JUDY KUNOFSKY ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:Okay, this is Christa Whitney, and today is January 11th, 2013.  I'm here in Berkeley, California with Judy Kunofsky, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Judy, do I have your permission to record this?

JUDY KUNOFSKY: Yes, you do.

CW:  Thank you.  So, as a place to begin, can you tell me briefly what you know about your family background?

JK:  Oh, I could have brought the whole family tree with me.  My parents were born in Poland, my mother in Lublin and my father in Warsaw, in Varshah.  My mother's family had been in Poland for several generations.  My father's family came from Nesvizh in Belarus.  And I'm very delighted that the Yiddish Book 1:00Center copied the Yizkor book for the sefer neshviz [Book of Nesvizh] because when the survivors had made up this book, my father, for some reason, didn't think I'd be interested and he didn't order a copy for us.  And for decades, I yearned to have one of these.  And thanks to the Yiddish Book Center, I now have the Yiddish pages from it.  But for some reason, I guess it's how the world works, the Yiddish Book Center didn't copy the Hebrew pages of the book.  So, I have about -- about half the book, and it includes a picture of my father's grandfather in Nesvizh in the late 1800s.  And it has a picture of my aunt in the early 1900s, in a Zionist youth group.  And, I'm involved -- well, I'm sort of signed up for JewishGen.org, and when I get some free time, I'm 2:00gonna -- I'm back to the 1840s, and I can probably go back still farther from my father's mother's side.  So, I know a lot about where my father's family came from.  And, as I said, my mother's family is from Poland and I was named after my mother's mother, whose name was Yakhet, which is a very old-fashioned Yiddish and Polish name that's listed in the book of Jewish names from Eastern Europe as extant.  But I'm a Yakhet, and she -- my grandmother was named after her grandmother, and my mother told me that this locket I'm wearing was my grandmother's grandmother's.  So, it's -- it used to have a watch in it and it doesn't anymore.  But I wore it just for this interview so I would feel like my mother's ancestral family was with me.  My parents came between World War I and World War II.  My mother was a teenager when she came and my father was maybe 3:00ten or eleven.  And I knew all the family that was here.  So, when I start doing family genealogy, I'm back before 1900, where some people I know, some American Jews are -- have to figure out where did their parents live when they were born?  But I can go back much farther than that, and I get a lot of pleasure out of it.

CW:  That's [BREAK IN RECORDING] are there any famous or infamous family stories that have been passed down?

JK:  Well, my grandmother Esther, who grew up in Nesvizh, her maiden name was Becker.  And apparently, the town of Nesvizh -- the lord was the Radziwills, who are known to Americans because Jackie Kennedy was related to the Radziwills.  And apparently, my grandmother used to deliver bagels to the 4:00Radziwill castle.  So, that's the only famous story I know, and I'm delighted to be able to tell it.

CW:  That's a great one.  (laughter)

JK:  Well, Becker means a baker.  So, you know, where do people get family names?  Either place names or, what you did or another few categories.  So --

CW:  Huh.

JK:  -- I come from a family of bakers, at least on one side. 

CW:  That's -- [BREAK IN RECORDING] So, you grew up in New York.

JK:  Yes.

CW:  What neighborhood?

JK:  Well, I was born in Brooklyn.  My parents lived in Borough Park, which was then very different from today's Hassidic Borough Park.  It was, I believe, a secular neighborhood.  At least my parents were secular.  And we moved when I was -- I went to the local elementary school, and when I was about eight and a half, we moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, parts of which had been redeveloped by the Ladies Garment Workers' Union into the ILGWU Cooperative Village, and we lived in the Morris Hillquit Building, and he, apparently, was a 5:00very famous socialist.  And I lived there until -- I lived there through high school and college, until I left New York.

CW:  And what -- would you say you grew up in a very Jewish home?

JK:  Oh, absolutely.  It was a very secular home.  My parents didn't go to shul, even on the High Holidays.  But they went to one uncle's house for Passover seders and it was a very Jewish household, although with none of the -- my parents weren't Kosher, they didn't light Shabbos candles.  But it was still very Jewish.  Their friends were mostly Jewish.  My father had more non-Jewish friends than my mother did.  And they sent me to the Arbeter Ring, the Workmen's Circle.  And they later told me that it was a compromise between one 6:00of my parents, who wanted me to go to a religious school where I would learn Hebrew and one who didn't want me to have any of that.  And they never told me which was which, but I'm pretty sure it was my father who wanted me to -- would have wanted me to go to a religious school.  But I didn't.  And so I went to the local Workmen's Circle.  And my parents, who -- and there are millions of people who have this story -- my parents spoke Yiddish in the home to tell secrets.  The moment they sent me to the Arbeter Ring, they stopped speaking Yiddish in the home.  So, I went for four years, and I don't remember ever talking Yiddish to my parents.  So, it was -- the usual American Jewish story is my parents didn't teach me Yiddish.  But in my case, they sent me to learn Yiddish, but then they didn't talk to me in Yiddish.  So, I'll never figure it out, why they did that.  I think it was that it was some kind of Jewish education that they could agree on.  And when I went to college at CCNY, I got 7:00involved with Hillel, and that was where I sort of learned about all the other aspects of Jewish life that I had heard about but hadn't really known very well.  And I then moved to California.  I moved to Los Angeles and went to graduate school at UCLA, and did some Jewish things there. I guess I got involved with -- more with other organizations than with specifically Jewish organizations.  And then -- moved to the Bay Area in 1972.  And --

CW:  Well, let's go --

JK:  -- do you really --

CW:  -- yeah, let's --

JK:  -- that's the --

CW:  -- we'll get back to that.

JK:  I'm getting ahead of --

CW:  (laughs) So you mentioned Passover at your uncle's house.  Were you there, too?  Or, and --

JK:  Oh, yes.

CW:  -- what you remember from --

JK:  Oh, oh.  (laughs) Well, my father, who was the youngest, had four 8:00brothers and one sister.  And the seders were around the table. I had two -- I had three older cousins.  Two were men and one was a woman.  The woman was developmentally disabled because she had had an illness as a child, and so she didn't participate.  And one of the male cousins -- also was, for different reasons.  And the other one was my cousin, Noah, who's my closest relative.  But he was 15 years older than I was, so I was, you know, eight, ten, twelve, and he was already an adult.  And I remember my uncle and the other men reading through the Haggadah as fast as they could in Hebrew.  And I asked the fir kashes, the Four Questions, and everyone was very pleased.  I mean, I was the only kid there.  And then, in the middle, I would go take a nap and sleep.  9:00And we would take the train there, from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and then take the train back until we got a car.  Then, I guess, we drove.  And I just remembered it being all in Hebrew, and it was a very intense experience, and I was drawn to it.  But it's not as though I felt that I was hanging out with my cousins.  My husband had a family where the cousins got together on every Jewish holiday, and so his memory of holidays is with his peers.  And my memory is with all these old people.  And my father was thirty-seven when I was born, and he was the youngest by decades.  So, the people were much -- although they're probably my age now, but they seemed much older.  And in later years, when I asked my mother about did she -- what did she think of the seders, it turned out she hated them because -- now that I -- in retrospect, when I thought about it, the women were all in the kitchen washing dishes.  And my mother, as 10:00the wife of the youngest sibling, was apparently the one picked on by the others to do most of the work or whatever it was.  It was not a good experience for her.  So, I'm surprised I grew up loving being a Jew, given -- (laughs) given some of those early experiences.

CW:  And can you just dis-- I mean, you mentioned a little bit that it's -- that Borough Park and, you know, the areas, neighborhoods of New York, and Brooklyn are different now than they were then.

JK:  Um-hm.

CW:  So what do you remember about the neighborhood?  Sort of the architecture and where you hung out?

JK:  Well, the architecture is the same.  I've been back to the neighborhood.  I grew up on Thirteenth Avenue and Forty-First Street.  The apartment is still there. I remember a bakery.  I remember a candy store.  I remember the subway that was around Thirty-Eighth Street that was torn down a 11:00few years after I was born.  And I'm not sure why I remember it, but nobody else in Brooklyn remembers it.  And I remember walking -- the walk I took to elementary school -- although, when I went back this last time, there was one -- it was one block -- it was two long blocks to the school -- that the second block had commercial -- had stores on it, which -- I hadn't remembered it.  I remembered it as all residential.  My mother and her brother ran a cleaning business, dry cleaners, which was apparently across the street from where we grew up.  And the apartment -- the building had four apartments and there was a couple with a boy who was around my age who were the apartment above us.  And one of his grandparents lived across the hall.  I don't remember who lived across the hall from us, but it was -- that part of Brooklyn pretty much looks 12:00the same.  I mean, there are now much classier, you know, hotels and restaurants.  But a lot of it, when I go back, looks a lot the same.

CW:  So, at -- can you just tell me a little bit about Arbeter Ring and sort of what the education was like for you then?

JK:  I don't remember if I went in Brooklyn or whether the four years was all in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  My teacher was Esther Feldman, who I'm told retired to Southern California, but I haven't been in touch with her. I remember a few things that stand out.  One was that the parents of many of the other students had numbers on their arms from the concentration camps.  I remember we had an event once a year in the local elementary school where we, 13:00the kids, sang Jewish songs and the parents sat in the auditorium and cried because they were many -- I don't know if they were Holocaust-related songs or whether our singing Yiddish reminded them of the horrible times during World War II. I remember learning Jewish history and getting a -- or European Jewish history and getting a general sense of which kings were good guys and which weren't.  And then, when I studied European history in high school and college, I found that that presentation of Jewish history had a different sense of who were good guys and bad guys.  There were kings who were good to the Jews but bad to their own people or bad to the Jews but good to their own people and the other two combinations.  And that was a revelation, to realize that just because Louis somebody-or-other was good to us didn't mean that he was a good 14:00king for the other people he ruled over.  I remember studying Jewish history, and I remember that the nations that conquered us was Ashur, Bovl, Persye, Grikhnland, Roym -- Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome.  And that phrase, with those five, I remember repeating that over and over again.  I remember singing a lot of songs.  I remember seeing the map of the Middle East].  And I'm embarrassed to tell you that, well, I grew up -- I was born in 1947, so I would've seen the maps in the '50s and the early '60s.  I did not see a map of what was then the current State of Israel with the chunk in the West Bank cut out until I was in college, because the school was -- I don't think they were anti-Zionist, but they just weren't interested in israel at 15:00all.  And so, the only maps we saw of the Jewish homeland were the ones from 2,000 years ago.  They didn't reflect the modern State of Israel at all.  And I do remember my last year there, my -- guess my fourth year, some parents requested that we learn some Hebrew words, and the school agreed.  And I still have the little book that we used to learn a few Hebrew words.  The final story I'll tell you is that there's a Hanukkah song that I learned that's, um, sort of one of the standard ones.  And when my husband and I married, we got -- the first time we spent Hanukkah together, we were singing one of the songs, and mine had the line "Zol yeder bazunder bazingen dem vunder -- each one should sing about the wonder."  And his was "Zog al-khinisim loyb got far di nisim -- 16:00talk about the miracles, thank God for the miracles."  And we realized that my version didn't have God in it.  It had wonders, which is sort of miracles, and there's even a third version of that song with a line that doesn't refer to any wonders at all.  And we realized that even though we knew the same songs, the fact that I had gone to a militantly secular Yiddish school -- God was not mentioned at all in four years of Jewish education. I mean, I picked up the religious part of our civilization when I went to college Hillel.  But, in retrospect, I realized that it was -- I think it was that the parents were very bitter about the Holocaust, and many of them believed that God couldn't possibly exist, given what had happened.  Now, my parents were not Holocaust survivors.  They had come before.  My mother's sister was murdered and her family were murdered in the Holocaust.  But it was a generation that felt very 17:00betrayed by God. 

CW:  [BREAK IN RECORDING] Was there -- I mean, you mentioned your parents were secular and had different ideas about how maybe you should be educated.  Was there a particular political atmosphere in the home?

JK:  My mother was a liberal Republican in that she voted for -- there was a mayor of New York who was very popular who was Republican, later became a Democrat.  But that's the kind of Republican she was.  She was a moderate.  My father refused to tell us who he had ever voted for for president, but he said he had never voted for a major party candidate.  So I assume my father was some kind of a socialist.  But he wouldn't -- I don't think my parents talked politics in the house.  John Lindsay, that's who my mother had voted for, and 18:00he later became a Democrat.  So, I don't know what that makes my moth-- but in New York, the parties were very different than they are now.

CW:  Right.  And did you -- sort of -- was Jewish culture something that was discussed in the family, in the community, around the dinner table?

JK:  I think so, but I can't remember any instances.  My parents sent me to Jewish camps and to Jewish clubs, mostly run out of the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side, which, as you probably know, was -- they invented adult education and extension courses.  They were very important in American history for that reason.  And the clubs I went to, the circles I hung out in, they weren't a hundred percent Jewish, but most of our friends were Jewish.  And we 19:00knew when holidays came and went, because there were observant people in the four buildings in that co-op, in the adjacent buildings.  So, we knew it was Sukkos because there was a sukkah down that we could see from our window, down in the backyard. I don't remember -- I don't remember talking about Jewish music or Jewish -- I don't remember any dinner conversations at all, now that I think about it.  But my father was a very cultured person, and I'm not sure my mother shared that.  And when -- he sometimes traveled without her because she didn't like to travel.  So, he went to Poland a few times and he went to Israel.  And whenever he traveled, he would visit synagogues that -- I don't think he went to daven in them, or maybe he did.  But he didn't do that at home.  So, I think -- I mean, the house was filled with Jewish books.  My mother was a painter, 20:00and she painted scenes from Poland that she got out of books of pictures of scenes in Poland, where she had grown up.  And there was the sense of us versus them, that, you know, we're the Jews and there's them in the world, and they saw the world in -- very much that way historically, that they had come from Judaism -- come from a Jewish family, Jewish neighborhoods, Jewish community, and that's who they were.

CW:  Was there -- was Jewish music something that you heard in the home or anywhere else?  Mentioned singing a little bit.

JK:  Well, we sang in Workmen's Circle.  Sort of folk songs associated -- or 21:00they're not folk -- I mean, some, we know who wrote them.  We sang songs associated with each Jewish holiday.  I don't remember hearing Jewish music in the home.  My mother was an opera fan.  She listened to it, but she never went to any operas.  I mean, here she was, living in Manhattan, and she didn't ever go to the opera. I don't remember hearing Jewish music in the home.

CW:  And when did you start getting interested in music in general?

JK:  Well, I played piano. I played classical music on the piano, and I don't think my connection is primarily with Jewish music.  It's with Yiddish culture as a whole.  And when we talk later about KlezCalifornia, I'll tell you about that.  But it was -- when I went to college, to City College -- I got very 22:00involved in Hillel.  And the rabbi was a -- one of the early Reconstructionist rabbis, Arthur Zuckerman.  And the Hillel that he set up was all different kinds of Jews, all together in one campus community.  And when I was a freshman, it was the first Hanukkah, and someone in Hillel said, "Let's sing 'Rock of Ages'."  And the only "Rock of Ages" I knew was the American hymn, "Rock of ages, cleft for me.  Let me find my faith in thee," which isn't a Jewish song as far as I know.  But they all meant Maoz Tzur, which is also "Rock of Ages," but I didn't know that song.  So, I had -- I knew some things about being Jewish, but I didn't know other things.  So, I was very involved.  I was an officer of Hillel for three out of the four years I was there, and that got me very involved in Jewish life in a way, so I feel very grateful to Hillel 23:00for that experience.  That changed my life.

CW:  Were there particular aspects of Jewish culture that were more interesting or appealing to you?

JK:  Well, I think what interested me most was Mordecai Kaplan's idea of Judaism as a civilization, that it's not just a religion, but it's a community that includes religion and culture and language and arts and music and dance, and that there really was a Yiddish land that crossed the political boundaries.  And it had a lot in common -- I always felt very identified with East European Jewry. I never, you know, knew much about -- until later -- about, 24:00you know, Sephardic Jewry or about West European Jewry.  I always felt very East European Jewish.  I don't know -- I guess I was interested in Reconstructionism, because I didn't have to worry about whether I believed or didn't believe.  I could just do it.  And whether I thought I was quoting it or saying it didn't matter, that that's what -- if you're Jewish, you don't eat pork.  You daven, you say certain things, you observe holidays.  And, in fact, our son who's now 23, when he was a kid, he was at the age where he was poking us, and he said, "I don't believe in God."  And I said to him, "Well, we don't really care if you believe in God.  Just do the mitzvahs [commandments] and celebrate the holidays."  And I think, in a lot of ways, that's sort of a Reconstructionist point of view, that says that part of being Jewish is going 25:00along with the program of the community, and you shouldn't worry so much about ideological issues in terms of religion.  You just -- you separate milk and meat, that's what you do if you're a Jew.

CW:  Yeah.  Looking back on your childhood, do you see any values or traditions that you feel your parents were really trying to pass on to you, instill in you?

JK:  I'm still a Jew.  (laughs) And my father was a feminist.  My father went and marched in the first feminist march in the '60s, in Lower Manhattan, I think.  And my mother didn't want to go.  So, my parents always felt it was important for me -- I'm an only child -- to get a good education so I could support myself and I wouldn't have to marry somebody just to be supported that 26:00way.  So, the -- I mean, they didn't have an egalitarian relationship, but I think they instilled those values in me, and I became a feminist once I knew what that word was. 

CW:  So, we've alluded a little bit to college and getting interested in other aspects of Jewish culture through Hillel.  At what point along the way did you return to the Yiddish language --

JK:  Ah!  (laughter) Okay.  So, I was at UCLA, and I was tangentially involved in Jewish life.

CW:  Right.

JK:  But I noticed that it's not very easy to be an unobservant Jew in California.  There isn't enough of a community the way there is New York that 27:00one could not do Jewish things but still feel Jewish because everybody around you was Jewish.  And I realized, both in Los Angeles and when I moved to Berkeley in 1972 that, for me, to be a Jew in California, you really have to be observant, at some level, because that's where the strongest community is.  So, when I moved here, the first group I got involved with was a feminist chavurah [informal worship group] that's still going called "Beit Chesed" that uses both male and female language for God in Hebrew.  And they're not so active anymore, but I'm in another chavurah, Nishmat Shalom, which is one of three in the country that uses both male and female language for God, in Hebrew.  And that's really very exciting.  We also joined the Conservative shul in Berkeley because 28:00we like the people, we like the singing.  It's a very -- it's Berkeley, so it's a very knowledgeable shul.  Members of the congregation lead all the services.  The rabbi only does it when he feels like it.  And I enjoy the balance between tradition and seeing what we want to change in tradition.  There is -- since I mentioned Reconstructionism, I should say there is a Reconstructionist congregation in Berkeley, but -- and we know the people in it, but we don't go to that one.  We go to Congregation Netivot Shalom.  So, here's how we -- I got reconnected with Yiddish.  My husband's father died at quite a young age.  So, we had three grandparents left.  Well, three of our parents left when we got married, and we got married in our 40s, our early 40s.  And we were going back to New York several times a year as they were getting sick and aging and needing more care.  And at some point, my husband, 29:00Mitchell Shandling, said, "You know, we have to find something positive to go back for, not just to take care of our parents."  And he had heard about KlezCalifornia from the local musician Gerry Genney -- sorry, he'd heard about KlezKamp in the Catskills.  So, we went to KlezKamp -- the first one, maybe, our -- in the mid-1990s.  And we walked in and we immediately felt at home.  It was a remarkable experience.  KlezKamp is a five-day immersion in Yiddish culture.  And as my husband jokes, the -- the implicit rule is you don't talk about religion and you don't talk about politics.  And everyone has a wonderful time.  So, we went every year for maybe ten or fifteen years.  And it was really remarkable. I had just started to play viola, and so I tried a little klezmer.  And after we'd gone for three or four years, I thought, you know?  I 30:00haven't read or spoken a word of Yiddish in thirty years.  I wonder if I can still read anything?  So I went into one of the Yiddish classes one year, and I found that I didn't remember any vocabulary, but I could read fluently.  I remembered the grammar.  I had the sense of the language.  And so, I came back home and I started reading Yiddish once a week for two hours with a friend, almost -- this was almost eighteen years ago, and we're still doing it.  We read Sholem Aleichem.  We read Kadia Molodowsky.  We read the Yiddish stories from the Book Center's "Pakn Treger."  We read non-fiction from "Afn Shvel."  And my husband joined us for about five years, and then his schedule changed and 31:00he couldn't do that.  So, my friend and I get together once a week.  So, it was just wonderful.  So, the -- Living Traditions, which puts on KlezKamp decided -- had done one in the Bay Area in 1988 or so.  And then, they did another one in 1998.  And my husband and I and our son went, and it was in Marin County at Walker Creek Ranch and we had a terrific time.  There were about 170 people, and we tried to get them to put it on again.  And they said, no, they had lost money, they weren't gonna do it.  So, we local people decided that if we were going to have that same kind of immersion in Yiddish culture in the Bay Area, we were gonna have to do it ourselves.  So, at first, we thought about doing the same kind of event: a five-day immersion at a hotel.  But when 32:00we found out you have to put down 20 or $30,000 for the hotel to hold the rooms, that seemed more than we wanted to try.  So we founded KlezCalifornia.  We picked the name because it was like KlezKamp and because, at the time, we thought that klezmer music would be the entrée for people to the broader Yiddish culture rather than Yiddish being the entrée to klezmer music.  So, we thought KlezCalifornia, we don't cover the whole state, but the name sounded alliterative.  And we've put on ten festivals in the last ten years and lots of other things.  But your question was how I got involved.  So, I got involved through KlezKamp.  That's how I grew to know about and love klezmer music and how I reconnected with Yiddish language and literature and sort of the 33:00Yiddish-loving community in this country.

CW:  Yeah.  Is there a particular piece of art -- maybe a song or a piece of music, a book -- that, along this journey of being involved and interested in Yiddish culture has been sort of a wow moment or an a-ha moment?

JK:  Well, the one most recently has been the song "Zog maran [Tell me, Marrano]," which is about, you know, hidden Jews during the Inquisition.  And there's a wonderful version of it with Lori Cahan-Simon and Michael Alpert.  And I heard that, and I play it over and over again.  And my viola teacher and I recently worked out a version that my string quintet is gonna play.  We used 34:00some harmony by Linda Hirschhorn, who's a local composer and arranger.  And so, that song -- when I -- when we ran through it once with the other people in my string -- it's a string quartet with two violas, so it's a string quintet -- of the other five, I think, the other four people, one is Jewish.  And I realized that to explain the song in English, it sounds so depressing, but -- and the song's in minor.  But in an -- minor isn't sad in Jewish life.  And I've argued with my Jewish teacher -- with my viola teacher, who's part Jewish -- and she says, "Well, no, minor is sad."  And I said, "Well, minor keys don't sound sad to me.  They sound soulful.  They sound," -- I guess soulful's the right 35:00word, so -- but to explain to other people why this song about Jews hiding in a cave to celebrate Pesach -- and the last line is, you know, "And when the enemy finds us, we'll die singing" -- and thank God Linda Hirschhorn, in her version that her group, Vocolot, sings changes the end to say, "And when the enemy comes, we'll drown them with our singing," which is a much, you know, sort of more contemporary version that we're gonna fight back, we're gonna go down with strength.  But for me, hearing Yiddish music is a religious experience.  And it's as much a religious experience as davening in shul.  My friend Max and I read Second Samuel in Yiddish, and that's the book of the Tanakh, where we know 36:00most of what we know about King David.  And we were using the Yehoash translation into Yiddish.  So, the Hebrew was one little box and then the Yiddish is one big page.  And it was remarkable how Jewish the Bible sounds in Yiddish.  Now, maybe it's that my Hebrew isn't good enough, but the friend I read with is fluent in Biblical Hebrew.  And so, we talked about how God talking to David or David talking to God, it sounds so Jewish in Yiddish.  And so, it's a whole -- as I said, it's a religious experience for me, even when it's a religious document like Second Samuel or when it's some secular song -- that Yiddish, in itself, makes me -- it feels like a religious experience, just like davening in shul.

CW:  Can you -- I mean, could you tell me more about that?  (laughs)

JK:  Uh, no.  (laughter)

CW:  Okay.  (laughs)

JK:  'Cause that's just --

CW:  That's fine.  (laughs)

JK:  It's just that -- that feeling, and I -- it surely comes from my childhood, that the -- and sort of the feeling of Jewish life was expressed in Yiddish. Hebrew was what you davened in, but somehow the soul, the emotion was all in Yiddish.  [BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:  So, I'm curious just to hear briefly, a little bit more about your involvement with the chavurah movement and sort of how you discovered that and, yeah.

JK:  Beit Chesed, which was the first chavurah I was involved with used to run the egalitarian conservative services -- High Holiday services for Berkeley 38:00Hillel.  And I arrived in the Bay Area in August of 1972.  And I guess I was looking for High Holiday services, and so I looked at what Hillel had to offer, and Beit Chesed was running the services.  So, I just jumped right in.  And Beit Chesed would continue to offer the services for quite a few years, until Hillel felt there were too many community people at their services, there weren't -- the percent of students was not as high as they wanted -- or the percent of community people was higher than they wanted.  And roughly at that point, Congregation Netivot Shalom Berkeley was founded.  Before that, there was a Reform shul and an Orthodox shul, but nothing Conservative.  And so, a lot of the people who eventually gravitated to Netivot Shalom had either been to 39:00one of the other shuls or were involved with the Beit Chesed chavurah.  And then, once there was a conservative shul, you know, that was a much bigger institution and people moved over there. 

CW:  Were there any particular mentors -- you mentioned a couple of names of people at KlezKamp earlier.  But were there any particular mentors or influential people, as you were sort of discovering Yiddish culture?

JK:  Yeah, I don't think there were any people who stand out more than others.  But that's also true in my professional life, where I don't think I've had individual mentors.  There've just been sort of a community of people who've influenced me.

CW:  So, I'd like to go back a little bit to KlezCalifornia and --

JK:  Yes.

CW:  -- you started telling me some of the early history of how it was founded.

JK:  Yes.

CW:  And can you just give sort of the broad mission statement for someone who's not familiar with --

JK:  Okay.

CW:  -- organization, sort of --

JK:  Okay.  Well, we promote and celebrate Yiddish culture in Bay Area.  And we do everything we can to get people to celebrate Yiddish culture.  We have, roughly once a year, a festival that -- the big ones attract 4 to 500 people.  And they're like KlezKamp, but shorter.  Virtually everything is participatory.  We call it a festival, but we're not, like the Bay Area Jewish Music Festival, which is virtually all performances, because we believe that a culture thrives when people do it themselves.  When you -- when you hum a Yiddish song to your child, that does so much more than taking the kid to a 41:00concert where he or she hears other people singing Yiddish -- that it has to be doing it ourselves for the culture to thrive.  We also have smaller tastes of Yiddish culture, which is the -- what we call klezmer dance parties, Yiddish singalongs.  We have two, uh, Yiddish conversation salons at different levels that meet every other month.  We co-sponsor events of other organizations, and we have a newsletter that goes to nineteen hundred people.  It's an e-newsletter that reports on every Yiddish-related event in the Bay Area, so that, for example, this is the January newsletter, January 2013.  And it has an 42:00event, "The Drama of Yiddish on the Hebrew Stage," which was a lecture last night at the Jewish Community Library.  "Jewish Eastern Europe: A Family Journey," which is gonna be, again, at the library next week.  A Yiddish class UC Berkeley -- well, this is "Reading Yiddish Texts," with Yael Chaver.  "Beginning Yiddish, Second Semester," which is at UC Berkeley. "Yiddish Women Writers in America and Their Feminist Legacy," this is a new course being offered through Lehrhaus Judaica, which is a -- adult education organization that's being presented and sponsored by the work -- local Workmen's Circle.  And then, here's a list of community events.  There are a dozen more in January, including Klezmer Monday at Saul's Restaurant and Delicatessen, which started last April.  There's klezmer music every Monday night for two hours.  There are two exhibits now, one at the San Francisco JCC and one at the Marin 43:00JCC.  The one in San Francisco is "Hollywood Stars Reading 'The Jewish Daily Forward' by Photographer Phil Stern."  The one in Marin is "Traces of Memory: A Contemporary Look at the Jewish Past in Poland," which, in fact, is an exhibit that my husband and I saw in Poland about four years ago.  There's a Klezmer night celebrating the release of a new CD by the Gonifs.  The Red Hot Chachkas are going to be at Saul's.  The Ellis Isle Old World Folk Band is performing at Le Bateau Ivre, a French café in Berkeley.  A free klezmer jam session, hosted by Klezmer Jeanette Lewicki is starting.  And what else is there?  Oh, in Palo Alto, the Feast of Jewish Learning, for the fifth year in a row, is going to have a klezmer dance lesson and Yiddish signing and klezmer music.  And then, "Cantor Unplugged," cantor Sharon Bernstein on our advisory council is giving 44:00her annual concert, and it always includes Yiddish music.  So, that's -- oh, and then, at the Jewish -- at the Reutlinger Community for Jewish Living], which is a senior residence in Danville there's gonna be klezmer music the end of January.  So, that's an example of there -- every month, ten or twenty things going on between Santa Rosa and Santa Clar C-- or Sonoma County and Santa Clara County, and the East Bay in San Francisco that are in the Bay Area.  And our newsletter's the only one that puts those together.  We don't catch everything, 'cause not everybody tells us.  But whenever we hear of something, we tell people about it.  And the last ten years, there's been much more of a feeling growing every year that there really is a Yiddish-loving community.  Now, not everybody in that community speaks a word of Yiddish, and not everyone plays music.  But we're bringing together the Yiddish language and the klezmer music 45:00and everything in between.  Now, for show-and-tell, this is the program for our three-day festival last February at the JCC of San Francisco, and we had seventy workshops, and was just -- it was like KlezKamp, but local.  And our local people -- the only out-of-towner was musician Daniel Hoffman from Israel, who was brought here thanks to funding from the Israeli consulate.  He used to live in the Bay Area, and he performed with a local klezmer band.  [BREAK IN RECORDING] This is the KlezCalifornia Gele Pages.  "Gele" means "yellow" in Yiddish.  And it's forty-one pages of Yiddish culture resources in the Bay Area.  Each one of the Yiddish conversation clubs, the twenty-five klezmer bands, the lectures in ancient European Jewish history.  The klezmer dance leaders.  Museums that have collections of East European Jewish history or 46:00klezmer music.  And it's quite remarkable how much there is.  And whenever people see this, they say, "I didn't realize so much was going on."  And that's why we did this.  So, we've actually tried to get people in other communities around the country to do this.  It's -- it would be too hard to do it in New York, and in some communities there wouldn't be enough.  But in middle-sized Jewish communities, you want to give people a sense that they're part of something that's living, that's lively. I should say that we never say learn Yiddish because otherwise it'll fade away.  We never appeal to guilt or responsibility, because we're Americans.  We don't do something because we should.  We say, "You like to dance?  Come have fun dancing with us.  You like to sing?  You like to play music?"  At our festivals, we have three kinds 47:00of workshops related to Yiddish language.  One is one that Harvey Varga does called "100 Yiddish Words the Average Puerto Rican New Yorker Knows That You Should Be Ashamed If You Don't."  Another is "Yiddish Proverbs," and Yiddish teacher John Levitow, who teaches at Stanford and at UC Santa Cruz -- teaches Yiddish proverbs, because that's some -- everybody likes proverbs, and you can pick up a little Yiddish while you hear the proverbs.  And the third thing we do is Yiddish literature study and translation with either Naomi Seidman of the Graduate Theological Union or Gabriella Safran from Stanford Universty or Yael Chaver from UC Berkeley.  So, we have lots of resources and people can learn wonderful things, and we appeal to them because it's fun, it brings joy and pleasure to their life.  Because, as Americans, that's what we're gonna do, not because someone told us we had to do something.  The other things I wanted to 48:00show you are -- we have our own KlezCalifornia songbook.  And --

CW:  Third edition.

JK:  Third edition.  The thing I want to show you -- see, we got this image off the web.  It's two men and a woman singing.  But what we did, because we're a community, is we painted a kippah on the man on the right, so everybody would feel welcome.  (laughter) And the "J" is the local Jewish newsweekly, and in December, their cover story was "The Joy of Oy: Yiddish is Thriving in the Bay Area."  And it was a really substantial story with lots of pictures of people and a description of some of what's going on.  They were mostly interested in Yiddish language.  And when they interviewed me on behalf of KlezCalifornia, they said, "How do we know that Yiddish is thriving in the Bay Area?"  And I said, "Because you're doing a cover story on it."  And they 49:00said, "Oh!"  (laughs) So, there's a lot going on.  It's a lot of fun.  And more and more people come to the events because they're fun.  And at the last event, there were a lot of twenty-something musicians who had discovered klezmer music on their own, and they came to our festival and they studied with the various music teachers.  And then, they were jamming with people who were much older than they are.  And one of the things about -- that we found about our events, and I know it's true about KlezKamp, is that Yiddish culture brings generations together in a way that -- the arts do -- in a way that nothing else does.  Now, sitting in an audience watching, that doesn't bring you together.  But if you're dancing, it doesn't matter the age or the political views or the 50:00religious views of the person next to you.  You're being a Jewish community.  You're celebrating Yiddish culture.  And people have a great time, so that's why I continue to be involved, because I get a lot of fun out of it, a lot of pleasure.  [BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:  So, speaking of languages, how, if at all, has language influenced your sense of identity?

JK:  Well, one of the things that Harvey said in this "J" story was -- he said, "I'm more Chaim than I'm Harvey."  And I think I have sense that some of my reality is in Yiddish, not in English.  We used to -- our son's English name is 51:00Jacob and his Yiddish name is Chaim Zelig?  Chaim was my grandfather and Mitchell had some ancestors named Chaim, and Zelig was the uncle who ran those marathon seders in Brooklyn.  Um, and when Jacob was young, we'd tell him, "Well, yes, your name is Jacob, but the angels call you Chaim Zelig."  And I think I have a sense that -- there's something profound about my relationship with Yiddish.  And I'm not fluent in it.  I can -- you know, I can say some things if I need to, but -- I can read pretty fluently from Yiddish to English, but I can't recall the words to speak very well.  There's just something very important to my identity about Yiddish.

CW:  So, when you and your husband were creating your own home and family, 52:00you've mentioned a few of these in passing, but what did you -- what was important to you in making a Jewish home? 

JK:  Well, my husband was more observant than I was when we met.  And our attitude toward food in the home -- we don't mix milk and meat in the same meal.  We don't bring non-kosher animals into the house, and we don't worry about shkhite [Jewish ritual slaughter].  [BREAK IN RECORDING] My husband's attitude was that it was important to him that if his grandparents, his mother's parents, Meyer-yisroel and Keyle, if they came back, if they flew back into the house and they saw what we were eating on the plate, they wouldn't immediately 53:00realize it wasn't kosher.  And that's -- it's sort of a joke, but it's true that it's what someone called photographic kashrut, that on first glance, it could be kosher.  So, I guess that's called kosher style America.  And we light Shabbos candles.  We do kiddush Friday night.  And I don't mean the one-sentence kiddush.  I mean the -- the whole kiddush that isn't just on the wine but says it's Shabbos.  We always have a family dinner on Friday night.  On Shabbos, we don't acquire anything.  We spend money, but only to go into places.  We don't buy food, we don't go to restaurants, we don't go shopping.  54:00And for our son, it was a special day.  It was the family day.  And we know so many families, both Jewish and non-Jewish, where every day of the week and the weekend was taken up with errands and they never had a break.  And we always went hiking with him.  We'd go to the local parks, we'd go to festivals.  But that was too -- he asked us not to after a while, because it was too frustrating to go to a festival and not be able to buy anything.  But he's seen all the natural areas all over the Bay Area.  And -- so, Shabbos is really special.  We celebrate all the holidays.  We have a special -- the room we're sitting in is at the edge of our house, and then here's the garage and here's a gate.  And that's where our Sukkah is, and it's perfect because Berkeley, the wind comes from the west, so the gate blocks the wind.  And Sukkos is our favorite holiday. 

CW:  Why is it your favorite?

JK:  Well, you get to decorate a sukkah and sit out of doors and eat, and the weather's perfect in the Bay Area in September or early October.  And it's an occasion to invite people over, and it's just a wonderful holiday.  And -- more American Jews should get into it.  And if you don't want the religious side of it, you can just say it's a harvest festival.  And we have non-Jewish friends over, and they love it, too, because how could you not like eating out-of-doors in a sukkah with -- under a roof of branches?

CW:  Yeah.  You mentioned earlier that you've gone back to Eastern Europe.  When and where?  How?

JK:  Well, my husband and I and our friend Max were reading Sholem Aleichem, 56:00and we had -- we were reading "Funem yarid [From the fair]," which is his fictionalized autobiography.  And we had read about the time when his mother had died and his father wanted to remarry.  But there were so many children that he didn't think he'd convince a woman to marry him if she knew how many children he had.  So, he sent Sholem, who was then, I don't know, about bar mitzvah age, and all the younger siblings -- they don't tell you how many there are -- with a balegole, a wagon driver, to stay with his mother's parents while the father looked for a wife.  And as part of that, the wagon went on a -- I guess a ferry, a raft ferry across the Dnieper River.  Well, we're in the middle of reading that story and the mail came, and one of the things on it was a postcard from the Oakland Museum, talking about their tours.  And one of them was a tour in a boat down the Dnieper River.  And Mitchell and I looked at each 57:00other and said, "We have to go on this trip!"  Well, it turns out the Dnieper River has been dammed in four places, so it's really four lakes.  It's not really going down a river, but there are -- I think twice a week in the summer -- tourist boats that take the -- a ten-day trip from Kiev to the Black Sea or back.  And we went a few days early to see more of Kiev, but my husband's family is from Gomel, which is the second largest city in Bialorus.  So, we decided we'd go to visit Gomel.  And it was -- we only had about forty-eight hours there, and we could have easily spent a week or two.  We had to get a visa, and Belarus is the only dictatorship left in Europe, so you have to get a visa and you have to have been invited by someone in Bialorus.  You have to get a hotel to invite you.  We had to get tour guides.  We don't speak a word of 58:00Russian or Belarussian, but we -- from Kiev, we took an all-day train to Gomel, and there had been almost no tourism in Gomel Gomel is downwind Chernobyl.  And so, there was a lot of illness, a lot of childhood leukemia.  And Gomel is northeast of Chernobyl, but that's how the winds go.  And so, we were -- our guide said we were the first tourists she had had in a long time.  There were a lot of German tourists, but in terms of from the United States, there were very few.  And we just walked around the city.  We -- the guide said, "Is there anywhere you'd like to go?"  And -- the first day we had her -- and we said, "Well, a distant cousin of Mitchell's had mentioned a match factory."  And she said, "Oh, I'll take you to the match factory."  So, the same match factory that this man who would be 100 if he were still alive remembered from his 59:00childhood in Gomel is still there, is still operating, and is still producing all the matches, the table matches, for the entire former Soviet Union.  We asked to go to some Jewish cemeteries, and she didn't know where to take us, but she connected us with a professor at one of the universities in Gomel.  Gomel's a university town -- who took us to a Jewish cemetery that no one had been in in decades, or no Jews had been in in decades.  And he was a non-Jew who was an expert on the history of Gomel.  And it was a remarkable experience, and we then went back to Kiev, and we took the trip down the Dnieper for ten days.  And one of the stops was in, uh, Zaporizhia, and we connected with a man who's a Yiddish singer, whose name I've just forgotten, but maybe it'll come to me -- who the Jewish music festival had brought here five or ten years earlier.  And 60:00he came and met us and went around on the tour with us.  And he -- the only language we had in common was Yiddish, so we did our best.  He told us a joke in Yiddish, which I then told here at an event in our shul, and the rabbi came up to me afterwards and told me he had heard the joke before.  So, I guess this wasn't a -- oh, Arkady, uh --

CW:  Gendler?

JK:  -- Gin-- yeah. 

CW:  Wow.

JK:  Gendler -- Ginzler.

CW:  Gendler.

JK:  Gendler.  Arkady Gendler.  So, we spent an afternoon with him in Zaporizhia.  And then we -- after the boat leaves you off, we were taken by bus to Bucharest, and we visited the local Jewish museum, which is in a shul.  There is a synagogue, but it was closed for repairs.  And we -- you know, we walked around, and obviously Jewish life isn't what it once was in Bucharest, 61:00but it was a wonderful experience.  We just wish we had had much more time in -- in Gomel.  Oh, the one thing I want to say about Gomel is in Kiev, most of the -- not everyone, but most of the people look Slavic, with Slavic facial features.  And in Gomel, everybody looked familiar.  Everybody in the town of G-- now, some of them have Jewish ancestors.  Some are Jews now.  But even the ones who aren't Jews now -- many of them probably have a lot of Jewish ancestors.  The majority of the population in Gomel 100 years ago was Jewish.  Most of that is gone now, but the faces were all familiar.  There was something about looking around -- and there were -- there were some peop-- we were introduced to someone who is now a Belarus -- well-known poet who -- I mean, I know we're not supposed to think of a -- a stereotypical look of Jews, but if 62:00this guy was a stereotypical Jewish face -- if he wasn't, I don't know what was, and he's not Jewish at all.  But at some point, maybe he was.  We did get to meet with the head of the local circus, which is a government institution in Gomel.  And we went with our translator, our guide.  And so, we walked into his office and we said to him, in Yiddish, "Can we talk Yiddish to you?"  And he replied, in Russian, that in that office, he was an official of the Belarus government and he was allowed to speak only one of the official languages:  Belarussian and Russian.  Well, I didn't know at the time that Yiddish was an official language of Belarus until sometime in the mid-1930s.  So, he wouldn't talk Yiddish to us.  So, Mitchell and I tried in our Yiddish or our English to do something that would get him to crack a smile indicating that he understood the Yiddish.  We also said, "Well, can we meet you outside your office and talk 63:00Yiddish?"  And he said, "No."  So, we asked him about the local Jewish community.  We didn't really do as much work as we should have to connect with the local community.  And the person we had tried to reach wasn't there.  And we said to him -- we asked him about the local Jewish comm-- he said Jewish life in Belarus was picking up and that Jews were coming back to live in Belarus and, you know, maybe a few are. Probably Israeli entrepreneurs, if it's like anything in Hungary.  And we asked about the -- he said there was a local Jewish community center, but he thought it was closed for remodeling.  And he then said, "Well, let me" -- you know, he was talking Russian and then the translator was translating to English.  And so, he pressed a button and picked up the phone, and then he said, "Yes, they're closed for remodeling."  And what we realized was that it was on his speed dial, because he only pressed one button.  So, we thought, well, here's someone who's an official of the Belarus 64:00government, the head of the local circus, and he's somehow involved in the Jewish community, but we didn't have a way to reach him.  So, as I said, I wish we had -- we've since then made some connections with a Jewish organization in Minsk, which is the capitol and the largest city in Belarus, and I wish we had done that before, because we would have had even more fun had we had more time in Gomel.  But Mitchell's -- my husband's mother's family is from Gomel and he really wanted to go there and I'm so glad we went.  The other story is that I mentioned to the guide that my family was from Nesvizh.  And for me, Nesvizh is sort of, you know, theoretical.  And I have some pictures from the Yizkor book, but I think of it as sort of a theoretical place.  And she said, "Oh, I was there yesterday."  And that just blew my mind, that here, my ancestral home -- 65:00she was in the town yesterday.  So, had we had more time, maybe we would have gone to Nesvizh, also.

CW:  Wow.  Just curious, what does the match factory look like?

JK:  It's a big factory with a wall around it, and it had a gate.  And there was a gift shot.  And we bought some packages of matches and we bought a potholder, and we bought some little weaving -- you know, was a crafts place.  And we offered -- my husband offered some suggestions to the salesperson about how they could market their things better.  And she seemed a little skeptical, and he said, "Does your supervisor" -- I mean, the translator was working with us the whole time.  "Does your supervisor like suggestions?"  And she said, "No."  So, you know, this is a dictatorship.  And it's not like going anywhere else in Europe, where people will tell you what life really is like.   People 66:00were somewhat guarded in Belarus.  Not that we could really talk to anybody and -- we were mostly with the guide and an additional translator, and then with the college professor who told us about the Jewish history of Gomel.

CW:  So you talked at the beginning about feeling very connected to Eastern Europe.

JK:  Um-hm.

CW:  And you've talked about being interested in Yiddish and Yiddishkayt.  So, how does this -- how does your connection to Yiddish, Yiddishkayt and your Eastern European Jewish heritage fit into your broader sense of being an American Jew?

JK:  Well, first, I know it's a hopeless cause, but I'm going to say it anyway.  When I was growing up, Yiddishkayt meant Judaism.  It didn't mean Yiddish.  So, the word has been shifting so that now Yiddishkayt means Yiddish 67:00culture, but I don't like it.  So, I'm registering my objection to that, even though I know what you mean and I know saying Yiddish culture or Yiddish-inspired culture is kind of wordy.  So, yes, I guess I have to get used to the -- that that's what "Yiddishkayt" now means. I don't know how to sort it out.  I go to shul about once a month.  I daven in Hebrew.  Um, I sing Hebrew songs.  I've been to Israel five times.  We sent our son to religious school.  He went to Camp Ramah, which is the conservative movement camp, and to the reform movement local day camp. I don't know how to sort out the pieces, but I don't need to.  Now, it's -- people make assumptions.  Our shul is having a retreat in May, and I guess the guest speaker is a professor at Rutgers who's an 68:00expert in Yiddish humor or something.  And -- oh, I'm sorry.  Wrong retreat.  It was last time we had a retreat, and there was a professor from Jewish Theological Seminary talking all weekend about some interesting theological issues involving the Jewish religion.  And I offered to lead a sing-along.  And I first offered to lead a Yiddish sing-along, because I thought they'd have a separate Hebrew sing-along.  And they said, well, they didn't think there'd be enough interest in a Yiddish sing-along.  I said, "Okay, well, I'll lead a Hebrew sing-along."  And someone said to me, "Now, you're not going to do all Yiddish songs, are you?"  And I thought I go -- I'm a member of a congregation.  I daven in Hebrew.  The assumption somehow was that if I love to sing Yiddish songs that I don't know Hebrew songs or don't like to sing those, as well.  And that's not the case.  We're American Jews.  We can -- we 69:00can be observant a lot or a little or not at all.  We can be interested in Yiddish a lot, little, or not at all.  We can be interested in Hebrew and Israeli life a lot, a little, or not at all.  We can put together whatever we want.  It's not -- there's still some people who are living 100 years ago, who think if you're interested in Yiddish then you're secular and you're anti-Zionist, and if you're interested in Hebrew then you're observant and you go to shul.  I mean, life is simply not like that.  The people who speak Yiddish in Israel are the Haredim and the people who speak Hebrew and Yiddish are mostly secular, you know?  So, what was true or thought to be true 100 years ago isn't true anymore for Americans.  We can pick and choose whatever in Jewish life we like, and we're part of a community that has all the pieces.  70:00So, just because there are some things I don't do, someone else is doing them, and that's fine. 

CW:  I just want to go back for a second to ask you about -- I mean, about -- something related to KlezCalifornia.  Not only have you been involved in KlezCalifornia, but other non-profits --

JK:  Um-hm.

CW:  -- related to not only Jewish things.  So I'm wondering what you see the role of nonprofits in the transmission of culture?

JK:  Well, the other nonprofits I've been involved with were all advocacy groups.  I was an environmentalist for twenty-five years.  For most of that time -- well, for more than twenty-five years, I was involved both as a staff person and a volunteer with the Sierra Club, so I know the role of nonprofits in American political life quite well. I don't know whether there's a difference -- 71:00if the Folksbiene Theatre had been organized as a for-profit, I'm not sure it would make any difference for the people who go to the performances, except if it's a nonprofit, then we can appeal to the very generous American Jews to donate to it.  So, that's the reason for having a nonprofit, the -- well, I'm a -- when I'm not doing KlezCalifornia work, I'm a fundraising consultant, I'm a grant writer.  And what's remarkable to me, when I do prospect research for my clients, who are not Jewish organizations, per se, they -- you know, they're educational and advocacy and health and social services and environmental and every other kind of organization -- is that when I do searches for foundations that are interested in particular subjects, the number of Jewish names that comes up, the number of Jewish foundations that comes up is remarkable.  We've 72:00-- as a community, we've done remarkably well in this country, and we've been amazingly generous.  I mean, I'm -- you know, I'm looking for something environmental, and there's the name of all the Jewish groups that give for environmental causes.  So, it's -- the tradition of tsedakah continues even among Jews for whom that's the only thing left of their Judaism.  They know that they want to give back because they've done well and they have an obligation to give back.  So, tell me more about your question, because I'm not sure --

CW:  Well, I'm just -- I'm wondering how, you know, I mean, the places like KlezKamp are sort of centers for learning about Jewish culture and Yiddish culture and certain people talk about sort of the importance of those types of camps and organizations like KlezCalifornia in sort of transmitting and 73:00continuing Jewish culture.  So, wondering just your thoughts on that.

JK:  Well, probably ninety-nine percent of the organizations that are involved in transmitting Jewish culture are nonprofits.  There might be a few that aren't but, you know, every synagogue, every Jewish community center, every Yiddish organization that I know of, all the foundations, they're all non-profits.  We rely on people who've made money doing something else to fund us.  Someone who made money in real estate or high tech or something else and that's -- and then forms a foundation or otherwise is very generous, and that's who we have to count on, because I understand that no Jewish cultural organiz-- 74:00tickets don't pay for what you see or what you go to.  Any workshop you go to is being -- likely being subsidized by some generous foundation or individual or family.  So, we need to rely on that generosity, and the Yiddish Book Center has been remarkably successful.  Send some of that to California.  (laughter)

CW:  So what do you see as the place of Yiddish in America today?

JK:  Well, I don't want to talk about that, and I'll tell you why.  Because that's sort of like talking about what's going to happen to Yiddish.  And I don't want to tal-- I choose not to talk about that.  I choose to read Yiddish because I get pleasure out of it and I choose to sing Yiddish songs and lead sing-alongs because it's fun, and I don't want to think about it.  Now, I will say that my husband's brother is Lubavitch, and his daughter and her now eight 75:00children live in Crown Heights.  And the older kids speak Yiddish.  And it's great fun talking to them, because they can't say very much in Yiddish, but what we can talk about is at -- I can certainly converse with them.  And it's really a lot of fun to hear it.  So, the Yiddish language is continuing in the Hasidic community.  And I'm just going to keep singing.

CW:  So what has been -- is most important for you to transmit to future generations about Jewish identity?

JK:  I don't know.  I mean, I think the most important thing is that Judaism 76:00is a civilization -- Mordecai Kaplan's view that even people who don't want to participate in the religion should know that there is great joy and pleasure in living as a Jew with Jewish holidays and Jewish values and Jewish literature and Jewish languages, and that it's a wonderful way to live.  And in America, more and more people are choosing to be Jewish.  It's -- some of the most devoted members of our shul are Jews by choice.  And, as my husband pointed out, when somebody marries a Jew, they're drawn to Judaism.  That's part of -- usually what attracted them to the person.  So, at the very same time that the rigid institutions in Israel are making it harder and harder for people there to be 77:00accepted as Jews, we're finding that in America, more and more people want to be Jewish.  And of course they do, because it's a terrific way to live.  And if non-Jews realize it, why shouldn't more Jews realize that it's just a great way to be alive. 

CW:  That's great.  Well, I have a couple more questions, but is there anything that you wanted to -- else that you wanted to show or talk about?

JK:  Well, let's -- let's see.  Well, I want to say a few things that we haven't covered.  The first is that the difference between Northern California and Southern California -- there are many fewer Yiddish speakers here and many 78:00more klezmer musicians.  Southern California has much more Yiddish language.  There are three organizations. Workmen's Circle, Yiddishkayt, and California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language -- think I have the name right.  But they have much less klezmer mus-- they have a few klezmer bands.  We have twenty-five.  They have much less klezmer dancing, much less Yiddish singing.  And that's just something interesting about the way it developed in California. 

CW:  Any idea why that might be?

JK:  I think it has to do with the history of immigration, that the heavy waves of Jewish immigration to the Bay Area were German Jews in the late nineteenth century, who all went to San Francisco.  And so, the two Reform shuls in San 79:00Francisco are very heavily German Jewish oriented.  We had the earthquake and fire, and people then went to Southern California.  So, there was just a different history of Jewish migration, so more of the East European Jewish immigrants went to Southern California.  And in the Bay Area, they came to the East Bay rather than the West Bay, to San Francisco.  So, there's -- well, also the housing prices in San Francisco -- but most of the klezmer musicians in the Bay Area live in Berkeley and Oakland, in the East Bay, and there's much more intense interest in Yiddish culture in the East Bay and in Palo Alto than in San Francisco.  The other thing I wanted to mention is that when we first got started, there was some skepticism on the part of the Jewish community centers that people would turn out for Yiddish culture.  And I remember we had our 80:00first event at a JCC -- was at the Berkeley JCC in 2005.  And there were three or four hundred people.  We had a concert and dance party Saturday night and then workshops all day Sunday.  And someone from the JCC San Francisco said -- where we had proposed doing the next one -- said, "Well, I'm not sure."  So, she came over and she saw hundreds of people dancing wildly.  And then, in Palo Alto, before we did one with that JCC, they said, "I don't know if our people will turn out for Yiddish culture, and the same thing: hundreds of people showed up.  So, no one anymore in the Bay Area says to us that they don't think people will show up for it.  In West Marin, which is not very Jewish, there were three hundred people.  A lot of young families.  All kinds of families of all racial and ethnic backgrounds came because klezmer music is terrific and you don't have to be Jewish to love it, and Yiddish culture -- how can you not like Yiddish 81:00proverbs, you know?  How can you not like singing songs that are great fun?  How can you not like dancing?  And I mean I did Israeli dancing for many, many years.  Klezmer dancing is much easier, because it's -- you're sort of dragging along on -- you're making patterns on the floor as opposed to the Israeli dancing, which is a lot of jumping and hopping.  And so, as people get older, it's much easier for them to do klezmer dancing than Israeli dancing, and it's also more following the leader rather than knowing a choreography.  So, all those things make it very popular with Jewish families, non-Jewish families -- it's just something that attracts a lot of people.  The other thing I want to say is that -- and this is true for all Jew-- new Jewish organizations, that the first few years, foundations invest in you.  They'll give you two or three years' worth of funding to get going, but then many Jewish org-- new Jewish 82:00organizations, when they get to be six, seven, eight, nine years old have a struggle with figuring out how they're going to sustain themselves financially.  And that's particularly true for Yiddish organizations because we're sort of one wonderful thing within the larger Jewish community which has many other wonderful things.  And so, we're always on the lookout for people who throw Yiddish phrases into their conversation, because, oh, maybe they're someone interested in Yiddish.  So, it's the constant challenge of fundraising, of trying to find a way to sustain even a small organization. I mean, we still get generous foundation support for our festivals.  But in terms of the -- you know, the newsletter or the ongoing activities of subsidizing dance parties and having publicity for sing-alongs, it -- the people doing it for us are either 83:00volunteering or we're paying them a pittance, because they know we don't have very much.  And there are no Jewish musicians -- well, maybe one or two -- who are really making a nice living in Jewish music or Jewish culture.  So it's a constant struggle being a nonprofit trying to figure out, well, we know we're offering a lot.  We're offering something to the Jewish community and the general community that they don't get anywhere else.  And we're peddling as fast as we can to sustain and grow what we're doing every year.

CW:  Well, this is a sort of silly question, but it's something that I've been asking a lot of people, so (laughter) just pardon me for a minute.  I'm wondering if you have a favorite Yiddish phrase, proverb, or song?

JK:  Well, I already told you lately I've been singing "Zog maran," listening to it over and over and over again.  I don't think it's my favorite.  I don't know if I have a favorite song.  Well, I love saying "keynehore [expression to ward off the evil eye]."  And the idea of "keynehore" is that, as Michael Wex describes it, that the air is filled with sheydem and ruchim, spirits and -- that are just hanging around, waiting for you to say something positive so they can come in and ruin it.  So, you have to say "keynehore," "no evil eye," as a way to neutralize them.  And I love saying it, because I guess for 100 years, Jews tried to make our religion rational, you know?  We're -- we worship and we 85:00sit quietly like Protestants do and we -- there's a reason for every -- you know, that -- and I love the irrational parts of the tradition, the amulets, the idea that these spirits are waiting for you to say something.  So, sometimes it's a little awkward when I say something positive in a non-Jewish setting and I want to say "keynehore," but I feel like it would divert the discussion into something -- and maybe we're talking about something important that's not Jewish.  But I love it because it's so irrational.  It's so -- and I don't really care whether I believe that there are sheydim and ruchim hanging around waiting.  I just love the approach of acting as though I believe that.  So, I 86:00guess "keynehore" is my favorite.  Of course it's also a Hebrew phrase, but the -- the "keynehore" is the Yiddish.

CW:  Yeah.  Um, (laughter) and what advice do you have for future generations?

JK:  Hmm.  Well, the same advice that I gave our son.  Just do the mitzvahs and observe the holidays and that's what's important.  [BREAK IN RECORDING] Well, I really -- one of the things I could've mentioned but I didn't was I started reading Kadia Molodowsky's "House with seven windows," which is a wonderful collection of short stories.  And I thought, well, the English is simple.  I can read this in Yiddish.  And so, my friend Max and I have been downloading the stories from the Yiddish Book Center's collection.  And we've 87:00been reading the stories in Yiddish, and it's a wonderful thing that the Yiddish Book Center has been doing, that it's -- I mean, we like to buy books, too, 'cause it helps the authors.  But when you just want a short story, it's so nice to be able to download it, and it's right there.  And it -- I don't have to send away to New York for it Boston or something.  One of the things we've realized in KlezCalifornia is that younger generations don't have any connection to Yiddish culture.  They probably don't have Yiddish grandparent-- Yiddish-speaking grandparents.  If they go to a family seder and -- once I tried to teach some kids the fir kashes in Yiddish, but then you have to teach them the different melody, the gmore-nign [cantillation with which the Talmud is studied] rather than the other -- and we realized that if they go to a family 88:00seder, no one's going to appreciate that they know that.  So, that raises the question of how can we make sure that every generation of young Jews has some connection with the East European Jewish experience?  So, KlezCalifornia's come up with a project that we've been trying to fundraise for for quite a few years and haven't yet.  But we know it's a terrific idea, which is that we think that music is a way to get people interested.  So, what we want to do -- and we're gonna do a sample of it -- is to develop learning objectives for each grade, K through eight or K through twelve.  Things like Yiddish is written in the Jewish alphabet. Yiddish has Germanic and Slavic and Hebrew and Aramaic elements. Yiddish was the language of East European Jews for 1,000 years.  You 89:00know, those are facts, and you would put them -- learning objectives would be looking at a map of Eastern Europe, draw roughly where Jews lived and spoke Yiddish.  And then, what we want to do -- see, in the Bay Area the KlezCalifornia community includes both the people who know the language and the music and the arts -- to put together lesson plans, maybe two forty--minute lesson plans for each grade and go in and lead with a song, and have the song teach the lessons that we want to teach.  So, for example, I'm told that in California schools, the song "Don't You Remember Sweet Betsy from Pike" -- did you learn that song?  Well, it's about the Gold Rush, and I'm told that California schools, at least some of them, that song is used to teach about the Gold Rush.  So, similarly, Yiddish songs can be used to teach about Jewish 90:00life.  You could have a Yiddish song about drinking, which many of them are, of course, and that shows that Jews drank and that they spoke Yiddish in their everyday life.  You can have a religious song in Yiddish -- of which there are many -- and that shows that Jews live their religious life in Yiddish, also.  So, we want to come up -- well, we know that there are religious schools and day schools that are interested when we offer them a program.  And what we want to do is to come up with forty-minute units that either someone who knows how to work with kids and can lead or at least sing Yiddish song -- can go in and have the song be a segue into a discussion of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. 

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:  Well, a sheynem dank, thank you so much --

JK:  You're welcome.

CW:  -- for speaking with me and the Yiddish Book Center.  This has been 91:00really wonderful. 

[END OF INTERVIEW]