DAVID SHNEER ORAL HISTORY

EMMA MORGENSTERN:This is Emma Morgenstern and today is July 12th, 2010. I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts with Professor David Shneer. We are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Professor Shneer, do I have your permission to record this interview?

DAVID SHNEER:Yes, you do.

EM:Thank you. All right, so we can get started. So, can you start by telling me where you grew up?

DS:Sure. I was born in Los Angeles. Actually, in a suburb of Los Angeles, as most Jews of my generation are not actually from LA. But my parents picked a suburb -- I don't know if intentionally where there were not a lot of Jews but certainly far from the Jewish centers of Los Angeles. So, I grew up in an environment that was me being the only Jewish kid on the block and singing Christmas carols with all the other kids and then having them come over to my house to light Hanukkah candles.

EM:Okay, and so who did you grow up with?

DS:With my parents. In our house, it was my parents and my younger brother. My 1:00grandparents lived, I think exclusively at this time, on the East Coast. They moved out from the East Coast to Los Angeles the way most of my family did in this great next chain migration from New York and Philadelphia to Los Angeles so that now almost all of my family lives in the Los Angeles area.

EM:And so, you did grow up in a Jewish household?

DS:Um-hm, yeah. Both my parents are Jewish. They were both -- well, my mother was raised relatively secularly. My grandfather was a truck driver in the union. That was his Jewish experience. My father was the son of a textile factory manager and a Hebrew school teacher who kept a kosher home. So, he was at least raised in a kosher home. But he actually was very cynical about Jewish religious observance because in his words, it was: "You make up whatever you want to suit your needs at the time." So, our house, we didn't have a lot of Jewish religious observance in the home. We had Pesach, we had Passover. We didn't do Shabbos. I 2:00went to Hebrew school, hated it, which I think is what you're supposed to do with Hebrew school. And had a bar mitzvah and then moved on to music -- was my growing up experience with Jewish culture.

EM:Okay, so in what ways did you connect with music as part of Jewish culture?

DS:Oh, not at all. For me, music was classical and jazz. I was in the high school orchestra, the marching band, and the jazz ensemble. So, no, I had actual-- I had never connected music to my Jewishness in high school, certainly. And now more, now that I do research on Yiddish culture, now I've just started a project doing research on a cabaret singer, a Yiddish cabaret singer. I'm now starting to make the connections, but personally they were not connected.

EM:Okay. So, how did you become interested in Jewish studies?

DS:It's a good question. I went to college. I went to Berkeley and I don't think 3:00I had a particular interest in studying Jewish studies at the time. My majors were chemical engineering and history. But I knew I wanted to do history and I went to my first chemical engineering class with eight hundred people studying organic chemistry and I was, like, I am out of here. I can't do this. So, I knew that I wanted to be in the humanities and social sciences and I started working on Russian history, which I think was my door into Jewish studies. I actually studied abroad in Leningrad, Petersburg. I was actually there when the city actually changed its name in 1992. And I think it was there that I started actually exploring how my personal Jewish life connected to the research area that I had. It was also at college that I, for want of a better word, became more Jewishly involved. I was involved with Hillel. I did the Young Israel group, that kind of stuff. I did a summer program in Israel. So, I think it was the combination of those two things that came together. But I was very clear that I didn't want to study abroad in Israel. I wanted to study abroad in Russia 4:00and have a real academic experience there and really learn Russian fluently.

EM:And so, why didn't you want to study in Israel?

DS:It didn't feel like my research area. My intellectual interests were definitely leading me towards Russia. I actually went to Russia in high school as part of a student ambassador's program at the end of the Cold War, which is kind of fun, seeing all these Russian Soviet kids with their little red pioneer banners and us stupid little Americans making fun of them, basically. I don't know how much love and ambassadorship actually took place from the trip but it certainly planted a bug in me that -- I would foster curiosity, fascination, interest in wanting to go back, so I did that. I mean, I have been to Israel many times and I end up having to do a lot of work there. But I knew very clearly in college that I was going to Russia.

EM:And what drew you to Russia, other than your visit? Or what about your visit drew you?

DS:Well, it was both the visit -- but also, my grandparents are both from there. I've told this story pretty frequently about how my grandfather told his kids -- told my dad that he was born in New York and he didn't speak with an accent. Neither did my grandmother. Although all of my grandparents were born in Russia, not a one of them spoke with any kind of Yiddish accent. And the truth of the story only came out when he was forced, under oath, to say where he was born and he answered Ukraine. Russia. And so, that sent shockwaves through the family and he ended up doing his own oral history. And I remember in high school, when his oral history got transcribed and circulated around the house, it was the sort of family Holy Grail. And clearly, there was something there that -- another seed that got planted between me and connecting back to Eastern Europe. But I didn't hear any Yiddish in the house. That's not true. My grandmother used to call me "sheyne punim [pretty face]." So, I had the small Yiddish phrases here and there: "a glezl tey [a little glass of tea]," "sheyne punim," that kind of stuff. But my parents don't speak a word of Yiddish. That was my grandparents 6:00who were throwing those phrases in. So, the move to Yiddish from Russian or in addition to Russian happened much later. Not until graduate school, actually.

EM:And why did that change happen?

DS:Initially for research purposes. You were asking how I got involved in Jewish studies and I started in Russian history and sort of added, shall we say, Jewish history. I still remember when I applied for graduate school, I had to debate whether to apply to strong Russian history programs or strong Jewish history programs, and ideally you find both. I ended up at Berkeley, again, for graduate school, which was great. It was a good choice. But once I started graduate school in Russian and Jewish history, it was very clear that I was going to have to learn Yiddish. So, I started studying Yiddish at Berkeley for one year, an evening class, and then I went to the YIVO summer program, the Weinreich program, which, at that time, was at Columbia and did the advanced class there 'cause I had studied German in high school. So, I had already studied German, Hebrew, and Russian. Sort of put 'em together and don't tell the Yiddishists 7:00that, but effectively you put 'em all together and you get Yiddish. So, studying Yiddish was pretty easy for me.

EM:Okay, and once you started studying Yiddish, how did you feel about it?

DS:Well, initially, it was a language that I needed for research purposes. Clearly, never is Yiddish just a language that you're studying for research purposes, neither if you claim it is nor if you own the fact that it never is. And you know that because the very first day of any Yiddish class, you're always asked, Why are you studying Yiddish? And I've never been asked that in a German class or a Russian class -- or a Hebrew class, actually, for that matter. I'm trying to think. I think not even a Hebrew class. But in a Yiddish class, always, the first day, one goes around the room and says, Why are you here? Presuming one needs an explanation, as opposed to, Because I want to learn the language. That's clearly never a sufficient explanation for why someone is in the room. So when that was always my answer. My first year in Yiddish class, that was always my answer. It was sort of a dafke [defiant] answer. It was, 8:00like, I know you know want me to say it's because I'm nostalgic and miss my bubbie [grandmother] and want to connect to the Old Country. But it's really because I need this language to access the documents and the published materials that I need. Okay, so obviously, me having to say that was equally as -- it was equal proof that there was something more going on here. And clearly, it had to do with family and relationships. I think most of the people who study this area of history have personal connections to it, so it's pretty hard to get away from that, heritage studiers of Yiddish culture. I started writing letters to my grandmother in Yiddish, for example, and I still remember the day when she wrote back to me in Yiddish. She's, like, "Your Yiddish is now better than mine," 'cause she had not been speaking or writing Yiddish for fifty, sixty years, probably, by that point. So, I didn't know whether that was a triumph or there was something bittersweet about having your grandmother say, "Your Yiddish is now better than mine." I think, for her, it was mostly sweet but there's also 9:00this sense of your grandparents sort of gave up their culture to fully assimilate into American culture.

EM:And how did that make you feel?

DS:Oh, I mean, it was definitely bittersweet. It was that relationship with my grandmother through letter-writing, I think, that put an overlay of familial nostalgia on studying Yiddish, 'cause if I went into studying Yiddish for the need to access archival documents and published materials, I've certainly come out of it being one who both fosters it as an intellectual exercise and also sort of recognizes the need for preservation, for study, and for propagation. So, yeah, I was a convert, shall we say, from the Yiddish programs, recognizing that there were -- doing this oral history project, for example. The very fact that we're doing it, it's part of what has kept me, I guess, involved in not just Yiddish language but the Yiddish world, which is, I think, what we're 10:00talking about here.

EM:And now that you are a professor, do you see that same connection to Yiddish with your students? I don't know exactly what you're teaching right now. Maybe you should tell me that first.

DS:Sure. (laughter) Well, and I can tell you about my experience teaching Yiddish, 'cause my first experience teaching Yiddish was in Berkeley, California at a high school. Actually, a Jewish high school. The principal of this high school was sort of a once a week Sunday thing, not a -- it was not a day school. It was a supplementary school and she came to me and she said, "Would you be interested in teaching Yiddish for our high school students?" Trying to think of the year. It was about, let's say, 1997-98. I was a graduate student. No, must have been later than -- more like '99, 'cause I only started studying Yiddish in 1997. And she said, "Would you come and teach Yiddish for the students?" I was, like, "C'mon, high school students who want to study Yiddish? Give me a break." She's, like, "Let's try it." So, we tried it and it was an elective. It was no 11:00require-- thirty students showed up out of 150, for my elective. It was amazing. We had no ide-- certainly something we didn't expect. So, these are even, I guess, a little bit older than you are. So, these guys, if they were sixteen and seventeen, now they're thirty years old. So, that generation was still -- had some kind of pull to Yiddish. And we did the, Why are you in Yiddish class? 'Cause, as I said, that's what one does the first day of any Yiddish class. And they all actually had an answer. It was, My grandparents, it was -- actually, this is Berkeley, so there was a number of, I'm trying to find a sort of non-Israel-oriented Jewish culture. I got a lot of that from these high school students. Some of them were explicitly: I want a non-Zionist form of Jewish culture, and I see that in Yiddish. So, lots of interesting, very politically sophisticated high school students, one of whom was the son of the principal. And she told me she was very proud -- he was a senior in the year we did 12:00Yiddish. And we're talking about once a week on Sunday. It's not like these kids were coming out knowing Yiddish. Clearly, it wasn't about a vernacular use of a language. They weren't going to be able to read anything after class. They probably weren't even going to be able to speak to someone after class. The son of the principal read a Yiddish poem at his high school graduation, which -- she said that was clearly about him connecting to this culture through the language class. That's the way I think these kids were connecting to it: so, culturally, politically, a little bit of nostalgia. I wonder if, now, the next generation -- so, ten, fifteen years younger than those guys, the ones who are in high school now, I would be interested to see how successful those kinds of classes are. A colleague, Hannah Polin, she started a Yiddish class at a Jewish day school in Los Angeles and I heard it was -- quite successful class. So, clearly, there is still interest in it. From that first experience teaching Yiddish for high school students, I started teaching it at the University of Denver when I moved 13:00to Colorado in 2001, in an evening class. And it was, shall we say, a more trad-- it was whom you might expect to come out for a once a week evening Yiddish class; mostly older, mostly people who maybe had a little bit of Yiddish who wanted an opportunity to get it back. They were all very surprised when I was teaching it as a serious language course, when I told them to buy the textbook, and I only spoke in Yiddish when we walked in the room, and they were -- some pleasantly surprised, some freaked out and dropped out that night. So, there is that expectation of an experience of nostalgia as opposed to an experience of actually working hard to study Yiddish. We actually did that for about two or three years in this evening course. A few really amazing success stories. One student in that class -- and she now is a Yiddish translator. So, she really took the bull by the horns, started studying Yiddish on her own, and she now does a Yiddish reading group for the University of Colorado, where I 14:00teach now, and she's doing some translation of Yiddish. So, few stories like that, too. But now at the University of Colorado, I don't teach Yiddish language. But I do teach a course called "The History of Yiddish Culture." And the first time I offered the class, it had room for forty-five students, which -- the history department said, Well, we cap those classes at forty-five. And I remember -- this is a big state school, University of Colorado at Boulder, thirty thousand students. I had come from a small, private school, the University of Denver. So, when they told me they were going to cap my class at forty-five, I was, like, Okay, you can cap it all you want. There's not going to be more than -- I was expecting twelve students in the class. Maybe fifteen. It had a wait list. It hit the cap and had a wait list and I did not know why. I had no idea why; I did not. I resisted the urge to ask all the students why they were in the class, 'cause -- for the students who were, like, It fit my schedule, I didn't want them to feel bad about -- they didn't have compelling reasons to be in that classroom. But the data spoke for itself, that the class 15:00was full. So, I'm teaching that course again this coming spring semester, spring 2011. So, we'll see if it is full again. But this is Boulder, Colorado. We're not talking about New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago: places that have big, vibrant, Yiddish-speaking slash Holocaust survivor slash Jewish communities. This is a state -- has an old established Jewish community but not really a Yiddish-connected one. So, clearly, there's been some kind of leap, I guess, made where Yiddish culture is now -- I don't want to use the word normal, although that's the word that's popping into my head. It's now a course offering that sounds particularly interesting and exciting to students and doesn't have the baggage of, You must have a nostalgic reason to be in this room. Estimates, by the way, are that maybe fifty percent of the students were Jewish, which means that fifty percent of the students weren't Jewish. So, I call that a crossover success.

EM:And what do you think the difference is in teaching Jewish and non-Jewish students about Yiddish culture?

DS:They're obviously bringing different stuff to the table. And it depends on the context. So, in my classroom, in Boulder, with forty-five students, a lot of the students were there for what I was just saying: because it fits their schedule and they probably thought it was going to be easy, I'm guessing, 'cause they had never -- big words, they probably don't eve-- actually, I had several students, first day of class -- it hadn't occurred to me to explain what Yiddish was. If you signed up for a class, don't you know what -- I actually had students come up to me after the first day of class saying, This was great. I was a little lost, though. What -- what's Yiddish? First day of class. And we did a whole background of it but they didn't even know that it was a language. They didn't understand that it was a cultural concept. So, I've retooled my syllabus now in response to that. Did a little more explanation on the first day. But those students are not coming with any of the baggage that many of us who teach this stuff think our students are coming with. They're there to read, take exams, participate in seminar, and get a grade. That's why a lot of the 17:00students are there. Now, some could lament that fact. I suspect some who may be listening to this may say that's a loss for Yiddish, that it's just another random class on their course listings. From my vantage point, these are people who are being exposed to a culture that we all think is dying or lost or only wrapped up in the sort of fog of nostalgia. And for these students, it's a cool, interesting new thing that they're learning about for the first time. And I actually find that pretty exciting. For the Jewish students, fifty-fifty. On the Jewish students, fifty percent of those Jewish students have no nostalgic connection, no grandparents who know -- I wish that -- a relationship to it. They, like their non-Jewish counterparts, they maybe recognized it, they had heard of it, they maybe know they're somehow connected to it. I should also mention that a lot of my Jewish students are from intermarried families. So, they weren't necessarily raised with a lot of Jewish culture and background and 18:00learning in their houses. They're actually coming to university and they're exploring it for the first time. So, that's a quarter of the class and then the last quarter of the class are the students who are actually coming with -- seekers. They're looking to delve into personal pasts. A lot of my students ask if they can do genealogy or family history projects for their -- I have my students do final projects. As their final project -- those are that last quarter of students, who are coming with wanting to actually have this be more than just another class on their course schedule. It's clearly something meaningful for them, which is great. And then, I always have a few auditors in the classroom: so, the old bubbies who want to come and sit in on the class. And they actually add a very interesting perspective. The last class I taught, I had four of them. And for some of this history, they lived it. When we were studying Yiddish radio and the advent of technology and how it changed culture, this one old woman, she's, like, "I remember when we got our first Yiddish radio station 19:00here in Denver, Colorado." And I was, like, Denver? Yiddish radio in Denver, Colorado? I didn't even know there was Yiddish radio in Denver, Colorado. So, the classroom dynamics were quite fun. The evaluations were good, in general, but a lot of the students said some of the stuff was over their head, that it was too hard -- is not the right -- maybe too hard, 'cause these were lazy students. But they needed even more explanation than what I was giving them, which was interesting.

EM:They needed more explanation as far as --

DS:Basic concepts.

EM:Okay.

DS:Very basic concepts. To really have a "History of Yiddish Culture" course be successful, a student should probably already have had either an "Intro to Jewish History" or an "Intro to Jewish Culture" class, because so much of Yiddish culture is bound up in traditional Jewish living and learning. The word "Shabbos," "kashrut," all of these basic concepts that come up over and over in the literature -- which is, by the way, where I learned traditional Judaism, was via Yiddish culture, 'cause I wasn't raised with it. So, I learned all the rules 20:00of kashrut, not from Yiddish literature but because I had to understand Yiddish literature, I learned all of that stuff. But in a Yiddish culture class, you don't have time to spend a day explaining what Shabbos is. But there are a lot of students in the class who not only have no idea but even -- it doesn't resonate at all. So, we actually now have a requirement on the course that they have to have taken a lower division course before they sign up for ours. So, we'll see. That'll certainly drop the enrollment numbers but it may create a more cohesive conversation in the classroom, 'cause what I didn't realize was that studying Yiddish culture is actually quite challenging. It requires a deep level of cultural knowledge, not just linguistic knowledge.

EM:So, you've talked a lot about your work with Yiddish culture, classes, and research. I know you've also done research on the relationship between queerness and Judaism and post-war Yiddish. And can you speak a little about your 21:00different areas of interest?

DS:Yeah, I actually was accused in a job interview once of having no focus. And I actually asked him, "You only study this little, tiny thing and that's totally boring to me." My interest in queer culture and Jewishness came, actually, through the back door, 'cause when I was a graduate student at Berkeley studying Russian Jewish history, in addition to my teaching job, which would have given me a very poor standard of living, I decided that I needed to get another job. So, I was actually the principal of the gay synagogue in San Francisco. I did that for five years. I was their education director. So, I actually was working and living and experiencing this world that I think traditional Judaism would have found very odd -- no, I know that traditional Judaism would have found very odd, which I found a very compelling cultural moment or experiment about what 22:00happens when a group of people who cluster around an identity claim space in a religion, in Judaism. And how, for example, does that transform curriculum, how you teach text, how you teach language? I still remember very clearly the previous principal told me, "Just remember, don't do the opposites game when you're teaching them Hebrew, abba, ima [Hebrew: father, mother], because that doesn't work for these kids. They don't operate in a world of abba/ima." And I was, like, "Okay." I hadn't thought about the levels of transformation that are required in an environment where the families, most of the parents are in same sex couples. Kids' sexual identity -- they were six. So, we weren't going down that road. But their parents were by and large gay, lesbian, and some transgender and bisexual families. So, from that experience, I ended up getting much more interested in this idea of sexuality and its intersection with Jewish history. And my colleague, actually, at that synagogue -- she was one of the 23:00teachers, she's actually a trained sociologist -- she and I put together this book called "Queer Jews," which was trying to document this moment of what happens when this group of people actually claim space in this culture. And I actually think the book project -- it was very exciting to put together. It was my first book. Very nervous. I sort of sent a book, a terribly written, I'm sure, in retrospect, book proposal to a very well-known publishing house, 'cause someone just told me to do it, and fully expecting -- everyone has told me it's very hard to get things published, rejection, rejection, rejection. This was first thing -- she sent me a note back saying, "I'm very interested. Send me a full proposal and we'll get you a contract," in one email. It's, like, okay, I guess there's something here, meaning she thought that this book would sell because she thought there was a need. So, that was my first foray into it. And from that, I got much more interested in the scholarly study of these things, of gender and sexuality. I've done some short articles on queer Jewish performance 24:00and culture and then a couple of colleagues and I just put out a book called "Torah Queeries," which is queer readings of each of the portions of the Torah. So, traditionally in Jewish culture, the Torah's divided up into readings for each week that everybody reads together. And then, someone, usually on a Saturday morning during a Torah reading, does what's called a "dvar Torah." And these are each written essays -- we can call them "divrei Torah," so words of Torah -- from some kind of queer perspective. I always emphasize that about half the writers are not queer. So, we were trying to train people what it meant to read through a queer lens, which was its own interesting experience, especially when you have like the dean of a rabbinic school who we invited to write, and he said, "But I'm not gay!" We said, That's okay, we're not interested in you being gay. You don't have to be gay to do this. So, that was a fun project. This new project on Yiddish culture in post-war Germany, as a historian, I like really 25:00good stories. And that's how my last book project on Soviet Jewish photography came about. I was in a photo gallery in Moscow in 2002, at an exhibition, and noticed that the names of the photographers sounded awfully Jewish to me. So, I went up and asked the curator, "What's with all the Jews on the wall?" And she says, "Of course they're all Jewish." I was, like, What? Why the hell would "of course" they'd be all Jewish? I thought the Soviet Union hated Jews, et cetera, et cetera. Or my first book said they didn't hate them early but then, of course, they hated them later on. So, I ended up having a three-hour interview with her that afternoon and decided that this was the next story that I wanted to tell. This newest project was born about a year ago -- dinner, Saturday night, huge Berlin loft. Run-down, one of these things that maybe existed in New York maybe fifteen or twenty years ago but that would cost two billion dollars now. In Berlin, they still exist. So, it's an artist's loft. So, it's an artist, 26:00a Jewish conceptual artist, and her partner who invited us over for dinner. She is the Renewal spiritual leader of Berlin from the Renewal Judaism movement, which I can explain more if you think it'll be of interest to your listeners -- yes? In a nutshell, it's a movement that came out of '60s counterculture intersecting with neo-Hasidism. And its basis is in Philadelphia and Boulder, Colorado, where I am. And its founder is actually in Boulder, Colorado. So, when I was in Berlin, he said, "Oh, you need to go see Jalda Rebling, who's the -- she's ordained cantor, Renewal cantor there." So, we had dinner with her and I was expecting a nice, lovely dinner of discussion about contemporary Jewish life in Berlin, which we did. But then, she started telling me about, effectively, her past life as a Yiddish theater actress in communist East Germany. I didn't even know she was an Ossi, a person from East Germany, one. I knew she spoke Yiddish because I had heard that she spoke Yiddish. I didn't know why. And then, 27:00she started telling me this amazing story about how her family had a theater troupe in the '70s and '80s in East Germany and actually that she and another friend sponsored this huge festival of Yiddish culture that brought together Yiddish theaters, theater troupes, musicians, writers from all over the communist world in the '80s to come together to actually share Yiddish culture and have a Yiddish cultural festival. And I said, "Wow, this is amazing." She's, like, "Well, if you think that's amazing, my mother's story's even more amazing." So, she started telling me her mother's story, which I actually -- I did not believe her. I still remember very clearly walking out of dinner, saying to my partner, it's like? "I don't believe her. I need to go research." And the main thing that I didn't believe about her was she said that her mother and her aunt, her mother's sister, were the last people to see Anne Frank alive. And I was, like, Everybody probably says that. Every Dutch Jew probably says they were the last person to see Anne Frank alive. So, I'm a historian and I did the research and, lo and behold, she and her sister were the last people to see Anne 28:00Frank alive, or figuratively: they were with Anne Frank in Bergen-Belsen when she died and they were the ones that told Otto Frank about the fate of his daughters. So, that was a good story. So, I started turning her story into a bigger history about what happens to Yiddish culture in this particular space in the communist world. So, it's East Germany, so it's communist, like Warsaw or Moscow or Bucharest. But we're talking about Germany, where the Holocaust happened. So, there's this interesting fusion of Holocaust memory on the one hand and state-sponsored Yiddish culture on the other hand. And she occupies that middle space. So, that's my new research project.

EM:That's great. (laughs)

DS:Yeah. No, it's a compelling story. It's better than fiction. I couldn't have made it up had I tried. She's running guns during the war. She's caught by the police, sent to Auschwitz, then to Belsen, and then is invited to come build Yiddish culture in communist East Germany. I'm, like, Come on, you've got to be 29:00kidding me. And she moves. She moves the whole family to East Germany.

EM:Wow. (laughs)

DS:Yeah. It's a pretty great story.

EM:So, these different research projects you've done, they're all Jewish-related but they all seem very different. So, what do you see as the common thread through them?

DS:Common threads are twenty -- 'cause I've been asked this by that very obnoxious guy who said, "You have no research area." So, clearly Russian Jewish history is one of my research areas. And the other way I came to this woman's story about Yiddish in East Germany is I actually started following post-Soviet Russian Jews to the places that they migrated to with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I became very interested in Germany, how a lot of Russian Jews ended up in Germany. About 150 to 200,000 ended up in Germany. So, to call Jews in Germany today German Jews, it's not true. Most of them are Russian-speaking, who are becoming German. So, there is a connection there. I think the big picture, 30:00though, the big questions that I'm interested in are twentieth century Jewish history and politics and how politics shapes how we understand twentieth century Jewish history. So, the first book that I wrote about was on Yiddish culture in the early Soviet period and I was very interested in the people who built Yiddish culture. I wasn't interested in Stalin, frankly, and the quote-unquote overlords who were shaping, who were creating the framework in which these people were working. I was interested in these Jews who had been more or less written out of the Jewish history that I certainly was presented, the Jewish history that is taught in most standard Jewish history classes. And yet, these guys were building Yiddish culture, state-sponsored Yiddish culture. That's an interesting story and I was interested in those guys. So, that's one sort of -- trying to unmask how politics is affected, how we tell twentieth century and contemporary Jewish history. The story of these photographers, it's a whole new 31:00way of looking at the Holocaust, which I only started realizing when I put two and two together and realized war photographers for the Soviet Union, they're going to be photographing the Holocaust. It had never occurred to me that we talk about perpetrators, we talk about victims, we talk about bystanders in Europe. But what do we do with Soviet Jews photographing the war? They are not perpetrators. Their families were victims, absolutely. A lot of them lost family, but they themselves were living in Moscow. They were never under German occupation, the people I look at. It's hard to call them Holocaust victims. Bystanders, certainly not. They're actually working for the war effort. So, there's a fourth category that -- I'm trying to figure out what it looks like with this project. And in some ways, the photographers I study in the Soviet Union, where the Holocaust destroyed whole families and killed a million and a half people, their story more closely resembles the story of American Jews who came with the American Army to Europe in '44. Many of the photographers working 32:00for the Americans were Jewish, as well. But we don't normally think of the United States and the USSR as actually having very similar Jewish trajectories. We tend to think of them through a Cold War lens of having radically different social trajectories. And then, the queer stuff, I think that's very obviously about telling a story that hasn't been told and looking at something through a different lens. So, you could say I tend towards the revisionist. I tend towards trying to take the same thing that we've been looking at this way and just change the angle a little bit. You could just call it I'm dafke-esque. I like to sort of push the envelope. I don't think the subjects that I choose are -- they're not overwhelmingly radical, so I try to pick something that's relatively mainstream and interesting that -- and I'm really interested in contemporary relevance, in how the histories that we write actually speak to what we're doing now. So, this project on Yiddish culture and communist East Germany, I'm very interested in what role states play in the building of culture and I'm very 33:00interested in what contemporary Germany looks like, Jewishly, and how Jewish life was not destroyed in Europe at the end of the war despite what, say, the Israeli government might tell people, but that there's actually a very rich, vibrant, interesting Jewish life in Europe then and that persists to this day.

EM:And do you see Yiddish as having a connection to all of these research areas beyond the fact that it was the language that people were using or speaking?

DS:Well, you could even actually -- certainly, for all three of the big research projects that I've done -- have had a Yiddish tie into them. The photography project was interesting because most of the photographers that I wrote about were relatively Russified Russian Jews, kind of like my family: phrases in Yiddish, maybe grandma spoke Yiddish in the house, but they spoke Russian primarily, it seems, with their parents. So, they were already pretty Russified. 34:00But I brought in Yiddish into the project 'cause I knew I wanted to find the Yiddish connection and it actually was very easy to find. During the war, the government published a Yiddish newspaper called "Unity," called "Eynikayt." So, I was very interested in how the Holocaust gets narrated in Yiddish by the government. And when say by the government, I mean by a state-sponsored newspaper. It was run by Jewish writers and journalists, versus the Russian press. So, does the story get told differently, first, question mark? If it does get told differently, how does it get told differently and then what does that mean for the story of Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust that's told -- it was great. I mean, it's just one chapter in the book but I think it's a very important chapter to talk about what it meant to be Jewish during the war in the Soviet Union. The queer thing is interesting because there's nothing on the surface of studying queer Jewish culture, certainly that I've been working on that -- sorry about that, I just touched the microphone -- that begs Yiddish. 35:00But there's this bizarre cultural phenomenon that I think actually may be over, I'm not sure, of people who identify as queer being attracted to Yiddish culture. And I noticed this when I first started studying Yiddish in the mid '90s: there were an awful lot of lesbians around in the Yiddish classes that I was taking. I thought maybe this was an American phenomenon. In other words, maybe this is American identity politics intersecting, right? Sort of leftist Jewishness with queer politics equals Yiddish. And there is certainly something to that. The Klezmatics' first album, earliest album, is "Shvaygn = Toyt [Silence = Death]." It comes out in the late '80s; '87, '88, which was a clear play on the gay group ACT UP's slogan "Silence = Death" as a response to Reagan-era anti-AIDS policies. Not meaning fighting AIDS but not not fighting AIDS. But when I started studying Yiddish in more international contexts -- I 36:00did a summer program in Tel Aviv about ten years ago and there were an awful lot of queer folk, not just from the United States: Germany, Austria, England. And I was, like, Something's going on here. So, actually, we talked about this for a while and, for them, they think that the attraction to Yiddish has something to do with marginality, that as a language and culture that I don't want to say was marginalized but certainly became marginal either just because of linguistic assimilation, because of ideology, because of the Holocaust, for all of these reasons, that there's some attraction to it from marginal groups. But the other interesting thing is that these people from around the world weren't necessarily Jewish and they were queer and attracted to Yiddish. So, I was really starting to see something about how this generation of people was -- I actually don't think Yiddish inherently carries in it alterity, leftist politics. I don't 37:00believe in that. But I am very interested in how people put that on Yiddish and see Yiddish and then frame Yiddish that way. And clearly, there was something there. When I came to this international symposium and there were all these people, all gay, from -- not all. I exaggerate. But a lot of them were queer, from around the world. So, yeah, there's absolutely that extra intersection where, in the research and work that I've done, it's not necessarily visible although there is a lot of queer Yiddish performance on Sara Felder's reworking of the "God of Vengeance," for example, or Warren Hoffman's book on queer Jewish culture, both of whom are actually themselves queer, writing about queer Jewish culture. Naomi Seidman, who's done some work on this. So, there is clearly something going on there that, yeah, I think ties -- there, you've just made the tie. Actually, it's Yiddish that ties all four of the projects together.

EM:All right, great. Well, we can talk about the Book Center a little bit, the 38:00summer program. So, how did you first get involved in the summer program?

DS:I first got involved with the summer program here at the Book Center six years ago. It's either six or seven now. I think it's six years. A former Berkeley graduate student who I knew when I was still back at Berkeley many years ago named Robbie Adler Peckerar was the director of education here and he called me up and he said, "Do you want to come and teach a mini-seminar? We're trying to raise the academic standards here, get some sort of serious scholarship going here." In the past, the internship had been primarily an internship where students are working around the Book Center. It had had an intellectual and educational components but he was really trying to turn it into a for-credit academic summer. So, I came out and taught and had a great time. And I think the things that drew me were, one, the students are recruited. It's not the forty-five students on a wait list who are in my class. These are 39:00students who go through an application process, who have to articulate a very clear reason why they want to study Yiddish and nostalgia doesn't have to be number one on the list. In fact, I think sometimes nostalgia number one on the list might hurt an application. So, these are students who are serious about their learning and they're not paying tuition to come to this program, which I'm a big fan of because I'm a big fan of -- I don't like non-paying internships because it's prejudiced against poorer students. They can't afford to take non-paying internships 'cause they have to work in the summers. So, I was very interested that the Book Center managed to raise enough money to be able to actually support the students so they could actually be here and not feel like they were going into further debt by being here for the summer. Some may go into debt but at least the theory, I actually really supported the theory. So, the students were fantastic, smart, intellectually curious, and from a wide variety of backgrounds. I still remember the first year there were students from, I 40:00think, six countries coming here to study. The demographics have changed as different education directors have shaped the classes. But that first year, it was Hungarian guy and someone from Russia and Italy. It was like the experience I had originally at the YIVO Yiddish institute ten years, twelve years ago. So, that's one. Two, the being surrounded by Yiddish books is always just fun for a geeky academic like me. So, I used to go after class; I would just go sit on the stacks and play with books. And you can do that at some libraries but you're not allowed to take them. That's the difference. So (laughs) that's the fun part about being here at the Book Center is that you can actually see a book and then go get it. It's pretty amazing. And personally, I kind of like the Amherst area for short periods of time. I'm used to having Yiddish culture be connected to big city urban space, which I love. I'm a big city guy. But there is something very bucolic about coming out to Amherst and spending a week or two studying 41:00Yiddish in the morning, sitting on the floor in the afternoon, reading books, and then going and frolicking in a warm summer evening. Two weeks was about my -- that was exactly how much time I wanted to do it for 'cause then I needed my big city again. But it was great. I had a great time. So great that I've been back every summer since, which says both that I guess I'm doing an okay job 'cause I keep getting invited back but also that I keep wanting to come back, 'cause it's a great place to be.

EM:And how have your lectures changed over the years?

DS:Well, the structure has changed over the years. Ironically, I am the one with the longest longevity in the program, more than Hanan or Yuri or Amy. So, originally, the whole program was structured around a faculty member coming for one week stints, six different faculty members. And what we discovered was the students didn't know who Sholem Aleichem was but they knew exactly about the experimental communist poetry being written on the Lower East Side in the '20s. 42:00They were missing something. So, it got restructured to have an introduction for the first couple of weeks, which I've done the past two years and this year Rivke Margolis did it, to give the students some kind of -- I mean, in two weeks, what can you do? But at least to give them some kind of basic vocabulary with which to work that they can then do a little bit more in-depth study. So, I had been doing those after we had that first summer that was not so successful of lots of random things where the students came out saying, Who's Sholem Aleichem? Or, even better, they didn't know who Sholem Aleichem was but they had read "Chava" five times over the course of the summer as different instructors wanted to use the story. So, clearly, a little bit more coordination was needed. So, that coordination has been put in place. This is actually the first time I've done one of these mini-seminars here in now three or four years, 'cause I had been teaching the intro class. But the interesting thing is I used the intro class I taught here at the Book Center as the template for my "History of 43:00Yiddish Culture" class at Boulder. I turned it from two weeks into fifteen, so we got a lot more time to go in depth and do more reading. But this was the place where I incubated the idea for that class. How the classes have changed, I think it was more international than it is now. I think most of the students now are Americans or at least are students here at American universities. A number of the students are not American but they're students here at American universities. How else has it changed? I think in the early days, there was a much wider range of knowledge base that the students were bringing, which made it challenging for the instructors. So, we had fourth year graduate students in Jewish studies who just didn't know Yiddish, so they wanted to come here to study Yiddish and freshmen who were nervous as hell and hadn't been away from home for that -- so, those first couple of summers were quite challenging as the Book Center tried to figure out that fine balance between wanting to have a 44:00diversity of people in the room to push and challenge each other while not having that diversity be disruptive for the learning process. So, you would probably know better than I would at this point whether they've been successful with that. But that's been an ongoing issue.

EM:Great. And what advice would you give to students coming to this program or studying Yiddish elsewhere?

DS:So, my favorite line that I discovered when doing research for my first book: it was the headline of the communist Yiddish newspaper in the Soviet Union called "Der emes," and the headline read, "Yidish iz oykh parnose far yidishe kinder," which translates as "Jewish kids can earn a living from Yiddish, too." So, I mean, I jest, but the most frequently asked question I'm asked as a chair of Jewish studies and a professor is: What's my kid going to do with this, X, with whatever X is, 'cause X is invariably something (makes air quotes) useless. History, Jewish studies, Russian, it's (makes air quotes) useless. So, I said, 45:00"Well, I am a professor of Jewish history and I've done okay for myself." I joke because how many -- there's, what, thirty of us, forty of us around the country? It's not like everyone who comes to the Yiddish summer program is going to go on to be a Yiddish professor. But the point is, one could be. And actually, a lot of the students who've come through this program have ended up becoming professors of Yiddish or scholars in various educational formats. But more to the point, I actually think that this summer intensive learning experience is incredibly valuable for basic critical thinking, learning skills, appreciation for historical memory, which I think a lot of people, a lot of the students come out of this program having a much deeper appreciation for their own pasts and for the historical past in general. I've actually seen students have better relationships with their families after the Yiddish summer program because they start to care more. I mean, presumably, they cared to begin with, otherwise they 46:00wouldn't be here. But there's actually a deepening for many of the students of a connection to family, Jewish and not, by the way, because Yiddish is never just Yiddish. Yiddish is never just studying a language. It's always that and something more. So, I think the students come out of here with a deeper sort of emotional appreciation for those kinds of things, which I think is incredibly valuable. And they've worked, they've gotten training in things like, I don't know, videography and oral history and archival research, publications. We've had students do blogging. So, the students here are actually gaining really great skills that they can go take with them to do other projects if this -- for most of the students, this is not the end of their Yiddish journey if I'm going to use that slightly schmaltzy phrase. For most of them, it's the beginning but even if it is really the end of a student's Yiddish studies, they've learned a lot of valuable skills out of the experience here.

EM:Great. All right, well, I think we're out of time. (laughs)

DS:Really?

EM:Yeah, so --

DS:Do you have more questions?

EM:No. Is there anything else you'd like to add --- in a couple of minutes?

DS:Let's think. I can give you one last good story.

EM:Yes, sure.

DS:I'll give you a good story. It's 1999 and I was living in Moscow, doing dissertation research on Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union. And I made contact with local faculty who were working in Jewish studies 'cause, remember, in the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Jewish studies was new and slightly avant-garde and hot. So, I was coming in to this booming field that people were excited about. And I got an invitation from one of the faculty to come to the Yiddish Club of Moscow. Okay, the Yiddish Club of Moscow. Now, remember, this is a Soviet Union that had -- there's a lot of Yiddish speakers in the Soviet Union but Moscow was a very Russified city. So, I go to the Yiddish Club, which is at the old Jewish theater, the old Soviet-era Jewish theater called the Shalom Theatre. We go there and I go to the Yiddish Club and there's one other person who is in a 48:00standard deviation of ten of my age. It's mostly older people and then there are two other young people. And what I didn't know was that I was the honored guest that evening at the Yiddish Club of Moscow. I thought I was just coming to observe. So, no, I was the honored guest. No Yiddish was spoken. Only Russian. What made it the Yiddish Club was that they were reading Yiddish literature in Russian translation. So, they were reading David Bergelson and Perets Markish and Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Peretz in Russian. But these are Yiddish writers, so that made it the Yiddish Club, which is great. But then, they asked me to make a speech. And I asked, "In what language do you want me to make the speech?" And they said, Please do it in Yiddish. So, I made a speech to the Yiddish Club, presuming that most of the people in the room actually didn't really understand what I was saying. But it was this amazing experience of -- kind of like with my grandmother that I was mentioning where the yingele, the 49:00youngsters have conquered the older generation, that I was actually having a post-assimilationist moment. So, in this room, we see what linguistic acculturation looks like with all of these older people who undoubtedly had Yiddish in their childhoods -- are much, much more comfortable in Russian and the young guy's the one who's -- at the time, I was twenty-six years old and I was asked to make the official speech, which, in Russian, that's a job. I was asked to make the official speech in Yiddish. So, that was an amazing experience and I ended up making some connections at that event. And then I left. So, that was an amazing experience. Left. The next day, I read in the newspaper that that theater had had a bomb scare earlier in that day, that this was right, in 1999, when Chechnya, the Chechen War was flaring up again under Putin and apartment buildings were blowing up in Moscow while I was living there. And basically, 50:00whoever was blowing up those apartment buildings was trying to blow up the Jewish Theatre, two or three hours before I arrived at the theater. No one mentioned it, though. What I found very interesting was both the sort of déjà-vu of, okay, I was in a building that almost got blown up two hours earlier -- they had defused the bomb -- but that it was not an issue noteworthy of conversation to the people at the Yiddish Club who presumably knew, because they would -- I mean, they're part of the pulse of this community. So, I also found it a very interesting statement about what Jewish life in Russia looks like, where they're very Jewish, these people were all very Jewish. Anti-Semitism exists and is -- I call it persistent social anti-Semitism. It's sort of a general low-level anti-Semitism. But it doesn't bother them. That's what was different. It bothered the hell out of me. It shocks most Americans, the level of persistent social anti-Semitism. These people really -- it's sort of par for the course. It's just what it is. So, I found that story illuminated 51:00this sort of interesting -- what Jewish life looked like in Moscow, anyway, in 1999. It's ten years now ago, so it's radically different now. But sort of immediate post-Soviet period, it was a very interesting time to be there.

EM:Yeah. That's a great story. (laughs)

DS:It was a good story.

EM:All right, well, think with that, we can finish up. So, thank you very much for your --

DS:My pleasure.

EM:-- interview.

DS:My pleasure.

EM:All right.

[END OF INTERVIEW]