whatever, just wherever I go to do outreach presentations. It's great. And it's just -- it's kind of cute, but it's sort of your --- "My yidishe mame [My Jewish mother]" kind of thing. It's like the grandmothers that are just -- it's like, "Oh, it's too bad, but it's still ni--" -- you know, that kind of thing. (laughs) So it's -- it makes for curiosity. And then the question's like, "Why Yiddish?" But then when they hear me speak Yiddish and -- or sing songs in Yiddish or something 'cause I often teach -- 'cause I'm a singer; I teach songs in Yiddish -- you know, then it's just like they want to feed me dinner. (laughs) So it's nice. It actually is nice.

AB:So what role does Yiddish play in your life?

ML:Like I say, it's just part of a passion that I have for language and culture, especially language and minority cultures in North America. As -- about the same number of non-Jewish-themed outreach presentations that I do to schools and community groups I do on Jewish-themed ones and Yiddish -- various 36:00congregations, Yiddish clubs in Milwaukee and so forth. And as part of what we call the "Wisconsin Idea" here, which is the concept that the knowledge -- the fruits of knowledge that we reap in the university should be disseminated to the larger community. And so it's just kind of fun to be able to share these things with people who are coming from outside of academia but are definitely curious about what we have to say about things like Jewish and its place -- Yiddish and its place in Jewish life.

AB:How do you use Yiddish?

ML:How do I use it? I use lots and lots of examples. And I recite texts with translations or transliterations and translations on PowerPoint slides. Sing songs. That kind of thing.

AB:Do you -- like, what role does it play, or --

ML:Like, speaking the language?

AB:Do you have chances to speak or use it in other arenas?

ML:A little bit. I mean, people like Henry Sapoznik a little bit. Not that much. I mean, when I meet Hasidim, then we -- you know, like when we're just out 37:00somewhere -- it happens at airports sometimes. Or in Europe, for that matter, too. It's happened in Europe. Met Hasidim over there. And then just kind of strike up a conversation, and then they -- But you're not Jewish? Oh! Okay. And in some ways that may make it easier than being Jewish and speaking Yiddish. I don't know. But I've had some great (laughs) conversations with Hasidim, including non-Lubavitchers, just sort of on the fly in different places.

AB:What were the conversations about?

ML:Where they're from, where they're going, and who I am, what my story is. I mean, even back at Texas there was a guy that called me der yidishe goy, right, the Jewish goy or the Yiddish goy. You know. Kind of fits, I guess. (laughs) I don't know. But yeah, I mean, we just sort of talk about the language and that sort of thing and just whatever. I mean, kind of "life."

AB:I know you've also given some talks on the Milwaukee Jewish community.

ML:Yes. Yeah.

AB:Can you talk about that?

ML:Yeah. Milwaukee had a very large active Jewish -- Yiddish-speaking community. 38:00Golda Meir, for example, was one of the most famous daughters of the Yiddish-speaking community in Milwaukee. She's from -- grew up in Milwaukee, went to school there. The school that she attended is named after her. She went to college there. And then became a Yiddish-speaking Zionist there sort of on the left-of-center side of the political spectrum, which was how Milwaukee politics was generally, progressive politics. They had a Yiddish Folksbiene, a theater group, there for many years. One of the last actors from that group is in his nineties. He's in one of the Yiddish vinklekh, the Yiddish clubs that I network with there. There was also a Yiddish newspaper called the "Milvokhye vokhnblat [Milwaukee weekly]," which was got -- edited by a man named Isidor Horwitz. And there were dozens of Yiddish newspapers in the Midwest and certainly in New York and so forth. Each of these newspapers are just fascinating little windows on Jewish life and Milwaukee, or upper-Midwestern, life. So I've done a lot of research on the content of the "Vokhnblat" and then do outreach presentations on what the "Vokhnblat" contains.

AB:What do they contain?

ML:Articles about -- on really interesting topics that have to do with American life and the status of Jewish Americans in American life. The areas of greatest interest to me are the World War I era and then the years leading up to World War II. What's particularly fascinating is that you had, in the World War I era, a very strong noninterventionist, isolationist kind of mood in America generally. It's like, We don't want to get involved with this European mess. And American Jews being sensitive to that, but also realizing that Jews and their brothers and sisters, cousins, or whatever, were suffering, like a lot of people in Eastern Europe and the former Russian -- especially the former Russian Empire. And so there was this kind of thing, it's like, Well, we want to help them, and we want to kind of raise the consciousness about Jewish and non-Jewish suffering in Europe as a sideline of what was going on in World War I. So kind of reading about how there would be fundraisers and activities to try and raise 40:00the awareness and sympathy for war suffering and orphans and so forth in Eastern Europe before America actually entered the war in 1917. In the 1930s -- so there were the Hitler years, but before World War II -- what really is fascinating is that people -- there were all kinds of events like lecture tours and stuff sponsored by Jewish, non-Jewish groups, German-speaking groups that were politically progressive, labor groups and so forth, all kind of pulling together and saying, Hitler is bad news, so that people can't say, Oh, we didn't really know about -- the Holocaust didn't start until 1941. Nonsense. People knew that Hitler was bad news, not just for the Jews -- and that was clear early on -- but for a lot of people as well. And so what's -- say there were these long articles and talks and reports of lectures, public lectures, mainly, saying, "This man is trouble; this is not going to end well." And this is something where it's like, 41:00you may not get articles like this if you read the mainstream English-language press of the time, because a lot of those things could have been more conservative, could have been just a whiff of anti-Semitism, or just -- maybe just not an interest in reporting on Jewish or left-of-center, progressive political topics. But in newspapers like the "Vokhnblat," you got it. I mean, you -- and the "Forverts," for that matter too, if you're reading in New York. So it's these -- these are these little time capsules. No one is reading the "Vokhnblat" because a lot of people that are interested in, say, Jewish American history may not necessarily know Yiddish, right? Tony Michaels is an exception. But there are a lot of really important books and periodicals published in America for Americans that were in Yiddish. And you got to know Yiddish to be able to make sense of it. So that for me is just like -- it's like digging up these fascinating nuggets of archaeology. And they're just things that are lighter topics, so cultural themes, things that have to do with cultural contact and Americanization, assimilation, contact across ethnic lines -- so, say, 42:00Polish Catholics, German Lutherans, and Jews getting together at the gym to work out. You know, (laughs) stories like that. Very cool.

AB:Yeah. So this idea of these various ethnic groups in the upper Midwest coming together is really fascinating. Could you maybe elaborate more about that?

ML:Yeah. I mean, the proverbial melting pot or tossed salad is not only seen in big urban areas like, say, New York, but also in smaller communities across the country where it wasn't just a bunch of white-bread, English-speaking farmers and craftspeople. These little itty-bitty towns, if they had people coming from Central Europe or Eastern Europe, it was this huge spectrum from, say, Finnish speakers to French speakers to Yiddish speakers to African Americans who were moving up from the South. These little communities in medium-sized towns were 43:00these fascinating microcosms of American multiculturalism. And quite happily for our kind of documentation purposes, a lot of them had newspapers, very small local newspapers. And so we can read about these things. Because otherwise the stories, a lot of these stories, would get lost. Yeah, there's a certain amount of homogenization in these communities today, but not as much as a lot of people would think; especially if people don't know the upper Midwest well, they think it's just something that you fly over, and it's just a bunch of cheeseheads and white bread whatever. It's like, No, no, not at all. And this is what I discovered when I came to Texas too: it's not all cowboys. Or they say, Well, there are Hispanics there. It's like, it's much more than that. I mean, it's like all these European groups, these American Indian tribes that are still represented there, and fascinating cultural contacts across these lines. You know, just foodways are fascinating to observe. But on the specifically, say, Jewish front, you find, people are not assimilating. They're still preserving a 44:00Jewish identity and not being ashamed of it or feeling that there's particularly any sort of overt anti-Semitism, any more than there would be, say, anti-Catholicism in some communities or anti-new immigrant feelings or anti-Italian or -Irish feelings or something like that. I mean, the lines of ethnic division were pretty clearly drawn, so everybody kinda knew where they fit in, but they were all working together, interacting with one another. One of my favorite kinds of little microcosms is (UNCLEAR) a town called Manitowoc, Wisconsin, which is north of Milwaukee. And a couple that I know very well, sort of groupies that I know very well through Yiddish clubs and have now retired in Milwaukee, he was the first Jewish cop on the Manitowoc police force and became a deputy chief of police in Manitowoc. And there's a little itty-bitty Jewish community still today. They didn't have a shoykhet, a kosher butcher, in Manitowoc, so they go to Sheboygan, the big city (laughs), right, which had a larger -- actually had a couple of congregations there. And then his stories 45:00about what it was like to grow up Jewish in a neat little town that no one would ever associate with anything having to do with Jewishness or Yiddishkayt. And he spoke Yiddish, along with various other languages that he'd pick up along the way. And then he's a Harley rider. He's a Harley motorcycle rider. And he's now part of a group of older, Jewish men that are Harley riders. And you know the acronym HOG, Harley Operators' Group? They say, We're HOGs. Their symbol is a pig, right? And so their t-shirts say, This HOG is kosher. (laughs)

AB:That's wonderful.

ML:Yeah.

AB:So I guess to go talk more about sort of -- I'm wondering what -- sorry. I'm trying to collect my thoughts.

ML:That's fine.

AB:So teaching Yiddish, what do you think the place of Yiddish today is, both in universities and in the broader world?

ML:Well, there's no doubt that interest in Yiddish is growing, somewhere on the order of, like, eighty, ninety American colleges and universities that teach Yiddish, and then you could add in JCCs and community colleges and informal courses. I mean, Jewish is -- Yiddish is being taught all over the place, which is really cool. That's expanding, and I don't see any decline. What I see as a positive trend is it's not only a part of a Jewish studies curriculum, but it's part of broader curricula that deal with either European or American studies more broadly. And that I see as a really positive development. People are realizing that it's not just to learn Yiddish to learn -- to be able to read Yiddish literature and learn folksongs, that kind of thing, but to see it as part of a larger kind of offering or palette of courses that people take. And this parallels exactly the trends in foreign language study generally in this country. In the old days you'd study a foreign language to be able to read 47:00classical literature. That was it. So you'd start with Spanish 101 and end up with Cervantes, right? Start with German, end up with Goethe, (UNCLEAR), that sort of thing. And, you know, studies show that today that students -- that's not where their main interests lie in foreign language study. It's basically part of -- they're broadly interested in culture, right, and cultural difference, contact, that sort of thing. Literature is canonical. High literature is a part of that, but only one small part of it. And so the growth in interest in Yiddish I see as paralleling the trends generally in foreign language study, which is it's not so much about just learning the language qua language, but part of a larger kind of cultural interest. And this is where I see -- it's kind of a natural expansion that Yiddish would be appealing to non-Jewish students as well. So.

AB:You mentioned before that often, like, half the class comes from a German background. What draws them generally to Yiddish?

ML:I think -- good question. I'd say because of the very, very close relations between Jewish and German culture historically, you can't really understand German culture without understanding Jewish culture as well. It's just too much a part of German-speaking culture.

AB:Can you explain that more?

ML:People recognize that, say, like other Slavic cultures, Polish culture and so forth, Jews have been in these countries, and an important part of the cultural scene, especially since the Enlightenment, right? Since the Middle Ages. So in order to really -- I mean, it's like saying, "I'm going to study American culture, but I'm not gonna do anything that has to do with African Americans." You could do that. You could basically say, "My interest is in white history." 49:00But there's a lot you'd be missing, an awful lot. And it's not just because, you know, individual African Americans did some interesting things, but because cultures are all hybrid; they're all synthetic. They take certain elements from each other. And so German, Polish, Russian identity and especially folk cultural identity, like foods, music, literature, folklore -- these are all things that have drawn on Jewish culture as well. In the same way that German Jewish culture has a lot of things that we'd say are sort of more goyish German. Or in Poland the same way.

AB:Could you give a couple of examples of German culture or Polish culture that has Jewish influence?

ML:Folk music definitely. I mean, if you listen to, say, what you'd consider typical oompah bands or folk bands or polka bands or something like that, and 50:00then all of a sudden you just kind of -- if you're listening to the band, and you say, "Oh, it's a Polish band. Oh, it sounds Polish." And then someone were to say, "It's a Jewish band," and then you hear, like, a little bit of clarinet, a little bit of -- "Oh, yeah. Oh, I just have to switch it a little bit." Or if I throw a guitar in there, it's like, "Oh, wait, this sounds like Tex-Mex music." Well, it's no accident that basically folk music, musicians, were all coming from the same sort of stratum of society, which tended to be not people that were the highly paid, most respected. You throw in there Roma and Sinti, right, the so-called Romani people or ethnic gypsies. They were part of this multicultural mix too. Also very strongly represented in Central and Eastern Europe forever, as long as there have been these cultures. And so, again, these are cultural expressions that need to be understood. I'd say folk music is probably the most important way of representing it. But there are also, for example, a lot of expressions in German that are taken directly from Yiddish. So like, for example, "mishpokhe," word for "family." It means, like, the large, extended family. "Di gantse mishpokhe [The whole family]," kind of thing. 51:00"Shlemiel," "shlimazl." Those are German words too. "Chutzpah." Right? And these are things -- it's like clearly, you know, if Germans are using it, they had contact with people that were not, say, Christian Germans. And again, it's one of those things where it's like, you say, "There's more to just this history and culture than what I'm getting from the kind of sanitized textbook version."

AB:So what should be the place of Yiddish in the academy?

ML:Yiddish is one among many cool parts of a mosaic that deal with language and culture in a kind of European-American context, originally. And if you think about Yiddish being expanded to other parts of the world, like South Africa and South America and that sort of thing. But basically I think for anybody that's interested in understanding European or American culture, past and present, 52:00that's relevant. But especially because Yiddish is a language that is hybrid, is definitely -- represents the beauty of cultural human contact, like all languages do to some extent. But that's sort of fundamentally what Yiddish is -- we can learn so much about what it means for cultures to come into contact, and human beings from different cultures to come into contact with one another and influence one another. That's where I think it's -- that's a very cool kind of message about Yiddish.

AB:So what do you see as the future of Yiddish?

ML:The future of Yiddish is kind of twofold. The language will continue to grow as long as there are Hasidim. A lot of people on the sort of Yiddishkayt, Yiddishist side of things, will continue to ignore them (laughs) or just sort of overlook that. But as far as I'm concerned, that's cool (laughs), and it's also 53:00fascinating. And so it would be very interesting to see how Yiddish continues to develop with, as I say, a population whose numbers are doubling every twenty years. Average of six to seven children per Hasidic family, and a very, very high retention rate of Hasidic youth that are born into these families that stay Hasid, right? Upwards of ninety percent. So that's a reality right there, and all the cultural expressions that go with that. Secondarily I think that there's clearly a trend upward in terms of recognition that Yiddish is a real language, worthy of study; it's not just a collection of funny words in English or a funny Yinglish accent in English, that it's a language and a vehicle of culture that's worthy of study. The same way that Jewish studies is expanding in part of the academy, so will the academic side of Yiddish. But then when you have public outreach organizations that are growing, like Folksbienes and then -- just look at what the National Yiddish Book Center is doing, you know, in terms of saying, Let's just kind of disseminate the fruits of Yiddish past to the present, and then it takes a life of its own. Klezmer music, right? KlezKamp. You know there 54:00are more klezmer bands per capita in the country of Germany than anywhere else in the world, right? And it's almost like -- we talk of philo-Semitism in places. And, of course, there is a Jewish community that's being totally reborn in Germany because of all the Russian Jews that are moving there. So that's a kind of big thing. And then they're discovering Yiddish, or rediscovering Yiddish, or revivifying Yiddish. Poland, places like that. Somewhat different than what's going on in Germany, but it's like, you know, this is not going -- the clock's not going to be turned back now. And I think as long as there's that kind of recognition that Ashkenazic Jewish history is part of this important multicultural mosaic, so will the future of Yiddish on the academic side be very, very bright.

AB:I'm sure you've heard that people say there's a Yiddish revival that's began and still going on. What do you think about that statement?

ML:I think that on the one hand there's never been a loss or disappear-- there's always been people that have been interested in Yiddish. I don't really see it 55:00as a revival, because the language has declined among most secular Jews, a majority of Ashkenazic Jews in places like the United States and certainly in Israel, but among the Hasidim it's not a revival of anything; it's just a maintenance and a growth of something. I think where we can talk about a revival is more like a commodification of Yiddish, or a kind of popularization or commercialization of Yiddish. So people being more familiar with what Yiddish is, like on things like, you know, t-shirts and books about Yiddish -- I mean, there are these books about the language, you know, "How to Kvetch in Yiddish" -- I mean, these kinds of things. There's more sort of a pop cultural awareness of Yiddish in some ways. And that's I think less substantial in terms of a real revival than things like people just actually learning Yiddish -- or learning to play klezmer music, for that matter. This is where KlezKamp I think is such an important sort of thing that basically says, No, there's not one way to play 56:00klezmer music. It's like, you can have a lot of people -- Jewish, not Jewish, whatever -- their instruments. I heard some klezmer music recently with a Celtic harp. And it worked! It worked great. And so I think that's -- is it a revival? Kind of. Is it just like a new chapter in the fascinating story of Yiddish? Yeah. I think it's more like that. And I just only value that very positively.

AB:What do you think your role is as -- I guess I sort of asked this already, but as someone who teaches Yiddish, what do you see as your role?

ML:To make it as interesting and palatable as possible for people, obviously. That's the role of any teacher with their subject matter. To be passionate about it, which I am. To share that passion with others. To also realize that it's something to give them tools that they can take with them beyond the classes 57:00that are not just, like, How do I use this in the dative case in Yiddish, or what's the Yiddish word for "sink," or something? But it's really sort of like appreciating what Yiddish is and why is it fascinating and worthy of study.

AB:So I guess I have a couple more questions. What role do you think that academics play in the transmission of Yiddish?

ML:I think a very important one, because teaching a language is not anything that just people can do. I mean, you have to have a certain amount of -- and just like being a native speaker, for example, does not confer anybody the ability to teach a language. So there is a whole kind of science of language teaching, applied linguistics, that I think helps on the language side to really improve the delivery, like the materials that we prepare for students to make 58:00accessible and so forth. So having people that understand how language teaching, how language pedagogy, works, that's extremely important, and you just can't get that from saying, "Oh, I know some Yiddish, and I grew up with it, and I can teach it." That's one concrete aspect of it. And then again, on the non-language side, but things that have to do with, say, history and culture and music and so forth, the academic environment promotes an ethos or spirit of objectivity. So it's like we discover what's there, not what we want to be there. So there's a lot of mythologizing about things -- knowledge, languages, and so forth. Like, you know, "Yiddish is a bastard language," or "Yiddish is a dialect of German." "Yiddish is not a real language." "Yiddish is dying." These are all false -- these are real impressions, but they're actually false assessments, right? And 59:00this is where the academic kind of taking a step back and being objective sort of says, "No, no, no, it's a little bit different." But then it's one thing to sort of disseminate these ideas among scholars; it's another thing to bring it out to the general public. And this is where a lot of academics need to do a better job of getting out of the ivory tower.

AB:How do you think they should do that?

ML:Outreach presentations is one big thing. I think being able to do podcasts, for example -- just the information that you present on websites that are accessible to non-scholars as well as scholars -- I mean, definitely on the language side of things this is what we do quite a bit. Outreach to schools. I've been to both Jewish schools and to regular public schools and so forth, talking about Yiddish and other cultural themes, and it's really important for people with advanced levels of knowledge about subject matter to be able to make that knowledge accessible to non-specialists. It's very, very important. I mean, journalism too has got its place in writing articles. But I think actually the 60:00face-to-face contact in things like schools and community groups and historical societies and so forth, that's very important.

AB:So you've sort of touched on this, but what should be the place of Yiddish in the academy?

ML:A part of language offerings, cultural offerings, connected to Jewish studies but with significance that transcends narrowly defined Jewish studies.

AB:So we're nearing the end. Is there anything else that you would like to specifically touch on?

ML:I don't think so.

AB:Okay.

ML:I think that, you know, getting back to the academic question, a lot of what we -- you know, there's a mismatch in all aspects of knowledge between what specialists know and what the general public knows. Science is a really clear example of that. And on the one hand people that have the specialized knowledge 61:00can just say, Well, who cares what people think? That's not who I'm interacting with. But we should care. (laughs) And things like global warming or evolution or something, these are big questions that have a very clear kind of social public policy relevance. Clarifying that Yiddish is a real language and not just a dialect of German, that may not necessarily have big public policy implications -- but it does have some very important implications in terms of, like, understanding what it means to be Jewish, right? Or how languages work, or what does it mean when we say that languages are in contact with one another? And then raising the consciousness about how language and identity intersect with one another, that's kind of important, you know? And this is where we -- I think that academics can do some public good, right, by taking the fruits of our knowledge out to the general public, the curious general public.

AB:Though earlier you talked about the role of language for religious communities, but what is also the role of Yiddish and identity formation for 62:00secular -- anyone, Jews or non-Jews, who are learning it?

ML:Well, I think it's definitely the feeling of being connected to a heritage. Because even if you know a little bit of a language, you're in the club, to some extent. So it's like me with Yiddish. I don't -- I'm not Jewish, but I speak Yiddish. And I know enough about Jewish culture and have a married family connection, whatever, that it's like, Okay, I'm in (laughs) you know? And that feels good. I mean, it just -- you feel a kind of bond with people that language -- I mean, language really is this kind of social glue. That it doesn't make any difference what your particular heritage is in terms of bloodlines; it's like, Who do you identify with? And language is a really great way to make that -- to really be a part of a culture. I mean, I speak German too. I'm not German. And I don't want to be German. I'm happy who I am. (laughs) I don't even have any German background. But I like the feeling of connecting with other human beings 63:00in their own language. And I think that's what a lot of us -- that excitement that a lot of us have when we're doing something in another language. It really does open -- it's a portal to a different culture.

AB:So my last question is what advice for future generations of Yiddish students do you have?

ML:Um -- what advice? (laughs) Don't get put off by grammar and paradigms and tables and vocabularies and that kind of thing. Understand that -- you know, if you're coming from the background of English as your native language, there are enough basic structural similarities that it's not too hard to develop a really pretty good working proficiency of Yiddish in not too much time. So if people feel like it's really daunting or hard or anything like that, I think they should be reassured; it's not so difficult to learn and develop a basic level of 64:00proficiency. Stick with it. And then also just kind of the more you learn Yiddish, and the more that you learn about Yiddishkayt and Yiddish-speaking culture, the more you're gonna want to learn the language to a deeper extent. It just becomes more and more fascinating. The more you get into it, the cooler it becomes. (laughs) I mean, that's how it is for me too. It's not like, "Oh, it's kind of boring now; I don't find it as interesting." No. The more you get into it the more it really is just a fascinating portal on a culture. So.

AB:Great. Thank you very much.

ML:You're welcome.

[END OF INTERVIEW]