Keywords:American Army; bystanders; Cold War; communism; communists; concentration camps; cultural heritage; cultural history; East Germany; Eastern European Jews; German Jews; Holocaust; Israeli government; Jewish cultural life; Jewish history; Jewish photographers; Joseph Stalin; liberators; Moscow, Russia; perpetrators; research interests; research projects; Russian history; Russian Jews; Russian language; Soviet Union; U.S. Army; US Army; USSR; victims; war photographers; Yiddish culture
Keywords:"History of Yiddish Culture"; American universities; faculty members; graduate students; international students; Jewish studies; Lower East Side; National Yiddish Book Center; New York, New York; Rivke Margolis; Shalom Aleichem; Sholem Aleichem; Sholem Aleykhem; Steiner Summer Yiddish Program; University of Colorado at Boulder; Yiddish classes; Yiddish culture; Yiddish education; Yiddish literature; Yiddish studies; Yiddish summer programs; Yiddish writers
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 DavidShneer. We are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center'sWexler Oral History Project. Professor Shneer, do I have your permission torecord 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 asuburb -- I don't know if intentionally where there were not a lot of Jews butcertainly far from the Jewish centers of Los Angeles. So, I grew up in anenvironment that was me being the only Jewish kid on the block and singingChristmas carols with all the other kids and then having them come over to myhouse 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. Theymoved out from the East Coast to Los Angeles the way most of my family did inthis great next chain migration from New York and Philadelphia to Los Angeles sothat 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 factorymanager and a Hebrew school teacher who kept a kosher home. So, he was at leastraised in a kosher home. But he actually was very cynical about Jewish religiousobservance because in his words, it was: "You make up whatever you want to suityour needs at the time." So, our house, we didn't have a lot of Jewish religiousobservance 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 dowith Hebrew school. And had a bar mitzvah and then moved on to music -- was mygrowing 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 hadactual-- 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 aproject doing research on a cabaret singer, a Yiddish cabaret singer. I'm nowstarting 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 majorswere chemical engineering and history. But I knew I wanted to do history and Iwent to my first chemical engineering class with eight hundred people studyingorganic chemistry and I was, like, I am out of here. I can't do this. So, I knewthat I wanted to be in the humanities and social sciences and I started workingon Russian history, which I think was my door into Jewish studies. I actuallystudied abroad in Leningrad, Petersburg. I was actually there when the cityactually changed its name in 1992. And I think it was there that I startedactually exploring how my personal Jewish life connected to the research areathat I had. It was also at college that I, for want of a better word, becamemore Jewishly involved. I was involved with Hillel. I did the Young Israelgroup, that kind of stuff. I did a summer program in Israel. So, I think it wasthe combination of those two things that came together. But I was very clearthat 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 schoolas part of a student ambassador's program at the end of the Cold War, which iskind of fun, seeing all these Russian Soviet kids with their little red pioneerbanners and us stupid little Americans making fun of them, basically. I don'tknow how much love and ambassadorship actually took place from the trip but itcertainly 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 Israelmany times and I end up having to do a lot of work there. But I knew veryclearly in college that I was going to Russia.
EM:And what drew you to Russia, other than your visit? Or what about your visit
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 thestory only came out when he was forced, under oath, to say where he was born andhe answered Ukraine. Russia. And so, that sent shockwaves through the family andhe ended up doing his own oral history. And I remember in high school, when hisoral history got transcribed and circulated around the house, it was the sort offamily Holy Grail. And clearly, there was something there that -- another seedthat got planted between me and connecting back to Eastern Europe. But I didn'thear 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 andthere: "a glezl tey [a little glass of tea]," "sheyne punim," that kind ofstuff. 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 inaddition 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, Jewishhistory. I still remember when I applied for graduate school, I had to debatewhether to apply to strong Russian history programs or strong Jewish historyprograms, and ideally you find both. I ended up at Berkeley, again, for graduateschool, which was great. It was a good choice. But once I started graduateschool in Russian and Jewish history, it was very clear that I was going to haveto learn Yiddish. So, I started studying Yiddish at Berkeley for one year, anevening class, and then I went to the YIVO summer program, the Weinreichprogram, 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, studyingYiddish 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 researchpurposes, 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 alwaysasked, Why are you studying Yiddish? And I've never been asked that in a Germanclass or a Russian class -- or a Hebrew class, actually, for that matter. I'mtrying 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 thelanguage. That's clearly never a sufficient explanation for why someone is inthe 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 mybubbie [grandmother] and want to connect to the Old Country. But it's reallybecause I need this language to access the documents and the published materialsthat I need. Okay, so obviously, me having to say that was equally as -- it wasequal proof that there was something more going on here. And clearly, it had todo with family and relationships. I think most of the people who study this areaof history have personal connections to it, so it's pretty hard to get away fromthat, heritage studiers of Yiddish culture. I started writing letters to mygrandmother in Yiddish, for example, and I still remember the day when she wroteback 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 therewas something bittersweet about having your grandmother say, "Your Yiddish isnow 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 fullyassimilate 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 familialnostalgia on studying Yiddish, 'cause if I went into studying Yiddish for theneed to access archival documents and published materials, I've certainly comeout of it being one who both fosters it as an intellectual exercise and alsosort of recognizes the need for preservation, for study, and for propagation.So, yeah, I was a convert, shall we say, from the Yiddish programs, recognizingthat there were -- doing this oral history project, for example. The very factthat we're doing it, it's part of what has kept me, I guess, involved in notjust 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. Maybeyou 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, Californiaat a high school. Actually, a Jewish high school. The principal of this highschool 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 beinterested in teaching Yiddish for our high school students?" Trying to think ofthe year. It was about, let's say, 1997-98. I was a graduate student. No, musthave been later than -- more like '99, 'cause I only started studying Yiddish in1997. 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, Iguess, a little bit older than you are. So, these guys, if they were sixteen andseventeen, now they're thirty years old. So, that generation was still -- hadsome 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. Andthey 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 ofnon-Israel-oriented Jewish culture. I got a lot of that from these high schoolstudents. Some of them were explicitly: I want a non-Zionist form of Jewishculture, and I see that in Yiddish. So, lots of interesting, very politicallysophisticated 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 kidswere coming out knowing Yiddish. Clearly, it wasn't about a vernacular use of alanguage. They weren't going to be able to read anything after class. Theyprobably weren't even going to be able to speak to someone after class. The sonof the principal read a Yiddish poem at his high school graduation, which -- shesaid that was clearly about him connecting to this culture through the languageclass. 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 schoolnow, I would be interested to see how successful those kinds of classes are. Acolleague, Hannah Polin, she started a Yiddish class at a Jewish day school inLos Angeles and I heard it was -- quite successful class. So, clearly, there isstill interest in it. From that first experience teaching Yiddish for highschool 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 moretrad-- it was whom you might expect to come out for a once a week eveningYiddish class; mostly older, mostly people who maybe had a little bit of Yiddishwho wanted an opportunity to get it back. They were all very surprised when Iwas teaching it as a serious language course, when I told them to buy thetextbook, 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 anexperience of actually working hard to study Yiddish. We actually did that forabout two or three years in this evening course. A few really amazing successstories. 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, andshe 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 likethat, too. But now at the University of Colorado, I don't teach Yiddishlanguage. But I do teach a course called "The History of Yiddish Culture." Andthe 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 Iremember -- this is a big state school, University of Colorado at Boulder,thirty thousand students. I had come from a small, private school, theUniversity of Denver. So, when they told me they were going to cap my class atforty-five, I was, like, Okay, you can cap it all you want. There's not going tobe more than -- I was expecting twelve students in the class. Maybe fifteen. Ithad a wait list. It hit the cap and had a wait list and I did not know why. Ihad no idea why; I did not. I resisted the urge to ask all the students why theywere in the class, 'cause -- for the students who were, like, It fit myschedule, I didn't want them to feel bad about -- they didn't have compellingreasons 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, spring2011. So, we'll see if it is full again. But this is Boulder, Colorado. We'renot 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 aYiddish-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 offeringthat sounds particularly interesting and exciting to students and doesn't havethe 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, whichmeans that fifty percent of the students weren't Jewish. So, I call that acrossover success.
EM:And what do you think the difference is in teaching Jewish and non-Jewish
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 ofthe students were there for what I was just saying: because it fits theirschedule and they probably thought it was going to be easy, I'm guessing, 'causethey had never -- big words, they probably don't eve-- actually, I had severalstudents, first day of class -- it hadn't occurred to me to explain what Yiddishwas. If you signed up for a class, don't you know what -- I actually hadstudents come up to me after the first day of class saying, This was great. Iwas a little lost, though. What -- what's Yiddish? First day of class. And wedid 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 mysyllabus now in response to that. Did a little more explanation on the firstday. But those students are not coming with any of the baggage that many of uswho 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 belistening to this may say that's a loss for Yiddish, that it's just anotherrandom class on their course listings. From my vantage point, these are peoplewho are being exposed to a culture that we all think is dying or lost or onlywrapped 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 Iactually find that pretty exciting. For the Jewish students, fifty-fifty. On theJewish students, fifty percent of those Jewish students have no nostalgicconnection, no grandparents who know -- I wish that -- a relationship to it.They, like their non-Jewish counterparts, they maybe recognized it, they hadheard of it, they maybe know they're somehow connected to it. I should alsomention 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'reexploring it for the first time. So, that's a quarter of the class and then thelast 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 askif they can do genealogy or family history projects for their -- I have mystudents do final projects. As their final project -- those are that lastquarter of students, who are coming with wanting to actually have this be morethan just another class on their course schedule. It's clearly somethingmeaningful for them, which is great. And then, I always have a few auditors inthe classroom: so, the old bubbies who want to come and sit in on the class. Andthey actually add a very interesting perspective. The last class I taught, I hadfour of them. And for some of this history, they lived it. When we were studyingYiddish radio and the advent of technology and how it changed culture, this oneold 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 itwas too hard -- is not the right -- maybe too hard, 'cause these were lazystudents. 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 toJewish History" or an "Intro to Jewish Culture" class, because so much ofYiddish 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 inthe literature -- which is, by the way, where I learned traditional Judaism, wasvia 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 Yiddishliterature, I learned all of that stuff. But in a Yiddish culture class, youdon't have time to spend a day explaining what Shabbos is. But there are a lotof students in the class who not only have no idea but even -- it doesn'tresonate at all. So, we actually now have a requirement on the course that theyhave 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 amore cohesive conversation in the classroom, 'cause what I didn't realize wasthat studying Yiddish culture is actually quite challenging. It requires a deeplevel 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 queernessand 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 totallyboring to me." My interest in queer culture and Jewishness came, actually,through the back door, 'cause when I was a graduate student at Berkeley studyingRussian Jewish history, in addition to my teaching job, which would have givenme 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 didthat for five years. I was their education director. So, I actually was workingand living and experiencing this world that I think traditional Judaism wouldhave found very odd -- no, I know that traditional Judaism would have found veryodd, 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 areligion, in Judaism. And how, for example, does that transform curriculum, howyou teach text, how you teach language? I still remember very clearly theprevious principal told me, "Just remember, don't do the opposites game whenyou're teaching them Hebrew, abba, ima [Hebrew: father, mother], because thatdoesn't work for these kids. They don't operate in a world of abba/ima." And Iwas, like, "Okay." I hadn't thought about the levels of transformation that arerequired in an environment where the families, most of the parents are in samesex couples. Kids' sexual identity -- they were six. So, we weren't going downthat road. But their parents were by and large gay, lesbian, and sometransgender and bisexual families. So, from that experience, I ended up gettingmuch more interested in this idea of sexuality and its intersection with Jewishhistory. 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 thisbook called "Queer Jews," which was trying to document this moment of whathappens when this group of people actually claim space in this culture. And Iactually think the book project -- it was very exciting to put together. It wasmy first book. Very nervous. I sort of sent a book, a terribly written, I'msure, in retrospect, book proposal to a very well-known publishing house, 'causesomeone just told me to do it, and fully expecting -- everyone has told me it'svery hard to get things published, rejection, rejection, rejection. This wasfirst thing -- she sent me a note back saying, "I'm very interested. Send me afull proposal and we'll get you a contract," in one email. It's, like, okay, Iguess there's something here, meaning she thought that this book would sellbecause she thought there was a need. So, that was my first foray into it. Andfrom that, I got much more interested in the scholarly study of these things, ofgender 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 foreach week that everybody reads together. And then, someone, usually on aSaturday morning during a Torah reading, does what's called a "dvar Torah." Andthese are each written essays -- we can call them "divrei Torah," so words ofTorah -- from some kind of queer perspective. I always emphasize that about halfthe writers are not queer. So, we were trying to train people what it meant toread through a queer lens, which was its own interesting experience, especiallywhen you have like the dean of a rabbinic school who we invited to write, and hesaid, "But I'm not gay!" We said, That's okay, we're not interested in you beinggay. You don't have to be gay to do this. So, that was a fun project. This newproject 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 photographycame about. I was in a photo gallery in Moscow in 2002, at an exhibition, andnoticed that the names of the photographers sounded awfully Jewish to me. So, Iwent up and asked the curator, "What's with all the Jews on the wall?" And shesays, "Of course they're all Jewish." I was, like, What? Why the hell would "ofcourse" 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, ofcourse, they hated them later on. So, I ended up having a three-hour interviewwith her that afternoon and decided that this was the next story that I wantedto tell. This newest project was born about a year ago -- dinner, Saturdaynight, huge Berlin loft. Run-down, one of these things that maybe existed in NewYork maybe fifteen or twenty years ago but that would cost two billion dollarsnow. 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. Sheis 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 countercultureintersecting with neo-Hasidism. And its basis is in Philadelphia and Boulder,Colorado, where I am. And its founder is actually in Boulder, Colorado. So, whenI 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 Iwas expecting a nice, lovely dinner of discussion about contemporary Jewish lifein 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'teven know she was an Ossi, a person from East Germany, one. I knew she spokeYiddish 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 theatertroupe in the '70s and '80s in East Germany and actually that she and anotherfriend sponsored this huge festival of Yiddish culture that brought togetherYiddish theaters, theater troupes, musicians, writers from all over thecommunist world in the '80s to come together to actually share Yiddish cultureand 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 moreamazing." So, she started telling me her mother's story, which I actually -- Idid not believe her. I still remember very clearly walking out of dinner, sayingto my partner, it's like? "I don't believe her. I need to go research." And themain thing that I didn't believe about her was she said that her mother and heraunt, her mother's sister, were the last people to see Anne Frank alive. And Iwas, like, Everybody probably says that. Every Dutch Jew probably says they werethe last person to see Anne Frank alive. So, I'm a historian and I did theresearch 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 whenshe died and they were the ones that told Otto Frank about the fate of hisdaughters. So, that was a good story. So, I started turning her story into abigger history about what happens to Yiddish culture in this particular space inthe communist world. So, it's East Germany, so it's communist, like Warsaw orMoscow or Bucharest. But we're talking about Germany, where the Holocausthappened. So, there's this interesting fusion of Holocaust memory on the onehand and state-sponsored Yiddish culture on the other hand. And she occupiesthat 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 thepolice, sent to Auschwitz, then to Belsen, and then is invited to come buildYiddish 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 threadthrough 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 Jewishhistory is one of my research areas. And the other way I came to this woman'sstory about Yiddish in East Germany is I actually started following post-SovietRussian Jews to the places that they migrated to with the collapse of the SovietUnion. And I became very interested in Germany, how a lot of Russian Jews endedup in Germany. About 150 to 200,000 ended up in Germany. So, to call Jews inGermany today German Jews, it's not true. Most of them are Russian-speaking, whoare 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 Jewishhistory and politics and how politics shapes how we understand twentieth centuryJewish history. So, the first book that I wrote about was on Yiddish culture inthe early Soviet period and I was very interested in the people who builtYiddish culture. I wasn't interested in Stalin, frankly, and the quote-unquoteoverlords who were shaping, who were creating the framework in which thesepeople were working. I was interested in these Jews who had been more or lesswritten out of the Jewish history that I certainly was presented, the Jewishhistory that is taught in most standard Jewish history classes. And yet, theseguys were building Yiddish culture, state-sponsored Yiddish culture. That's aninteresting 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 andcontemporary 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 twoand two together and realized war photographers for the Soviet Union, they'regoing to be photographing the Holocaust. It had never occurred to me that wetalk about perpetrators, we talk about victims, we talk about bystanders inEurope. But what do we do with Soviet Jews photographing the war? They are notperpetrators. Their families were victims, absolutely. A lot of them lostfamily, but they themselves were living in Moscow. They were never under Germanoccupation, 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 likewith this project. And in some ways, the photographers I study in the SovietUnion, where the Holocaust destroyed whole families and killed a million and ahalf people, their story more closely resembles the story of American Jews whocame 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 theUnited 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 differentsocial trajectories. And then, the queer stuff, I think that's very obviouslyabout telling a story that hasn't been told and looking at something through adifferent lens. So, you could say I tend towards the revisionist. I tend towardstrying to take the same thing that we've been looking at this way and justchange the angle a little bit. You could just call it I'm dafke-esque. I like tosort 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 relativelymainstream and interesting that -- and I'm really interested in contemporaryrelevance, in how the histories that we write actually speak to what we're doingnow. So, this project on Yiddish culture and communist East Germany, I'm veryinterested 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 Jewishlife was not destroyed in Europe at the end of the war despite what, say, theIsraeli 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 photographyproject was interesting because most of the photographers that I wrote aboutwere relatively Russified Russian Jews, kind of like my family: phrases inYiddish, maybe grandma spoke Yiddish in the house, but they spoke Russianprimarily, 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 theYiddish connection and it actually was very easy to find. During the war, thegovernment published a Yiddish newspaper called "Unity," called "Eynikayt." So,I was very interested in how the Holocaust gets narrated in Yiddish by thegovernment. And when say by the government, I mean by a state-sponsorednewspaper. It was run by Jewish writers and journalists, versus the Russianpress. So, does the story get told differently, first, question mark? If it doesget told differently, how does it get told differently and then what does thatmean for the story of Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust that's told -- it wasgreat. I mean, it's just one chapter in the book but I think it's a veryimportant chapter to talk about what it meant to be Jewish during the war in theSoviet Union. The queer thing is interesting because there's nothing on thesurface of studying queer Jewish culture, certainly that I've been working onthat -- 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 Yiddishculture. 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 Iwas taking. I thought maybe this was an American phenomenon. In other words,maybe this is American identity politics intersecting, right? Sort of leftistJewishness with queer politics equals Yiddish. And there is certainly somethingto that. The Klezmatics' first album, earliest album, is "Shvaygn = Toyt[Silence = Death]." It comes out in the late '80s; '87, '88, which was a clearplay on the gay group ACT UP's slogan "Silence = Death" as a response toReagan-era anti-AIDS policies. Not meaning fighting AIDS but not not fightingAIDS. 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 lotof queer folk, not just from the United States: Germany, Austria, England. And Iwas, like, Something's going on here. So, actually, we talked about this for awhile and, for them, they think that the attraction to Yiddish has something todo with marginality, that as a language and culture that I don't want to say wasmarginalized but certainly became marginal either just because of linguisticassimilation, because of ideology, because of the Holocaust, for all of thesereasons, that there's some attraction to it from marginal groups. But the otherinteresting thing is that these people from around the world weren't necessarilyJewish and they were queer and attracted to Yiddish. So, I was really startingto see something about how this generation of people was -- I actually don'tthink 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 andsee Yiddish and then frame Yiddish that way. And clearly, there was somethingthere. When I came to this international symposium and there were all thesepeople, 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 intersectionwhere, in the research and work that I've done, it's not necessarily visiblealthough there is a lot of queer Yiddish performance on Sara Felder's reworkingof the "God of Vengeance," for example, or Warren Hoffman's book on queer Jewishculture, both of whom are actually themselves queer, writing about queer Jewishculture. Naomi Seidman, who's done some work on this. So, there is clearlysomething going on there that, yeah, I think ties -- there, you've just made thetie. 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 formerBerkeley graduate student who I knew when I was still back at Berkeley manyyears ago named Robbie Adler Peckerar was the director of education here and hecalled me up and he said, "Do you want to come and teach a mini-seminar? We'retrying to raise the academic standards here, get some sort of seriousscholarship going here." In the past, the internship had been primarily aninternship where students are working around the Book Center. It had had anintellectual and educational components but he was really trying to turn it intoa 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'snot 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 veryclear reason why they want to study Yiddish and nostalgia doesn't have to benumber one on the list. In fact, I think sometimes nostalgia number one on thelist might hurt an application. So, these are students who are serious abouttheir learning and they're not paying tuition to come to this program, which I'ma big fan of because I'm a big fan of -- I don't like non-paying internshipsbecause it's prejudiced against poorer students. They can't afford to takenon-paying internships 'cause they have to work in the summers. So, I was veryinterested that the Book Center managed to raise enough money to be able toactually support the students so they could actually be here and not feel likethey were going into further debt by being here for the summer. Some may go intodebt but at least the theory, I actually really supported the theory. So, thestudents were fantastic, smart, intellectually curious, and from a wide varietyof backgrounds. I still remember the first year there were students from, I 40:00think, six countries coming here to study. The demographics have changed asdifferent education directors have shaped the classes. But that first year, itwas Hungarian guy and someone from Russia and Italy. It was like the experienceI 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 ageeky academic like me. So, I used to go after class; I would just go sit on thestacks and play with books. And you can do that at some libraries but you're notallowed to take them. That's the difference. So (laughs) that's the fun partabout being here at the Book Center is that you can actually see a book and thengo get it. It's pretty amazing. And personally, I kind of like the Amherst areafor short periods of time. I'm used to having Yiddish culture be connected tobig city urban space, which I love. I'm a big city guy. But there is somethingvery 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 mybig city again. But it was great. I had a great time. So great that I've beenback 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 forone week stints, six different faculty members. And what we discovered was thestudents didn't know who Sholem Aleichem was but they knew exactly about theexperimental 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 forthe first couple of weeks, which I've done the past two years and this yearRivke Margolis did it, to give the students some kind of -- I mean, in twoweeks, what can you do? But at least to give them some kind of basic vocabularywith which to work that they can then do a little bit more in-depth study. So, Ihad been doing those after we had that first summer that was not so successfulof lots of random things where the students came out saying, Who's SholemAleichem? Or, even better, they didn't know who Sholem Aleichem was but they hadread "Chava" five times over the course of the summer as different instructorswanted 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 timeI've done one of these mini-seminars here in now three or four years, 'cause Ihad been teaching the intro class. But the interesting thing is I used the introclass 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, sowe got a lot more time to go in depth and do more reading. But this was theplace where I incubated the idea for that class. How the classes have changed, Ithink it was more international than it is now. I think most of the students noware Americans or at least are students here at American universities. A numberof the students are not American but they're students here at Americanuniversities. How else has it changed? I think in the early days, there was amuch wider range of knowledge base that the students were bringing, which madeit challenging for the instructors. So, we had fourth year graduate students inJewish studies who just didn't know Yiddish, so they wanted to come here tostudy Yiddish and freshmen who were nervous as hell and hadn't been away fromhome for that -- so, those first couple of summers were quite challenging as theBook 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 nothaving that diversity be disruptive for the learning process. So, you wouldprobably know better than I would at this point whether they've been successfulwith 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 Unioncalled "Der emes," and the headline read, "Yidish iz oykh parnose far yidishekinder," 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 chairof 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 jokebecause 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 onto be a Yiddish professor. But the point is, one could be. And actually, a lotof the students who've come through this program have ended up becomingprofessors of Yiddish or scholars in various educational formats. But more tothe point, I actually think that this summer intensive learning experience isincredibly valuable for basic critical thinking, learning skills, appreciationfor historical memory, which I think a lot of people, a lot of the students comeout of this program having a much deeper appreciation for their own pasts andfor the historical past in general. I've actually seen students have betterrelationships with their families after the Yiddish summer program because theystart 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 aconnection to family, Jewish and not, by the way, because Yiddish is never justYiddish. Yiddish is never just studying a language. It's always that andsomething more. So, I think the students come out of here with a deeper sort ofemotional appreciation for those kinds of things, which I think is incrediblyvaluable. And they've worked, they've gotten training in things like, I don'tknow, videography and oral history and archival research, publications. We'vehad students do blogging. So, the students here are actually gaining reallygreat skills that they can go take with them to do other projects if this -- formost of the students, this is not the end of their Yiddish journey if I'm goingto use that slightly schmaltzy phrase. For most of them, it's the beginning buteven if it is really the end of a student's Yiddish studies, they've learned alot of valuable skills out of the experience here.
EM:Great. All right, well, I think we're out of time. (laughs)
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 contactwith local faculty who were working in Jewish studies 'cause, remember, in theSoviet Union in the 1990s, Jewish studies was new and slightly avant-garde andhot. 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 ofMoscow. Okay, the Yiddish Club of Moscow. Now, remember, this is a Soviet Unionthat had -- there's a lot of Yiddish speakers in the Soviet Union but Moscow wasa very Russified city. So, I go to the Yiddish Club, which is at the old Jewishtheater, the old Soviet-era Jewish theater called the Shalom Theatre. We gothere 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 aretwo other young people. And what I didn't know was that I was the honored guestthat evening at the Yiddish Club of Moscow. I thought I was just coming toobserve. 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 inRussian translation. So, they were reading David Bergelson and Perets Markishand 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 tomake a speech. And I asked, "In what language do you want me to make thespeech?" And they said, Please do it in Yiddish. So, I made a speech to theYiddish Club, presuming that most of the people in the room actually didn'treally 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 apost-assimilationist moment. So, in this room, we see what linguisticacculturation looks like with all of these older people who undoubtedly hadYiddish in their childhoods -- are much, much more comfortable in Russian andthe young guy's the one who's -- at the time, I was twenty-six years old and Iwas asked to make the official speech, which, in Russian, that's a job. I wasasked to make the official speech in Yiddish. So, that was an amazing experienceand I ended up making some connections at that event. And then I left. So, thatwas an amazing experience. Left. The next day, I read in the newspaper that thattheater 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 apartmentbuildings 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 theJewish Theatre, two or three hours before I arrived at the theater. No onementioned it, though. What I found very interesting was both the sort ofdéjà-vu of, okay, I was in a building that almost got blown up two hoursearlier -- they had defused the bomb -- but that it was not an issue noteworthyof conversation to the people at the Yiddish Club who presumably knew, becausethey would -- I mean, they're part of the pulse of this community. So, I alsofound it a very interesting statement about what Jewish life in Russia lookslike, where they're very Jewish, these people were all very Jewish.Anti-Semitism exists and is -- I call it persistent social anti-Semitism. It'ssort of a general low-level anti-Semitism. But it doesn't bother them. That'swhat 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 sortof 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, in1999. It's ten years now ago, so it's radically different now. But sort ofimmediate 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