ZOHAR WEIMAN-KELMAN ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is December 14th, 2014. I am here with Zohar Weiman-Kelman at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Do I have permission to record?

ZOHAR WEIMAN-KELMAN: Yes.

CW:Okay. Thank you. Well, first of all, can you tell me when and where you were born?

ZWK:Okay. I was born in West Jerusalem in 1982. Yes.

CW:And what do you know about your family background?

ZWK:My parents were both born in the United States and immigrated to Israel in the '70s, so before I was born. Of my grandparents -- what is it? Three of them 1:00were born in the United States. The one who wasn't was born in Vienna, but his family was from Galicia. And the generation before that, they were mainly Russian -- except for one grandmother who is a few generations in the United States. So there's that history.

CW:And could you just briefly describe the home that you grew up in?

ZWK:It's a lovely home. My father's a Reform rabbi in Jerusalem. And my mother is a documentary filmmaker. So -- a home that's both traditional and very not traditional at the same time. I grew up speaking English in Jerusalem, so that in itself is already a kind of bubble. The Reform movement is also not a very mainstream movement in Israel, so that was its own form of marginalization -- or 2:00kind of -- just parallel universe. And I have a brother and a sister who are younger than me, who probably have very -- their own different stories of the house that we (laughs) grew up in.

CW:So what languages did you hear growing up?

ZWK:We spoke a complete back and forth of Hebrew and English. I speak more Hebrew to my brother and more English to my sister. We all speak predominantly English to our parents. Of all of the friends I grew up with, almost nobody's parents spoke Hebrew as a first language, so it was very common for everyone to be living sort of bilingually with French or Spanish or Portuguese and Hebrew.

CW:And did you know anything about Yiddish when you were growing up?

ZWK:So, so little. Which is interesting, I think, growing up in Israel. I mean, I think I probably had it as a sort of vague association with the Jewish past. 3:00My father did the -- I think it was the Weinreich Summer Program at a certain point. Because my great-grandmother -- his mother -- apparently forgot her English at a certain point and only spoke Yiddish, so he studied some Yiddish to speak to her. They say that in the final phase, she only spoke Polish -- she went back to the language of her nursemaid. So that was sort of the story, but it wasn't a real encounter with the language. And -- are you ready for the story of the encounter with the language, or is that a separate question?

CW:Well, can I just ask first ---

ZWK: Yeah.

CW:-- did you have any sense of -- beyond your own family -- of Yiddish -- ideas about Yiddish, general attitudes towards Yiddish -- in your growing up?

ZWK:I think, if anything, I had an association of Yiddish with humor. So, you know, tragic past on the one hand and American Jewish humor on the other. Maybe 4:00the two associations.

CW:So then, yeah, how did you first encounter it?

ZWK:Funny you should ask. (laughs) By a somewhat non-direct trajectory, which was: I was studying Hebrew literature at the university in Jerusalem and came across sort of the narrative of writers writing Hebrew in Europe and Eastern Europe -- which somehow I had never really been aware of. And I became curious about that. And I had an opportunity to go live in Berlin in 2002. And I became fluent in German and started learning about Jewish culture before the Holocaust, rather than what was just -- you know, not how everything was just destroyed, but sort of what was destroyed -- kind of that past that was not a big part of my Israeli upbringing, which was very Holocaust-obsessed but not actually Jewish 5:00historically rich in content. And then in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, I stumbled upon one of the loves of my life, Glückel of Hameln. And I was already interested in women's writing and I was blown away by that text. And I wound up writing a paper about -- I was taking a class on medieval women mystics -- so almost related, but not quite -- but I ended up writing comparatively about "The Book of Margery Kempe" and Glückel of Hameln, because both of them were sort of able businesswomen and I was interested in the way they talk about God and religion in similar ways. And to read that, though, I read it in German translation by her descendant, Bertha Pappenheim, who was Freud's Anna O. And I could already tell there was a lot going on. But reading some of the secondary literature, I would have quotes here and there of the alt yidish [old Yiddish]. And then when I got back to Israel, I thought, Well, I already speak German and 6:00I have these pieces. And I thought, Maybe I'll do Yiddish -- really, for fun. I didn't mean to take it so seriously. And then I started taking Yiddish with Hanan Bordin at Hebrew University. And yeah, it was -- you know. If Glückel was a crush, this was a real love story -- a combination of, Hanan was such a wonderful teacher, I connected to the humor -- but not that kind of sprinkled-into-English Yiddish humor, but rather the kind of critical reading of the Weinreich text and the kind of kvetchiness that it has. So Hanan and I both kind of shared that kind of appreciation of Yiddish morbidity through that text 7:00and other value systems. And then I was also, at the same time, working on Hebrew poetry -- and through Dan Miron's attempt to disparage Hebrew women's poetry -- he sort of mentions often the way it shouldn't have been so hard for Hebrew women writers to write poetry, 'cause Yiddish women writers were writing all of this poetry. Look at that! And that just cinched the deal for me, 'cause I was already getting involved in the language, and it was exactly the kind of poetic questions I was interested in asking. And we've been together ever since.

CW:(laughs) So other than Hanan, have there been -- are there big mentors or people that you -- yeah, mentors along the way, in terms of Yiddish?

ZWK:Yes and no. Yeah. It's a tricky question, I would say. When I studied in 8:00Vilna, Yitskhok Niborski had a huge impact on how sort of rigorously I was able to start thinking in Yiddish and produce literary criticism in Yiddish. And then I did follow him around the world for a while -- in Paris and in Los Angeles and in Berkeley and in Tel Aviv. But ultimately, I would say that the kind of shape my interests took has kind of taken me away from the kind of cozier world of very internal Yiddish studies. I don't know exactly how I would explain that, but I think there's a sense in which there is a type of continuity that is expected of Yiddish scholars, and my interests have gone sort of all over the 9:00map -- very tied to my interest in Yiddish, but I've learned Polish since and become very involved in queer theory and different things that have really enriched my work on Yiddish but, I think, have taken me out of a certain circle of Yiddish scholarship that I think has pretty rigid boundaries. But I have another mentor -- can I --

CW:Yes, definitely.

ZWK:(laughs) I would say -- I mean, she's both the subject of my work and also a role model or mentor, and that's Irena Klepfisz.

CW:Can you explain who she is?

ZWK:She is a bilingual Yiddish-English radical lesbian poet scholar. She was born in 1941 on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where she was passing with her mother, while her father was one of the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, who 10:00perished there. And she became first a poet in the English language, and then, influenced by trends of Spanish-English bilingual writing that were part of lesbian politics and poetics, she started writing Yiddish and English. And I remember when I was first doing research in Warsaw, looking at Yiddish women's poetry, I had this deep desire to find -- and if not find, more a temptation to invent -- a lesbian Yiddish poet whose story I could discover and then write a lesbian history about. And then I was in a conference in Berkeley, and suddenly, I sort of found out that my imaginary Yiddish lesbian poetess was flesh and blood. And that was extremely exciting. And since then, we've also become friends. So, I definitely think her -- the corpus of her Yiddish-English writing 11:00is actually quite limited. It's probably fifteen poems. But the genius of that (laughs) -- I have no other word for it -- has completely given me tools to think about Yiddish and English intimately interacting and really touching readers in a way that inspires the rest of my work.

CW:For you, what is the intersection between queer studies and Yiddish studies?

ZWK:I think there are multiple intersections. And they're all sort of surprising in some ways. 'Cause my original project for my PhD was women's poetry, but it wasn't anything to do with queer theory or lesbian poetry. But somehow, the poets that I encountered, one of the avenues of that encounter was a very 12:00particular 1970s, '80s identity politics project that was feminist and lesbian to a large extent. Projects like "Nice Jewish Girls," which kind of set up the political framing -- it's the first Jewish lesbian anthology from 1982 -- followed by "The Tribe of Dina" -- that's from 1986 -- that was an issue of "Sinister Wisdom," another lesbian journal. But that's one of the first places where I encountered Kadia Molodowsky and some of Irena Klepfisz's work and Anna Margolin -- different poets and biographies. So there's something about the lesbian project that paved one of the ways -- possible ways to the Yiddish past, and the specific past of Yiddish-speaking women. So that's a big tool -- one that's especially interesting, since there is an interest in the past there, but 13:00a lot of the women don't actually speak Yiddish. So, in some ways, as a Yiddish speaker, it's interesting to be able to connect through them, but also, skipping over -- I think of it as speaking directly to the bobes [grandmothers]. And it just shifts the whole -- I feel like in cultural politics and literature in general, there are some stories about cultural transmission and rebellion that work in a straight way, where, you know, you're born, you rebel against the one before you, you -- and I feel like there's something in these complicated pasts between these generations of women that invites a different kind of dialogue, in Yiddish and about Yiddish, that I'm excited to participate in.

CW:So can you explain this term that you use -- about heteronormative transmission of Yiddish, and then what's outside of that?

ZWK:Um-hm. I think the way that we talk about language in general -- I mean, "mame-loshn" [mother tongue] makes it very clear, but it's true for any normal language -- that you speak the language you inherited from your parents. Or, at best or worst, you speak the language of the surroundings that you're in. And both of those have to do with a kind of -- something either that's blood-related or sort of by osmosis with your surroundings. And while that's true for many languages, I argue -- or one argues -- it's quite clear that in the case of Yiddish, it doesn't work in that same way, because of the fact that outside of ultra-Orthodox circles, most people are not learning Yiddish from their parents. It's from their grandparents, at best, and even that is not necessarily the case. So, one option is to sort of see that as a problem -- that quoted critique 15:00that a Yiddish speaker should be made in the bedroom, not in the classroom -- as in, by a mother and a father who biologically reproduce a child. And this is a very straight idea of where babies come from (laughs) and how language should be passed down. And I'm interested in making babies in other ways and in acquiring language in other ways -- and detaching from that very sort of essentialist model of culture and identity. You know, 'cause that's the kind of model that also doesn't expect non-Jews to have access to Yiddish, for example, and a kind of model which is faced with the crisis when Yiddish is not transmitted in these ways, and doesn't leave a lot of openings for other ways for Yiddish to have a future. And I think it's really interesting for Jewish cultural politics in general that are pretty obsessed with questions of survival for different reasons. That's part of the discourse against intermarriage, for example, 16:00revolves around the survival of the Jewish people. A lot of investment in Zionist militarism has to do with the concern of survival for the Jewish people. And I'm interested in Yiddish, in part, as a way of saying, Maybe survival isn't the only key. Not survival and not revival, but maybe there's something else -- other ways that we can be retrieving and transmitting the past that don't have that kind of ensured continuity. So, it means it's riskier, but it also means the boundaries are a lot more fluid and the possibilities are a lot more diverse.

CW:When you look at the Yiddish speakers that you're around, how does this theory relate to sort of the world that you're in or not?

ZWK:I think it relates pretty directly just in terms -- even back to my story about whether I feel like I'm inside or outside, or Irena Klepfisz's story where she is very much outside of these circles in many ways -- though she was very inside and studying with Weinreich for a certain period, but once she came out as a lesbian -- or rather, was outed -- this became less of a possibility for her. And I don't think that's a coincidence. More, you know, my interpretation, but there is a way in which now, we talk a lot about how great queer Yiddish is, but that wasn't true of the establishment historically. And I think regardless of actual sexual practice, when we just talk about what it means to be sort of orthodox about how you treat Yiddish, I think there are sort of separate groups. There's a lot of people who I know -- mainly outside of academia, but also inside -- who are thinking very creatively and excitedly about how to make use 18:00of Yiddish, and it's very tied to other radical political projects, versus people who are doing a lot of amazing and very rigorous scholarship in Yiddish, but in much narrower terms. I sort of move between both of those groups. But I think part of the problem is that it's the rigorous scholars and that kind of more closed circle who hold a lot of the keys -- a lot of the information that is so vital. And I would like to see those keys disseminated a little bit more widely and in a more inviting way. And it's true -- I mean, it is frustrating, I'm sure, for native Yiddish speakers or excellent Yiddish speakers to have to deal with people with bad grammar. (laughs) And on the other hand, it is very 19:00hard to speak excellent Yiddish when you don't have that context. And I think that the excellence together with that survival are things that we need to rethink in some ways to make these tools more vibrant and more useful.

CW:Practically, do you have a vision for how you can do that?

ZWK:I'm sort of waiting to see the -- there's a lot of generational change happening in academia and institutions, so I think that's one of the things that will impact how it goes. I think as I have more and more students and expose people to Yiddish in different ways, that's one model that I'm developing. Just --

CW:Can you give an example?

ZWK:Different things. Like, I was teaching a course on passing -- on movements in race and gender -- in the department of English at Haifa University, and I had a very diverse group of students. It was about seventy percent Palestinian 20:00women -- so, diverse within the different Palestinian populations -- Christian, Muslim, Druze -- and then Jews -- and born in Israel and born in Russia. And we read (laughs) Irena Klepfisz's poetry. And to watch -- for the Jews, the connection to the Holocaust was very, very strong. And it's funny, because I don't focus on that aspect of her bilingual poetics, but that was -- the truth is, actually, that was, for the Palestinians as well, very, very striking. But there was something also just about the tool of bilingualism that wound up being very important for both students studying the English literature and living in English and Hebrew, but even more so for Palestinians navigating Hebrew and Arabic. So, seeing how a Yiddish poet can be a model and a tool for people who are not thinking in a Yiddish idiom at all. So that's one example. But I just 21:00got wonderful papers back on some of Kadia Molodowski's poetry. And I think once we try and not talk about what's Yiddish about these poems, but about what's feminist or how are the poetics functioning -- whether in translation or in original -- and more often than not, in translation -- then I think we're gonna be drawing more engaged students who can take up the work. And I think if you're an excellent reader of poetry, to me, that can work hand in hand or overshadow how excellent your spoken Yiddish is, for example. And that's, I think, a way to kind of empower more students to bring their strengths to the study of Yiddish.

CW:Can you describe how, if at all, your academic work interests and work and 22:00your personal life intersect?

ZWK:Hm. Let's see. Interesting question. Yeah, I think it's pretty inseparable. For me -- I have to think about how I sort of formulate the movement back and forth -- but just -- actually, kind of on a theoretical or a spiritual level, I would say that the experience that I was having in Israel -- different phases of living there -- before I left for grad school and living there during and after graduate school -- there was often a pretty intense feeling of hopelessness, and 23:00just of -- kind of a deadlock in terms of the political situation. And that the work I was able to do with Yiddish opened up for me this amazing alternative past, for the one part. And that was very connected to this anger at not having been taught this past. But through this past, I suddenly had this vision of, you know, that the future -- or the present that I was living in -- the future of that past -- was just one of the options that could have happened. And the more I studied Yiddish, the more I saw different cultural writings -- like Rokhl Feygenberg talking about projecting all these different futures, where maybe Yiddish would be spoken in Birobidzhan, and Polish would be spoken by Jews in Poland and Hebrew would be spoken by that small community possibly in Palestine. So this kind of multilingual past and the images of the future that that 24:00multilingual past had was something that finally did enable me to feel like there was a little bit more spaciousness in the present to imagine different trajectories and to feel a little bit less pessimistic about the future. And that's not to say that I think the future is Yiddish, but there is something about getting to interact so deeply with an alternative past that has changed the way that I think about the future, or has led me to be more hopeful in some ways.

CW:Can you say more about that, maybe in terms of your own identity and how your work has influenced your identity?

ZWK:Um -- hard questions! Yeah. I mean, part of it is the rebelliousness that I 25:00do associate with Yiddish and with the actual radical histories that I feel able to connect to. Other politics like Bundist doikayt [hereness] and commitment to social justice when and where you are -- which has even, within Israel, enabled me to treat my engagement there not as nationalism but as a doikayt project of having been born there and wanting to fix that place. So, these are sort of political avenues that come from my academic work, but definitely impact how I practice life. So that would be one thing. The queer Yiddish is another aspect. 26:00And something about the actual pleasure that I take in these studies and the ways in which I -- one of my projects is studying pleasure in Yiddish. So, there's something in that that also has to do with both a different avenue of transgressiveness, in some way, but also with a really deep connection with the past -- the way in which -- you know, I like to say, if you can get turned on by this poem in the '20s, then you're not so far off. It's a way to both recognize the corporality of the past -- which, I think, is something that often doesn't happen in nostalgia or in general -- so you really see the past as real in this way, and you are also no longer able to separate yourself completely from the past if you're physically activated (laughs) by it. And I do feel that kind of 27:00blessing of feeling very in touch with the past in these ways.

CW:Well, there's a lot more that we could talk about, but I just want to end by asking you to see what you've seen change, just in your time being involved with Yiddish academically.

ZWK:Yeah. So the most quick, basic, easy one is the internet and the digitization. And I'm not involved in the theorizing of that, but it is so phenomenal (laughs) that whatever I want to look at, more likely than not I can find it or a version of it or something in the neighborhood of it online through -- yeah. Before, I would have had to come to the National Yiddish Book Center. The fact that I can find these things online is incredible, and it has 28:00completely changed my work. So, if I'm working on Celia Dropkin, for example, then I will do the work and find the books, and that might be complicated, but it's sort of doable --- but I kind of know the scope. But my more recent product on Yiddish sexology, for example, is something where I wouldn't even know that I could have -- what to look for without these archives, you know? And the fact that I can, through web searching, find one thing tagged with "sex" or "sexology" and through that, fifteen other titles by Dr. Leonard Landes, published in New York from 1895 to 1916 -- and the fact that I can see all of these books, completely encourages me to do these projects that I am quite sure I never would have done. And also, someone who's not a historian but is interested in theorizing and in kind of connecting the dots across time, the 29:00fact that I'm not spending all of my energy acquiring these materials means that I'm much quicker to be able to think about what I have found. And to be a lot more playful, also, with my use of materials. So that's a huge, huge change. And I would say that politically, there's -- especially in Israel -- a lot more room now for Yiddish studies. From living in Poland, a lot has -- there has been consistently Yiddish scholarship there, but that is a place where the most phenomenal young scholars are doing work that's both academic and artistic and cultural with Yiddish. So that's definitely something new. I think a challenge that we have in US academia is more and more funding going to Israel studies programs, which won't necessarily guarantee continued study of Yiddish. So I 30:00think if there's one point that needs a more urgent intervention, it would be to make sure that Yiddish isn't replaced by Hebrew in American studies -- in American academia. Because I think that especially for building of and studying of American Jewish identities, Yiddish is extremely vital.

CW:Well, I just want to ask one very short -- if you can try to keep it short -- what would you advise someone interested in Yiddish to do first?

ZWK:I would say, quick, learn the language. I think there's amazing texts in translation, but there's just something to be said for the language courses, and 31:00I've taken so much joy in them, so I would definitely encourage people to find your closest Yiddish course and do that. And I would also say that whatever it is that you're interested in -- whether auto mechanics or Yiddish sexology -- there's probably material in Yiddish on that subject for you to look into. So, that would be the other thing -- to encourage people to connect -- to not have Yiddish as sort of separate from their other interests, but to look through Yiddish at the world that they're interested in.

CW:Wonderful. Well, a hartsikn dank [thank you very much].

ZWK:Nito far vos, es iz geven a fargenign [You're welcome, it was a pleasure].

CW:Thank you very much for taking the time. I hope we'll have another chance to talk more. (laughs)

ZWK:Mertshashem [God willing].

[End of interview]