JOEL BERKOWITZ ORAL HISTORY

JESSICA PARKER:This is Jessica Parker, and today is December 17th, 2012. I am here at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference in Chicago, Illinois, with Joel Berkowitz, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Joel, do I have your permission to record this interview?

JOEL BERKOWITZ: Yes.

JP:Thank you. So, to begin, I'd like to ask a couple of background questions. Can you tell me briefly what you know about your family background?

JB:My father was born in the Soviet Union to Polish Jews who had fled in December of 1939 from the town of Jeleń. My grandfather had served in the 1:00Polish army and was familiar with a town on the -- I think it's been stationed -- in a town called Gomel on the Soviet side of the border. So, they made their way there. And my father was born not long after that. They got married on the way out of Poland. So, that's the very brief -- so Polish Jews on my father's side. And that's actually where -- because my father came to the States when he was about ten, and he was speaking Yiddish at home -- that was really my connection to Yiddish. On my mother's side, my mother's second-generation American-born, Philadelphia. And so, while her family came from various parts of Eastern Europe -- one set of grandparents from Vitebsk and another set of 2:00grandparents from -- one from Austria-Hungary, one from -- or one from Austria, one from Hungary -- there had been Yiddish, but it was attenuated by the time it got to my mother. So, my mother is not a Yiddish speaker. She -- over the years, when I started learning Yiddish, and I would say things to my father, then my mother would react. Whereas she passively learned a lot of Yiddish (laughs) sitting around the kitchen table when my father's family was around. But, you know, because of that -- even my mother's parents didn't really speak Yiddish. It was my mother's grandparents who did. So, I didn't -- I wasn't raised with any significant amount of Yiddish. It was kind of in the atmosphere, and at bigger family gatherings I would hear some, and I was very interested in my Jewish background and history from a pretty early age. So, that was kind of the 3:00seed that was planted, just not a lot of language was actually planted at that point.

JP:Was your family supportive of that interest as a kid?

JB:Uh, yeah. I can't say that I was necessa-- I think the main form it took as a kid -- you know, my father in particular just was fairly plugged in. I mean, because there's a kind of -- at least on the surface -- I mean, I told you both interesting stories, but it was a more kind of dramatic story, being refugees and all of that. So, that tended to be where a lot of the kind of drama of the family narrative was. And so, you know, I'm sure we had discussions about it over the years. I mean, I went to public schools, went to Hebrew school a few hours a week, and then continued in a, quote, unquote, Hebrew high school 4:00program -- this was in the suburbs of New York City -- after my bar mitzvah -- where a lot of my courses were various kinds of Jewish history courses, and I guess text courses, and some Hebrew too. And so, they were very supportive of that. And I think a lot of probably where my interest manifested itself was at -- when I went to Sunday school, I actually kind of wanted to learn something, unlike most of my classmates, (laughs) who were just -- I mean, it's not that I wasn't a bit jealous of my friends who were -- you know, after school didn't have to be in school a couple more hours. But I did want to learn things. In terms of the Holocaust experience, my -- actually, both of my grandmothers are still alive. And my father's father died when I was only eight. So, I never really had a chance to talk to him much. I was certainly given the message growing up, one way or another -- which I'm sure was accurate -- that my 5:00grandmother wasn't very comfortable speaking about her wartime experiences. But that changed over time, and I remember a certain point -- I mean, she's now in her mid-nineties, biz hundert un tsvantsik, keynehore [may she live to 120, no evil eye] -- but maybe twenty years ago, when -- you know, her attitude, like a lot of older people going through those experiences, realized that she had a story to tell. And then, I started asking her questions because she was starting to open up in other ways. And then, she was saying to me, "I didn't know you were interested." And I was like, "Well, I was told that I shouldn't (laughs) ask you." So, that piece of it was something that was -- and again, that's a fairly widespread phenomenon -- but something that was -- I was kind of deliberately hands-off because I didn't want to stir up disturbing memories. And so, that's -- you know, obviously those aren't easy things for her to talk about, but she does talk about them now.

JP:Great. Would you say you grew up in a Jewish home?

JB:I did. We belonged to a Conservative synagogue. And we went reasonably regularly. And my father's a physician, so during the week, I didn't necessarily see him for dinner. On Shabbos, we made a point of waiting -- like, no matter how long -- it was kind of a family joke that he would say, "I'll be home at six." I don't know why he bothered after years and years. But he would still say that. And then, it was often seven or eight or sometimes later. But on Shabbos, we really made a point of sitting down together. And that was very important. It was powerful just to have that. So, that was in brief the kind of fa-- but very 7:00strong sense of our Jewishness. And we lived in a very Jewish part of the world, and so that was a --

JP:Which part was that?

JB:In Westchester County, in New York, for the most part. My dad was in the Air Force when I was little, so we were actually all over the place until I was about six. But then settled in Westchester. And so -- you know, in an environment where there were a lot of Jewish things going on. But I certainly had a strong sense of myself as a Jew that was -- you know, partly religious, but very much -- I mean, I think the kind of -- I didn't know that I wanted to be a college professor when I was a kid. Maybe -- I guess kids don't say they're gonna be college professors, do they? But -- so maybe it was an astronaut or a fireman or whatever it was that week. But there definitely was a kind of academic interest in a lot of things, and particularly things like literature 8:00and history. And probably I didn't realize it so much, but I think my -- the Jewish piece of that was there too, in those interests. It wasn't like everything I was reading was Jewish-related by any means. But certainly just an interest in those kinds of subjects that would eventually really dovetail professionally in -- with the things I was doing as a researcher.

JP:I'm wondering -- I mean, you mentioned that Westchester County was a very Jewish area. Are you able to describe the neighborhood a bit to me, and what it was like when you were growing up there?

JB:Well, it was a -- different neighborhoods. The place that I consider really my hometown wasn't my hometown until I was twelve. It was -- in brief, I was born in Philadelphia, actually, but we left when I was three. My father had 9:00positions at a couple places in the South, in Virginia and then in Mississippi. And then we shipped off to Ankara, Turkey, for six months, when I was four. And -- which I wish I could say I remembered well, but I don't really. Then we were in -- near an Air Force base in Mons, in Belgium, for a year and a half. And I have some memories of that. And I guess that's when I -- you know, I also, at the time very grudgingly, was learning some French. I later very happily studied French in school, but at the time, my parents told me stories about my really not -- being very resentful that I was being forced to learn this other language. But -- so that neighborhood was, like, near a cow pasture, with a lake nearby. But then, we were in a couple different places in Westchester. 10:00Ultimately settled in Mamaroneck. And we were -- I mean, in a way it wasn't really a neighborhood the way one thinks of it. I mean, we had -- the houses were -- in our particular part of town -- were fairly far apart. There weren't a lot of homes on our street. I did have friends on the street, and there were a bunch of kids around the same age who played together. But it's not -- you know, it's not like a scene out of Henry Roth or something, where you have all these sort of picturesque -- I mean, I guess there were kind of ballgames in the street or people's backyards and things like that. But a very suburban area, that particular part of town.

JP:Great. I want to sort of jump back to -- you mentioned you went to a Jewish sort of high school program.

JB:Um-hm.

JP:Are you able to tell me a bit more about that? What was it called; what did you do?

JB:It was Temple Israel, in White Plains, New York, which I'm pretty sure was 11:00also a Conservative shul. If you wanted to do a program like that, I think that was, if not the only one in the area, the only one I can recall. There was a lot of -- so people from various towns around that area went there. And so, I guess I was there from -- I think it was eighth to eleventh grade. And I remember when I started, in my first year, I was taking Hebrew -- and it met on Wednesday, either afternoons or evenings and Sunday mornings, and I think it was about six hours altogether. And so, initially, I think about three of those hours or two and a half or something were Hebrew. And then, there were other kind of Jewish Studies courses of different sorts. At some point, I think by the end of my first year I thought -- you know, the Hebrew piece -- not because of anything 12:00the teachers were doing or weren't doing -- was very unsatisfying, just because there was such limited time. And I thought, I know I want to learn Hebrew better at some point -- and I had this sort of foundation, the rudiments from Hebrew school -- I know I want to learn it a lot better. But at that point -- I'm not making a lot of progress now; I would like to spend some time in Israel at some point or take more intensive courses. And I sort of set that aside and thought, If I take a course, let's say, on the Crusades or on anti-Semitism or on Tanakh or something, I feel like that will stick with me more. And so, I sort of tended to take content courses rather than the language piece of it at that point, just because I felt like I -- more could happen in a limited time. And I remember having some really, really good teachers, actually. I remember some teachers' 13:00names. And I remember them just being very knowledgeable, very serious, very nurturing. So, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

JP:So, how did your education continue on from there? What was the trajectory?

JB:So, I went to University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate. And I think I knew probably by ninth grade that I would be an English major. I didn't know what I wanted to do professionally, but I loved literature. And I realized -- fortunately, pretty early on -- that for just about anything you wanted to do professionally that you could major in whatever you wanted. I actually still wish that more students realized that. I think they think -- and I did often get the classic English major's "What are you going to do with that?" question from a lot of parents who thought, That's not terribly practical. Which I just didn't 14:00agree with. And so, I was an English major. Initially with -- at Penn at that time, you had to pick sort of a concentration within the major, and there were various options. And I initially was taking the sort of fiction track. So, a certain number of my courses over the course of my undergraduate studies would need to be in fiction, which was fine with me. And then, there were certain other core requirements and things like that. I spent a semester of my junior year in London and took a -- I guess I would say that one of my formative experiences was a course I took -- it was at King's College, London, where Penn had a program. And there's a theater critic there named Benedict Nightingale, who's pretty well known. And he taught this theater seminar which consisted of 15:00figuring out each week -- he said, Okay, this coming week you go to such-and-such a play, and we kept a journal, and we got back together the following week and talked about it, and at a certain point also had a tour of the inner reaches of the National Theatre, where I had spent a lot of time by that point. And I remember very distinctly -- in fact, I can tell you that I was sitting in the National Theatre. So this -- I'm about, what? About nineteen or so. And I was watching a Restoration comedy, "Love for Love," that Tim Curry was in and enjoying it quite a bit. But also having this thought, having seen "Phèdre" with Glenda Jackson one week and having seen "The Duchess of Malfi" with Ian McKellen another week, and so seeing things from very different periods -- and I remember sitting there thinking, Other than a little bit that I know 16:00about the Elizabethan era, a tiny bit that I've learned about the Greeks, if I see something like a Restoration comedy, I've no idea of the cultural context that it comes out of. So, I can enjoy this play, but there was a piece of me that knew that I was missing something as a student. As entertainment this was fine, but there was a piece of me that was hungry to know something about, Why is this being written in this particular style, when Shakespeare a few decades earlier is writing in a very different way? And felt very hungry to learn something about that. So, finished my semester in London, went back to Penn. There were three very interesting looking -- at least three -- but there were three courses that I went to check out on drama and theater. One was the later plays of Shakespeare, one was the Elizabethans and Jacobeans other than 17:00Shakespeare, and one was a course in political drama. It was like a unit on the Greeks and a unit on the Elizabethans and a unit in the -- in modern times. And I thought, Great. I want to take at least -- I just want to take a couple of these. After I sat in on one session of each, I couldn't bring myself to drop any of them. So, I just stayed in them. And then, immediately shifted the focus of my major towards drama rather than fiction. And I still took fiction courses. But I just got very interested in dramatic literature -- which I always had some interest in, and I had done some school theater and things like that. So, I enjoyed -- that was another piece of it that felt like I had some kind of entry point as someone who had -- you know, nothing special, but had performed, like millions of us do, in various kinds of plays. And so that was the beginning of really focusing on theater and drama as opposed to other areas of literature.

JP:Did you have any mentors who were especially helpful or supportive in this journey?

JB:Uh, yes. As I said, Benedict Nightingale was a wonderful teacher and incredibly knowledgeable and a wonderful writer. And again, I was blessed with a number of really outstanding teachers at Penn. Those three that semester -- there was a -- the Shakespearean professor was a guy named Robert Turner. Rebecca Bushnell, who -- I'm not sure if she's still dean of arts and sciences at Penn, but she was dean for some time, taught this political theater course. It was fantastic. And Cary Mazer was the teacher of this Elizabethan and Jacobean course. And Cary actually had his theater degree from Columbia. So, 19:00that was -- that ended up being quite important. First of all, in the classroom -- and I ended up taking a couple of other courses with him. It was important because he was bringing a sensibility as a teacher that wasn't just about the text. With all due respect to my other teachers, who were wonderful and really helped me understand a dramatic text and taught me many other things. But Cary would get scenes up on their feet and would -- you know, as a student, you're thinking, Oh, okay, I'm thinking about who's actually onstage at this moment, and who just left, and who's hiding and other things that are going on, as a work of theater. And so -- again, while that's something I was somewhat aware of, that was a perspective that he enhanced significantly and that also -- 20:00again, right before I really realized it -- was sort of shifting my focus from a sort of text focus to something that was -- it was the text, but it was also a lot of other things. It was really the performance that was every bit as important as the text. Or, depending on the text, sometimes more important, I suppose.

JP:So, in amidst all of this, where did Yiddish and Yiddish theater arise for you?

JB:So, Yiddish was not -- actually, Yiddish was -- it was taught at Penn, and I was interested in taking it, and I simply never saw a way to fit it into my schedule. I actually continued with some French that I was learning in high school. And I sort of wanted to take Yiddish, but it just conflicted with other things that I wanted to do, so I never did it while I was an undergraduate. 21:00Getting towards the end of my undergraduate days, coming back to that "What are you going to do with it?" question, I actually applied to law school, like a lot of English majors, and I actually went to law school for a year. Because I -- I think I wasn't as imaginative, I suppose, as I wish that I had been. Not -- I don't have any regrets, but I -- if I had been a bit more daring or had asked different kinds of questions, I might have taken a different route. I ended up seeing that year in law school as an extension of my liberal arts education, and I'm very glad that I had it. But I went with a great sense of ambivalence, because I sort of realized, after I was getting accepted at good schools, that, you know, I've enjoyed college more every single semester that I've been here, and I think I'm kind of getting the hang of this whole thing. And I -- in terms 22:00of things like taking courses for the professor rather than for the content and things like that, that I'd become more savvy, and I thought, You know, I haven't really thought about extending this and just staying on a college campus for the rest of my life. In fact, I called Cary up in a bit of a panic and had some discussions with him about thinking about graduate school and thinking about a career in academia, which I really knew nothing about at that point. But I ended up going off to law school for a year, finding things about it that I did like, but it definitely wasn't for me. And so, in the middle of the year -- I did stay on to finish the year, but I started applying to graduate schools. And I applied to theater programs, and a lot of that was Cary's influence also. I could've applied to English programs too, and I thought about it. But I liked that approach of sort of integrating all of these pieces of theater, of studying dramatic literature, theater history, criticism and theory, and other things, 23:00and all the things that theater brought together. So, applied to a bunch of places, ended up going to CUNY, the City University of New York, the Graduate Center. And so, I transitioned from that year in law school to going off to the Graduate Center the next year. Yiddish still wasn't really on the radar academically. At some point during the year, my father actually stumbled across a brochure on the bulletin board at the synagogue where he'd been going. The rabbi there later joked that it might have been the first time in the history of the synagogue that someone actually made use of something on the bulletin board. But it was a brochure for the Oxford Yiddish summer program, which was thriving at the time. It was a one-month intensive program in Yiddish. And at that point I thought, A-ha. This is the opportunity to begin to learn Yiddish. I didn't 24:00have any long-term plan for it. I had no idea, really -- I was taking my first year of courses in theater, which was really a boot camp. In a way, it was almost like law school all over again in terms of the intensity. And I was just learning vastly new things every single week. But it was an opportunity to just go and spend some time studying Yiddish, and so I went off. And was absolutely bitten by the bug. It did something to me. My teachers were a guy named Johannes Brosi and Dov-Ber Kerler, who -- Dov-Ber is now at Indiana. He would later be my colleague at Oxford for several years. And they were both excellent. Dov-Ber taught us a lot while also making us laugh till it hurt. I mean, it literally was painful much of the time. But it didn't get in the way of learning. And we 25:00learned a huge amount. It was a very well-run program. And it just -- I was absolutely -- it was really like being in love. And that sounds very corny, but intellectually, and in -- more than intellectually -- it was some kind of -- I would say almost a kind of Jungian -- it felt at the time like a sort of Jungian connection to something that I tapped into that was connecting to my ancestry. And I felt very emotionally invested in it right away. And I knew that I wanted to continue. I didn't know at the time -- I don't think it crossed my mind -- that I could have an academic career doing this, because it was all so new. I barely -- you know, I could talk about the weather or things like that, but I 26:00didn't have any reading knowledge to speak of or anything like that. But I knew I wanted to continue. So, I went back to New York, continue -- I was a full-time graduate student. But found courses -- I took a conversation course with Pesakh Fiszman at the Workmen's Circle, at the Arbeter Ring. And just sort of kept up some of what I had and learned a bit more. And then, did the YIVO summer program the following summer. So, I did the intermediate program at YIVO, and -- after that, when I studied with Ellie Kellman and Avrom Novershtern and Sheva Zucker -- by the end of that summer, I was also most of the way through my graduate coursework by that point. And now, after the intermediate program, I had something of a serious foundation. And then, the thought occurred to me, You know, if I did some more courses during the fall and coming year and the YIVO 27:00program again next summer, I think I could actually kind of get up to speed and be able to go off to the archives and the library and be reading primary and secondary materials in Yiddish and actually do serious work on it. I talked to professors at the Graduate Center who were -- who did very serious work in languages of which they were not native speakers. So, my supervisor, Marvin Carlson, reads a ton of languages, so I talked to Marvin. Dan Gerould, who passed away not long ago, who's a wonderful scholar of Polish and other Eastern European theater, particularly Polish theater, and translator of Polish drama. Harry Carlson, no relation to Marvin, who's a translator of Strindberg. So, you know, I was -- really didn't have a sense -- I thought, Does it sound like I'm well-positioned to actually do this? And they were all very encouraging. And so, 28:00finally, that third summer of doing Yiddish was expressly for the purpose of getting my Yiddish to be good enough to do dissertation research in it.

JP:Wow. That's quite the journey.

JB:Yeah.

JP:So, I'm trying to think of the next question, 'cause you covered so much ground there. I mean, I know this is jumping ahead a bit, but I was wondering -- you were in Jerusalem for your post-doc at the Hebrew University in the mid-1990s.

JB:Um-hm.

JP:Were you engaged in the Yiddish scene there? What was that like for you?

JB:So, I -- yeah. I finished my dissertation and defended it in the winter of 1995. The job market was, and still is, tight, so I was I guess keeping my eye 29:00out for jobs, but also applying for fellowships. And it was very -- so I articulated a project that would involve archival research in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. I had the support of Avrom Novershtern, who had been my teacher by this point for two summers at YIVO. And so, I was very fortunate to get a Fulbright to be a post-doctoral fellow at Hebrew University. And so, Avram was my mentor there. And so, Avram and I met quite frequently. We had lunch together a lot. During that year, not really part of what I had proposed for my Fulbright, but I was commissioned to do a translation -- just a literal translation -- of Yud Lamed Peretz's play "Bay nakht afn altn mark," "A Night in the Old Marketplace," 30:00from 1907 or so, and that -- this crazy, unwieldy, dramatic poem that some people wanted to turn into a work of contemporary theater. So, it ended up -- that became an addition to what I was already doing, and I was often bringing things to Avram and saying, What on earth is Peretz doing here? Or, you know, I understand the words here, but I don't really -- I can't figure out -- am I getting this right? So, there was a lot of that and discussions about many other things. I actually reconnected with Dov-Ber Kerler, my teacher from the Oxford Yiddish summer program, who was on sabbatical in Jerusalem that summer. And Dov-Ber is pretty hard to miss, so I -- I think I actually ran into him at the theater one night. And we ended up seeing a lot of each other, also, that year. And then, at the end of the year he said to me, You know, there's gonna be a job 31:00opening at Oxford that's gonna be announced next fall, and you should apply. And then he ended up calling me and faxing me the application a few months later. And I wish that I -- I mean, I met other people involved in Yiddish at the time. If I had it to do over again, I think I would have gotten out of the library more and into just the sort of yidishe krayzn [Yiddish circles] and things like that. There were some things going on there that I didn't take as much advantage of as I would've liked. But I also -- there were many other things going on there. I made a circle of friends, some of whom I end up seeing at AJS most years. I was studying Hebrew intensively, finally, after those years of -- I mean, I had taken some other Hebrew since then. But I went early, earlier than I 32:00needed to be as part of the grant, and took the summer ulpan at Hebrew University and then continued taking courses throughout the year so that my Hebrew could finally come closer to where I wanted it to be as well. So, it was important in terms of that, too. And I was sitting in on lectures at the university as well and just going to things. I mean, the tremendous number of activities and resources that were going on in Jerusalem.

JP:Just out of curiosity -- I mean, you mentioned having intensively studied Yiddish and then Hebrew. Do you use the two languages differently? Do they feel different to you and meet different needs for you?

JB:Yes. I mean, first of all, my Hebrew's not as good as my Yiddish. So, right there, there's a difference. I suppose even going to when my Yiddish was fairly 33:00rudimentary, Hebrew never hit me in the same way. And I guess you could say if I was really a dyed-in-the-wool Jungian, which I can't say that I was, that I would have tapped into a deeper well of the sort of Jewish collective unconscious or something, and I would have been just as smitten by Hebrew, as I know many friends and colleagues are. And I love Hebrew, and I've loved learning Hebrew and continue to. But I think it was largely a product of just the situations in which I was learning things. And just -- I don't know, the stars aligned in a certain way. I don't have a fancy explanation for this. But that -- while I very much enjoyed learning Hebrew, it -- I've never had quite the same relationship to it. And I think also I suppose that -- maybe not at the very 34:00beginning of learning these languages, but at some point along the way -- I had to have an awareness that the life that my ancestors, that my grandparents, their parents, et cetera, were living in Eastern Europe was not a life that was lived -- on a daily basis, day in, day out -- in Hebrew. Obviously Hebrew would've been important to them in various ways. But Yiddish was their mame-loshn [mother tongue]. And I was conscious of that from the very beginning. And I think that was always sort of part of my connection to Yiddish, that there was something that I was maybe engaging in some kind of a conversation with people who came before me, many of whom, although -- I wasn't born until the 1960s, so it's not as if I experienced this rupture as a child. But I think as 35:00soon as I started to become aware that I had family who perished in the ghettos and the camps and in other ways that -- I guess you could say that I missed them, in a way. I wish I knew them. And this was partly -- it was partly, I guess, a tribute to them. Or it was partly -- you know, that people call Yiddish also "loshn-kdoyshim [the language of martyrs]," punning on "loshn-koydesh," the holy tongue, that is, Hebrew and Aramaic, as opposed to "mame-loshn," that is, the mother tongue that's Yiddish. And after the Shoah some people referred to Yiddish as "loshn-kdoyshim," the language of the martyrs, because most of those who were murdered by the Nazis were Yiddish speakers. And so, just on a familial level, as well as the larger sort of peoplehood and human level, I would hear about this great-uncle or that great-aunt, and thought, I wish I knew them. And 36:00not that I was learning Yiddish so I could go to a séance and channel them or something, but there was some sort of relationship there; there was some kind of sense of continuity that accounts for at least some -- a little bit of that difference. And then, as a scholar, while I do use Hebrew sources, the vast majority of my sources are in Yiddish for the work that I do.

JP:So, in response to that, how did you come to the specific research topics that you have worked on, predominantly around Yiddish and Yiddish theater?

JB:So, after that third summer at YIVO when my Yiddish was indeed good enough to go off and -- initially it was not -- you know, it was rather slow going to start reading plays and -- but, I mean, newspaper articles and things were a bit 37:00easier. But I was able to read things, and I was getting faster and using the dictionary a bit less each time. And I started exploring for a dissertation topic in Yiddish theater with the blessing of my teachers, none of whom were Jewish, none of whom -- of my main teachers at the Graduate Center -- none of whom knew very much about Yiddish theater and culture. But all of whom were very nurturing. One of the most amazing moments was -- I had a teacher named Walter Meserve, who was kind of a walking encyclopedia of American theater history, a tremendous knowledge of the subject. And Walter's agenda as a mentor of graduate students was really very simple. It was he wanted to make whatever contribution 38:00he could and have his graduate students make a contribution to telling the overall picture of the American theater. So, anything that made a contribution to that really had his blessing. And so, whether it was going off and -- like, one of my classmates doing history of troupes in upstate New York -- not Yiddish troupes, but English-language troupes -- or working on women theater managers or whatever it might be, each of us was sort of putting another brick in that wall and adding to the knowledge of American theater. So, I remember the day when I went into Walter's office and was saying to him -- I didn't have a specific topic in mind yet but had said, "What do you think of my doing a project on American Yiddish theater, and would you be happy to be involved?" And he was so enthusiastic about it. And Walter comes from Maine, and has this very thick 39:00Maine accent -- which I will not try to mimic here, 'cause I'll kill it. But he was so enthusiastic about this -- that it was going to make one of those contributions. So, I knew at that point and from talking to other teachers that I wanted to do something on American Yiddish theater. It was a matter then of finding what the topic would be. And I started looking at various things and then thinking, Oh, I got a great idea! Oh no, someone actually did this already. And it was -- I was sitting in on a Shakespeare seminar, just for fun. I was done with my coursework at this point. There was a teacher in the English department that I wanted to take a class with. And he asked us at the beginning of the semester to -- our homework assignment for week two was simply to write on an index card why we were in the class, what brought us to that particular 40:00seminar. And there was something about him asking that question at that point -- it's not as if I went there to help with my understanding of Yiddish theater, but something about it just sort of triggered this light bulb, and I thought, What about Shakespeare in Yiddish? Could that be a topic? And I didn't know. I knew of some examples. And then, it's the job of the graduate student at that point to go out and see whether this is feasible, whether it's been done before, whether it can be done and all of that, and whether it's a suitable topic for a dissertation. And after some months of looking around and finding what I could, I put together a proposal, and that became my doctoral dissertation, which I then revised for my first book. So -- and it was a way to try to -- well, I didn't ultimate-- initially think I was gonna be doing this. I initially thought, I think, I was gonna be laying out, Okay, here are five different 41:00versions of "Romeo and Juliet"; see how they compare. And I did a certain amount of that. But also found at least in some cases was able to find enough material from the time to try to reconstruct what some of these productions were like and how people were reacting to them. So, that was my first big project.

JP:Wow. Can we stop for one sec? [41:27]

JB:Sure.

JP:Your microphone cord seems to have migrated down.

JB:Oh, okay.

JP:So, I might have to clip. I just want to put it back up. (scratching sound) (off-mic) Sorry?]. [Adjusted a?] little bit.

JB:Okay.

JP:'Cause it was actually behind you.

JB:Oh.

JP:I'm not really sure how it --

JB:Okay. Too many gestures.

JP:No, I don't think -- (Berkowitz laughs) [like, it just?] -- these things slide.

JB:Okay.

JP:[Sorry?]. It's just visually better [if?] it's not sort of --

JB:Okay.

JP:Okay. Thank you for bearing with me.

JB:Sure.

JP:You have some great stories.

JB:Thanks.

JP:And you're a good storyteller.

JB:Oh, thank you.

JP:Which, I mean, might to some extent to the fact that you're in theater.

JB:Yeah, maybe.

JP:Okay. These clips are very tough. Okay. Great. Thank you. So, to jump ahead a bit, you're a professor now and have been a program chair or department chair for quite some time. I wanted to ask about the challenges, pressures, delights of teaching Jewish Studies and Yiddish Studies at the university level.

JB:Um-hm. When I was -- the end of my Fulbright and looking for jobs, I was mostly applying for jobs in theater. And I remember -- and I should mention one of my other most important mentors from graduate school, a woman named Judy 42:00Milhous, who's a scholar of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater, who was also -- she was on my committee. And actually, I should say that to bring in a Yiddishist on my committee when I put it together, I turned to Nahma Sandrow, who's very well-known historian of Yiddish theater and a fine translator of Yiddish plays. I didn't know Nahma before I asked her to be on my committee, but she was actually in the CUNY system as it happened. And -- actually, I think I think we had met briefly before that. And so, I asked her to join the committee, and she graciously accepted. And so, she was the one who could sort of keep me honest on the Yiddish side of things while my other professors just sort of generally were making sure that this was a rigorous work of scholarship. And so, I was -- it was Judy who -- Judy was very pragmatic and often -- she was the one 43:00who, more than anyone during graduate school, who would sort of teach us about the profession. Like, This is how it works, folks, and this is what you do, and this is what you don't do, and here's a horror story for you, and never do anything like this, and -- or, This is the kind of thing you can get into, and this is how to put yourself forward. And when I went to Judy to say, "I'd like to do something on Yiddish theater, and would you be on my committee?" she also was supportive, but warned me not to pigeonhole myself as the Yiddish theater guy when I was applying to theater jobs. Which I think I knew. And I thought that was -- I was going to make it clear to prospective employers that I was getting this broad training in theater, and that was partly why I went to the Graduate Center in the first place. But -- so I was applying mostly to theater jobs, not always getting any offers. And then, coming back to Dov-Ber's comment 44:00that there's gonna be a job open in Oxford. He faxed me this, and I thought, Well, I'm not trained in Yiddish Studies; I know people who are who are probably applying for this job. But what the hell? It's gonna cost me a postage stamp to England, and I'll let them know I'm alive and that sort of thing. So, I sent it off. And long story short, was flown out there, interviewed for the position, got the job. And so, my first position, which I held for four years, was teaching Yiddish literature at Oxford. And I bring all that up in answer to your question because for me -- now, I always knew being -- if I was gonna be a scholar of Yiddish theater -- in a way, my model as a potential teacher, as 45:00distant from what I was doing as it might sound, was really Judy, who was doing Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and theater. Given that that's not what most people immediately want to learn when they go into a theater program, she didn't necessarily teach in her specialty all that often. Although she did from time to time. But she needed to cover the basic courses that were being covered, and they were much more general than her subject. You know, if she had been a Shakespearean or working on twentieth-century theater or something, then there might have been more opportunity that was sort of in the mainstream of the curriculum. So, I sort of looked at Judy and thought, Okay, I'm perfectly happy to be that sort of creature. I will go into the classroom, and I'll teach my theater history from the Greeks to the Renaissance and then theater history from the Renaissance to the present, and I'll teach dramatic literature and those sorts of things very happily, and then I'll go off to the library and the archive, and I'll dig through the Yiddish materials, and I'll write my articles 46:00and books. So, that's really where I saw myself. If I had gotten the first job in theater instead of in Yiddish Studies, I expect that that would to some extent have changed -- you know, it just changes what's on your radar day in, day out. You know, you're immersed -- and so -- and also, I did not have broad training in Jewish Studies. I was coming to this as an outsider -- as many people do. It's not that unusual. But it wasn't as if I had taken a bunch of seminars in Jewish history and Jewish texts and that sort of thing. I was teaching myself American Jewish history while I was doing my dissertation. I was reading everything I could get my hands on, particularly about Jews in places like New York and Yiddish culture in big cities and that sort of thing. And so, 47:00becoming a teacher first of Yiddish Studies and then, after four years in Oxford, I went to University at Albany, in New York, part of the SUNY system, as a Jewish Studies job more broadly. Again, I was teaching myself a lot of -- Okay, I have to teach the theater -- I mean -- "theater" -- the Jewish Studies survey, and so I need to be at least a couple steps ahead of my students, and I need to learn all of these things. So, that put Yiddish theater for me in the context of Jewish history, of Jewish literature, of other areas of Jewish Studies. And that brought me to things like the AJS Conference, which I tend to go to more than some of the theater conferences. If I had all the time in the world, I'd go equally to both. But it positions my work that way, and it makes me think as a teacher -- again, not that I usually teach things on Yiddish theater and drama. I occasionally do. But I do bring them into other courses. 48:00And sometimes I will specifically -- I'll think, Okay, I'm teaching something about the Haskalah, about the Jewish Enlightenment. Here's a wonderful text, a dramatic text, that illustrates some of the points of the Haskalah really beautifully. There is no translation of it, so I'll do it. And I'll bring it to my students. And some of that then -- I published a book called "Landmark Yiddish Plays" that was a book of translations of Yiddish plays that I did with Jeremy Dauber, who teaches at Columbia. Jeremy and I became friendly when he was a doctoral student at Oxford. And Jeremy approached me to say, "Do you want to try translating some plays together?" And so, we started this project that we chipped away at over a number of years. And so, that was an example of a kind of cross-pollination of things that I was using in the classroom. And in some ways, I can't remember really even what was the chicken and what was the egg. You 49:00know, did I translate a scene for the class, and then it goes into something that becomes a book? Certainly, once the book was available, then I could either -- I mean, if the course justified it, I could assign the book, or I could assign parts of it, or photocopy a scene or something and say, Okay, let's do this scene, and then talk about how this illustrates the Haskalah or Jews in a shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community] in 1900 or whatever the topic might be.

JP:I mean, you mentioned this ongoing work that I'm sure -- I mean, some teachers do, but a lot don't. You're preparing translations for your students as an additional level of engagement. Are there specific challenges to translating dramatic works?

JB:Yes. A lot. And I had a number of teachers in graduate school who were translators. My teacher Marion Holt was and is a translator of Spanish drama. 50:00And I had conversations with Marion -- it was before -- I mean, I guess I was getting involved in Yiddish. I wasn't thinking actively, I don't think. I shouldn't say that. Maybe I was starting to even sort of try to translate some things from Yiddish drama. But I remember conversations with Marion where he would say -- you know, particularly when he was starting out, and hardly anyone in the US was teaching Spanish theater and drama in English translation, it was he and one or two other people who started translating particularly of the twentieth-century people -- maybe other than Lorca, who maybe would get more attention, but some other important people who weren't really known -- and Marion would look at this playwright and think, Well, I really want to teach it in this class that's in English translation. No one else is gonna do it, so I better roll up my sleeves and make this translation available for my students. And then he would publish those things, and they'd get produced, and that sort of thing. So, that was also one of the kind of models that I had. So, when 51:00Jeremy approached me to start this project, he had a particular play in mind, a play called "Leichtsinn und Frömmelei [German: Carelessness and False Piety]," from the 1790s, by a Haskalah writer, Aaron Halle-Wolffssohn, who was one of the people Jeremy was working on for his doctorate. So, we pulled out this play, and we started assigning each other scenes. And the challenges -- I mean, a lot of the challenge of translating a play are -- I think are common to just translating other things. But certainly as a -- when it became pretty clear that this was a project that we wanted to stick with and that we wanted to publish these things, and ideally, that we would also make them available for people to 52:00put -- to get on their feet and produce -- we found ourselves trying to straddle this line between our responsibility as sort of teachers and scholars of the material that made us fairly conservative as translators, because we don't want to run off and sort of do our own thing with it. We certainly very much had the feeling that we don't want the reader or the actor to look at this and go, Okay, this -- I can really see the translator's hand here very actively. We felt that the best translation would be that we're really kind of -- I mean, we did put our name on it, so I can't say we're anonymous, but that we wanted to be in the background and let the words do their own work. But that is a very subjective matter, and I have not reached a definitive -- I don't have any kind of formula as to how you do that. And I've also over the years -- and I continue to do 53:00other translation projects -- over the years, I've become gradually less conservative. And I did a -- we did a stage reading in Milwaukee last year of a play that I've translated, a play by the wonderful poet Kadia Molodowsky, who's well known as a poet -- less known as a dramatist, because that was really secondary to her poetry, but she wrote several plays, and she wrote this play, "Nokhn got fun midber," "After the God of the Desert," shortly after the Shoah, and it was published, and it's quite a beautiful historical drama. And working on it with some actors -- it wasn't a full-scale production, but we did a couple of public readings of it -- a lot of conversations with the actors, who were very astute and very thoughtful and asked a lot of wonderful questions and made great observations. And each time I do that, I think I feel a little bit more -- again, it's not like I want to run off and do my own version of what Molodowsky 54:00did and make it something very different. But it makes me feel a little bit freer to say, You know what? With all due respect to Kadia Molodowsky, whom I love, this speech goes on a little bit too long, and I'll cut a few lines. And I'll make it clear what I'm doing, either in an introduction, or maybe I'll put them in the footnote or something like that. But I want this to be something that's gonna be lively. I want something that actors can actually say. I want this -- something to -- but something that also, if students are reading in the classroom, that they're gonna have a reasonably good sense of -- to the extent that a translation can do this -- of what Molodowsky was doing, also.

JP:So, it's clear to me that you're active in many different worlds, I mean, as a professor, but also ongoingly involved in the theater world, as well as more informal education. I know you've mentioned lecturing or teaching at senior citizen centers. So, I'm curious as to what role you feel academics play or 55:00don't play in the transmission of culture.

JB:Well, they play lots of different roles, and I think every person -- I know some of that is shaped by what they're working on. So, someone who is a Talmud scholar or a scholar of Judaism and Hellenism or Jews in the Islamic world, partly the things that they work on are -- and their relationship with how -- what they disseminate and how they disseminate it is gonna be dictated a bit by the subject matter, by the materials they come across, by their approach to it, and by whatever the public interest is going to be in that. And we all come to it in very different ways. And I think that's part of the beauty of what we do. It's also why -- it's a lot of why I have been involved with and continue to be involved with collaborative projects, because one of the reasons that got me 56:00interested in theater as an academic in the first place was that, unlike looking at, let's say, a novel -- you know, the novelist can go up to his or her garret and pound out the novel and then send it off to the publisher. And that's not to say that the novelist can't be deeply engaged with the wider world. But there's not the -- inherently -- the sort of level of input that a play is going to have to get up onstage. Because by definition, for that play to get to that point, the scene designer has to weigh in, and the costume and makeup person has to weigh in -- or people -- and the -- you know, you're dealing with the architecture of whatever space that they're dealing with, and you're dealing with costumes, and you may be dealing with music, and certainly performers and the director and all of that. And an audience. So, there're all of these 57:00different elements, and so as scholars of theater and drama, we -- there's a particular need, I think. And also because Yiddish was part of a multilingual environment that for almost all of the time and places where Yiddish theater was staged, the people who were going to that were Yiddish speakers, by and large. But they were also often Russian speakers, and they were also often Polish speakers and English speakers and Spanish speakers and other languages. And Hebrew played a role in their sensibility, and their religious education played a role, particularly for men in the sensibility that they brought to this material. So, that means that it's particularly important for -- at least for some of the projects that we do -- to bring people together, for example, in an 58:00edited book. And I've edited a couple of books where I draw on this person, who works on Soviet Yiddish theater, and that person works on Polish Yiddish theater. Because none of us can do it all. And so -- I mean, obviously that's true of any scholarly endeavor. But it's -- Yiddish theater is part of a multinational, multilingual, and kind of multidisciplinary endeavor that to me makes it particularly important that people are coming to it from very different angles. From my own perspective, I do and will continue to have my scholarly projects and books and articles that are just a chance for me to gather material and assess it -- particularly for an academic audience, but also for a general audience. I mean, I've published in "Pakn Treger," and that's a nice opportunity 59:00to bring something that is serious and substantive but that is something that -- I've never wanted to only write for people with PhDs in theater. And I remember going one -- many years ago to a session at a conference, and the scholar of African American culture, Henry Louis Gates, was talking, and he said, "When my graduate students start speaking in jargon in a class presentation, I stop them, and I ask them to rephrase what they're saying in language that their father can understand." In other words, respecting the intelligence of a lay audience and communicating that. And I think that's really important. I mean, there is a hunger out there that -- obviously the Book Center is an example of how that manifests itself, of people from a lot of different backgrounds who have some 60:00kind of interest in this material. And if you can't connect to that in some way, then you're really missing out on an audience. So, there's some of my work that speaks more to academics, and there are other things that may speak -- that I might publish in a place where a wider readership might read it. And then, there are other things that are specifically geared towards, This is a work that I want to make more accessible; I want to make accessible to an English-speaking audience and put it out there so that it can be staged or read or a combination of the two.

JP:Great. Well, I'm just being conscious of the time, so I think we'll have time for maybe two or three more questions. I wanted to ask if you've seen any trends or changes in the presence or prominence of Yiddish theater during the course of your involvement.

JB:Um-hm. There's some interesting trends. When I started working on this material in the early 1990s -- first of all, on the academic side of things, 61:00even though that's not what you're asking, it was a rather lo-- I mean, it wasn't unhappily lonely endeavor, but I knew that it wasn't as if I step out the door of the Graduate Center, and I give a shout, and lots of people are gonna come running to talk about Yiddish theater. My friend Nina Warnke, who trained at Columbia, was working on material that overlapped with mine. And so, Nina and I would meet for pizza or whatever pretty regularly and talk about what we were working on. And we actually -- we were big enough nerds to assign each other homework -- I know this is -- that's just the way we are -- were. So, we would say, Great, this has been fun, and we'd catch up on the personal stuff too. And so, for next time, let's read this melodrama that everyone was going to in 1909, because as far as we know, we're about the only two people in the world who have 62:00any interest in this (laughs) right now, and we'll come back and share our perspectives and questions and things like that. So, we did that. There was a man named Marvin Seiger who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on Yiddish theater in the US -- which I think he finished in 1960 or sometime in the '60s. And Marvin actually was also in the CUNY system, and I did an independent study with him, and -- so there were really -- there weren't a lot of people around on the scholarly side of things. That's something that has changed dramatically. There have been a number of books put out on Yiddish theater, mostly in English, some in Hebrew, some in some other languages -- German, for example. Russian. Polish. By this point, there's been another generation of scholarship that's 63:00come out in Yiddish, as well as articles in various languages. And so, there's much more of a kind of cadre of people, a number of whom I have worked with and/or will work with or am working with. So, that actually is something that's really welcome, because there is so much to be done, and it's so much fun that there are these other people to talk to, and particularly now. If I am reading something about a play that was being staged in Warsaw in 1920, I can get on Skype or drop an email to a colleague, whether in the States or in Poland or somewhere else, and say, Hey, what do you -- can you tell me about this? Any good sources? That sort of thing. So, there's something of a conversation that's going on. On the theater side of things, there's actually more going on now than -- which may -- at least in -- well, there are things going on in Yiddish, and 64:00they're maybe similar to what was going on then. There's also more of an interest in doing things, at least in the US and Canada, in English translation. And so, there are -- there are companies that are either sort of dedicated to Yiddish theater in translation, but there are also companies that are just interested in -- either in Jewish theater or just in theater, but they happen to have, let's say, an artistic director who's Jewish and knows something about Yiddish theater or gets interested in it. There was a recent season of plays in Yiddish translation in New York, which included one of the plays that Jeremy and I translated. And so, it's heartening to see -- I mean, I can't say that -- I'm not gonna predict that twenty years from now, if you walk around the Greenwich Village and you -- it's a spring afternoon, and there are people in the cafés, 65:00everyone's gonna be talking about the latest Yiddish play. I don't think that's gonna be the case. But there are more scholars around. There are more translators around. And that message that I guess each of us is kind of sending in different ways, that, you know, "The Dybbuk" is wonderful, and "God of Vengeance" is really interesting, and "The Golem" is great, but, you know, there are, like, thousands of other Yiddish plays out there. And a number of them are really worth staging and going to. That's slowly kind of making its way out there. And I think that there's reason to expect that once that message is sort of starting to get out, that it will continue to build. And so, there's some reason to hope for interesting things to happen and continue to happen, both academically and on the practical theater side of things, regarding Yiddish theater.

JP:Right. Well, any other predictions about the future of Yiddish more generally?

JB:I -- I don't know that I do. I think as a student of Jewish history, that I'm a bit humbled about the idea of making any grand predictions about where the culture or any of the Jewish languages are going. Because surprises happen. I don't see -- you know, outside of the Hasidic world, which is its own important story, but in terms of the things that I work on, theater actually does have its own sort of particular place there. But it's very different from the way that it has tended to function and the sort of story that most of scholar-- you know, if 67:00you're looking at theater in the Hasidic world now, you're looking at theater in the Hasidic world and how it works in that world, but it's in its own kind of category that works very differently from, let's say, how Yiddish theater would have worked in its heyday. I don't see Yiddish coming back as a language that people are going to be speaking. And some of my colleagues might get angry at me for that. I think most would agree. That's not -- that doesn't mean that I think it shouldn't, that I wouldn't love to live in a world where it did. I'd love to live in a world where Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe was not devastated by a horrible war and attempted genocide. I'd love there to be cafés in Warsaw and Moscow and New York where the latest Yiddish play is passionately argued about, and it's at the center of everyone's conversa-- we're just not in that world 68:00anymore. And so, I'm not so much in the prediction business. I can see where some of the trends are. I have some thoughts of where things are likely to head. But I guess I would feel like if I were doing that, it's a bit like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner off the cliff. You know that -- he's fine, as long as he keeps running. But the second he looks down -- or, in this case, maybe forward (laughs) into the future -- that's the moment when he falls down the canyon. That I mostly -- I mean, I'm very interested in what people are doing around me, and my work intersects with that. But I really want to just sort of make my contribution, put it out there, and not -- I don't really worry too much. I mean, I -- you know, I'd love there to be a major production of a 69:00play that I've translated on Broadway or some other major place, and I -- it doesn't mean that I wouldn't try to make that happen. But largely, I just sort of do my work and put it out there and hope that it has meaning for an audience, audiences both in the theater and in classrooms and in their studies. That will mean that what I do matters.

JP:Well, to close -- I mean, with a bit of the forward-looking, but without the prediction aspect, what advice do you have to students of Yiddish?

JB:I guess it depends what their goals are. If it's simply sort of undergraduates who are coming to it and maybe just tasting it, then I don't know 70:00that any advice would make a difference. A good teacher is what's going to -- and their own desires -- are gonna determine where they go with it. And if they -- if someone just lights that spark, then it may be something that will continue to mean something to them in some way. And they may go off and become a doctor or a businessperson or whatever it might be. But Yiddish could play its role in their life as part of their knowledge -- and that's whether they're Jewish or not, also. But if they're Jewish, then as part of their knowledge of being a Jew, and if not, then part of their knowledge of Jewish culture and language and literature. If they -- if it's a graduate student, then I guess my most practical advice would probably be -- I mean, whether they're -- you know, if they're undergraduates who're starting to think, I'm getting really serious 71:00about this, or graduate students who are getting involved in Yiddish in some way -- is learn Yiddish and learn whatever other languages you have time to learn. And it depen-- you know, if you're -- I mean, some of that is going to be -- obviously, if someone's working on Russian-Jewish history, then of course they're going to be learning Russian. But in ways that wouldn't be obvious, I would just say that, again, Yiddish is in that multilingual environment, and so the more of that you can absorb, the better, because you -- then it gives you that facility to go and see -- and actually, one of the really interesting trends -- it's not so much -- it's less related to Yiddish theater right now, although that might change, than to Yiddish Studies -- but one of the really interesting trends at the moment is a new wave of scholars, some of them Israelis, some of them from -- you know, Americans or from other places -- who 72:00are more or less equally comfortable with Yiddish and Hebrew and are really opening up some very interesting lines of inquiry into the way that those languages and cultures interrelate. And starting to really sort of change the way we think -- we tend to think of sort of Yiddish in this silo and Hebrew in that silo, and they're almost -- while we know that for much of their history they were sort of complementary, we tend to see them as sort of parting ways. And there are ways in which that's true. But these scholars are showing that -- I mean, we know that a number of these writers were writing in both languages, and there are interesting things going on between them. And so, we don't have all of the answers yet as to how Yiddish relates to the various languages, Jewish or not, around it. So, any language that one has that is part of the 73:00Yiddish milieu will add -- I mean, you're -- if you study Arabic, then there's probably not gonna be a whole lot of ways, I would think, in which you're finding those things dovetailing -- although maybe are some. But if you're, let's say, learning Spanish, and you want to look at the Jews in Latin America, then you can find very lively ways in which Yiddish and Spanish are interacting. And certainly and particularly for English speakers, that's one of the many stories that is very, very underreported. And so, for a graduate student looking for that niche, there are lots of places to go, just linguistically, that involve Yiddish but also involve other things.

JP:Well, on that dynamic note of a lot more room for future inquiry and research, I want to thank you for sharing your stories and reflections with me today. I also want to thank you on behalf of the Yiddish Book Center for participating in the Wexler Oral History Project. Thank you, Joel.

JB:Thank you very much.

[END OF INTERVIEW]