JUSTIN CAMMY ORAL HISTORY

DAVID SCHLITT:This is David Schlitt and today is December 14th, 2010. I am here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts with Justin Cammy, assistant professor of Jewish studies and comparative literature at Smith College. And we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Justin, do I have your permission to record this interview?

JUSTIN CAMMY:Well, now that you ask, now -- yes, you do.

DS:Thank you.

JC:(laughs) You're welcome, David.

DS:So, let's start by talking about your background. You grew up in Ottawa?

JC:I did. Ottawa, Canada. I was born there.

DS:Okay, and can you tell me about your family and growing up in Ottawa?

JC:Sure. My family actually was not originally from Ottawa. My father was born -- raised in Montreal and his parents were already Canadian. So, goes back a few 1:00generations, at least. My mother's parents were from Prague and she was actually born in Prague after the war in a family that, as far as I can tell, 'cause I've done the research and gone to Prague, had no connection to Yiddish whatsoever and, in fact, was bilingual in terms of Czech and German speaking. So, my mother came to Canada, to Montreal, after the war as a very, very young child and spent some time in Montreal. She grew up in Sudbury, Ontario, which was a mining town. Went back to Montreal, where she met my father and then they moved to Ottawa when he was in graduate school and he ended up getting a job in Ottawa. And they remained there and I was there from the time I was born till I was eighteen.

DS:And what kind of Jewish community was there in Ottawa?

JC:I would say that the Ottawa Jewish community was a -- for a small city -- 2:00now, it's become much larger, but at the time, it was probably, I don't know, five hundred thousand people in the whole city. So, like many Canadian cities, the Jewish community was quite tight-knit. There was a JCC, but a rundown JCC that smells like every other JCC, no matter what community you go to. I think they all share their purchasing on the same purchasing of cleaning products. So, they all smell the same no matter where you are. And there were a multiplicity of denominational possibilities. And actually, for a city that size, a number of afternoon schools. There was one day school and when I was growing up, there were at least three, if not four, afternoon schools. So, I attended one of those Jewish afternoon schools, the Ottawa Modern Jewish School, which my father was principal of. The difference between Ottawa Modern and the others, the main other one, the larger one, at a certain point -- they were always sort of within 3:00the same range that was -- the Talmud Torah was more traditional. Ottawa Modern was the only one of the schools that actually taught Yiddish and Hebrew as part of its curriculum. So, I remember studying Yiddish from the time I went to afternoon Hebrew school. And it was more concerned with sort of secular Jewish identity. So, it taught Hebrew, Yiddish, Jewish history. It also taught the holidays. I mean, I remember that one of the big foci was the preparation of the Passover seder, but it was a much more -- I'd say, at least in its founding, a much more progressive-minded Jewish school. So, I went to public school throughout the entirety of my education. French immersion public school. So, in many cases, there weren't a lot of other Jews in those schools, at least from K through eight. By the time I got to the public high school, there were already a bunch of other Jews. But my main Jewish education, I would say, was divided between Ottawa Modern Jewish School until graduation in sixth grade, then a -- 4:00afternoon, I think it was twice a week Jewish high school for a few hours a night. I was also involved in BBYO, B'nai B'rith Youth Organization. And, I think, just as importantly was participation for -- dozen summers at Camp B'nai B'rith of Ottawa. None of those institutions were particularly religious in their orientation or were particularly interested, I would say, in cultural literacy in terms of sort of languages or sort of really getting to the heart of Jewish texts. They were more sort of places for Jews who could be happy to be with other Jews and taught things that made people semi-literate. But it wasn't an intensive -- a highly intensive Jewish education.

DS:Oh, can I ask -- it sounds as though your family, then, was quite Jewishly engaged, or at least involved in the community if your father was the principal of the supplementary school.

JC:Oh, yeah, no, my father was principal -- they were very, very highly engaged Jewishly. First of all, my mother being the child of two survivors of the war -- had that European history and identity that was brought with her that was readily talked about at home. So, there was that part of sort of the missing family or her missing family, her missing grandparents and a set of grandparents that I had that were European and that were still relatively new immigrants to Canada. My father, in his day life, was a professor of political science and Quebec politics. And not only was he involved for many years as principal of the afternoon Hebrew school, but he was also involved, in his younger years, a lot in -- what are those things that men hang out with -- B'nai B'rith --

DS:The brotherhoods?

JC:Yeah, the B'nai B'rith brotherhood, where he eventually became one of its presidents at a certain point. So, he was always very involved, my father. Loved shul. Big fan of khazones [Jewish liturgical music]. My grandfather on his side also loved khazones. So, I would say that -- highly culturally affiliated Jews. And certainly, we celebrated all the holidays at home. We marked them. I wouldn't say that we observed them as a Torah Jew would do that. So, we celebrated -- we marked Shabbat every week. We said the prayers. But there was no ban on necessarily being able to go out on Friday nights. There was certainly -- we drove. I went to school on -- I didn't go to school on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, but I would go to school on the beginning or end days of Sukkot, Shavuot, Pesach. If the seder was held at home, there would be no reason the 7:00next day not to go to school. So, it was a world in which we were highly involved in Jewish life in the community, but also, very much part of the larger community. I wouldn't say that our home was in a particularly ghettoized Jewish neighborhood. There were not very many other Jews on the street, and all the friends who I grew up with at the time, I still know their names. Brent Whitely, Luke Lemke. These are not your typical Jewish names, and they were sort of the guys who I would hang out with on a regular basis. So, Jewishly, it's an interesting -- when I talk to my students, it's so interesting how sometimes people rebel against their own upbringings. I don't see it as a rebellion. I just see that the pendulum of culture and history moves and is in constant flux, 8:00obviously. I've made certain decisions now that I have to be a parent and there's two that would be sort of noticeable. I think that it's interesting -- it's understandable in the cultural context of Canada in the 1970s. But something as simple as a name -- Justin is not a particularly Jewish name. In fact, Justin was the Roman emperor some charge with putting in place one of the first series of anti-Semitic legislative laws. So, the question years later, when I ask that as sort of a scholar, why Justin -- I don't think that occurred to my parents. I don't think that they sort of researched the name and tried to see whether there was any specific meaning to it. They liked the name and it seemed like a good name that would be good for a Canadian child, that wouldn't distinguish him as "other." So, even though they were highly Jewish identified, 9:00both in personal background and in commitments, there was no sense that the name had to be different. There was no sense that public school wouldn't be appropriate. In my own decisions that I've made with my wife, it would be the exact opposite. I mean, my three children's names, also interesting in terms of the Yiddish connection 'cause they have nothing to do with Yiddish. But Aviya, Amitai, and Shalev, these are highly ethnically marked names that will distinguish them forever, at least when they're in a North American context -- but our thinking was totally different. We wanted names that would be the same here and in Israel, so that they wouldn't have to have sort of this bifurcated identity in terms of what their names ought to be, depending on what group they're hanging out with. So, these are their names. It tells them who they are. They're not particularly modern Israeli names, but they're also not frum [devout] names in that sense. So, they are -- Amitai and Aviya, at least, are 10:00biblical names. But they're un-- really not popular names. Shalev is a little bit more modern Israeli, but it -- all names send symbolic messages about the people who chose those names. And one can easily identify what those symbolic messages might be in our choice of those names. Although, in our last son, we needed -- all the names are named after people. So, we needed a "L" name, and Shalev, named for my grandmother who had recently died, Lotte, Charlotte. So, Shalev is very good. But a second one that was very second in the running was Leivick. I really was pushing for Leivick, but there was some discussion over whether naming someone after a diminutive would be appropriate. So, it was there but it just didn't make it. So, that's one decision that sort of differentiates one generation from another. The other is that my own children, in a much smaller town, in Northampton, Massachusetts, go to a Jewish day school. So, they're not doing the public school that I did. They're doing the Jewish day 11:00school where the emphasis on literacy in a Jewish language and literacy in tefillah [Hebrew: prayer] and also in Jewish texts is far more rigorous than I was able to get in an afternoon school. So, people make different decisions and I think that culture moves in a different direction and different generations react to certain prompts. So, one of the great regrets that I have is the inability or was the inability, when I reached college, to not really be as fluent as I would have liked in a Jewish language. It would have been interesting to sort of have a greater command, let's say, off Hebrew prior to going to college and prior to going to Israel, prior to going to graduate school. It's something that I had to catch up with later in life as an adult. And so, I wanted to give my children the advantage -- this one advantage that I didn't have. It may be that they're going to reject it and it'll be their 12:00children who are -- have very North American names and who go to public schools, which will also be fine. So, one makes decisions in strange ways.

DS:Well, you're highlighting a reaction or a distinction with --

JC:Yeah.

DS:-- the prior generation. But there's also -- it seems like real strands of continuity in --

JC:Absolutely.

DS:-- at least as regards -- your children's education.

JC:Yeah.

DS:It seems both -- your father, at least, and you are very involved in your children's education in terms of their Jewish education.

JC:Yeah. I mean, my father professionally, but I'd say my mother was just as involved. I mean, she was just as involved Jewishly as my father was. It just happened to be that he had this professional piece. But it's not that he was the committed one and she wasn't. I'd say that they were both equally invested. And I don't even -- yeah, I wouldn't even characterize it as rebellion. I think that your word distinction would be interesting. And there's also -- frankly, economics play into this. At the time when I was going to school, it was very 13:00expensive to go to -- it still is, to go to Jewish day school. And there were certain economic reasons that my parents decided that public school's there, it's a good school. It'll make -- the French aspect, I think, was very important to him, to teach another language. But I think it's interesting: if you extend it beyond sort of just my parents and look at it theoretically, now that I'm president of a Jewish day school here, what you'll get from a lot of Jewish parents who are ambivalent about sending their kids to Jewish day schools is this notion of, Well, I want my child to have a bilingual education, so I'm going to send them to Chinese language immersion or to the public school that has a great Spanish program. And you say, "Well, Jewish day schools also have a bilingual education" -- they're, like, Oh, well, that -- Hebrew's not bilingual. Hebrew, it's something else. I don't know what that is in their minds, but there's still this ambivalence. So, I did have that bilingual education and I would say that the idea of being educated in two languages from kindergarten 14:00through, at the time, grade thirteen in Ontario, although I hadn't thought of it at the time, brought out greater appreciation of the notion of the polyglossic nature of Jewish society. It allowed me to understand in my own research about Yiddish, and my own research into Jewish language wars and ideological debates, the idea of what it means to grow up using different languages at different times, sort of the functional differentiation of languages. When you would switch. Code-switching, and why the more languages you speak and know makes you a richer person. So, I, in a strange way, attribute that French immersion education to my interest in Yiddish, in Hebrew, in various manifestations of Jewish culture that occur in different languages and are marked by different languages.

DS:But it wasn't necessarily a straight line from there.

JC:No. Not at all, not at all. It wasn't even a straight line by the time I got to college, 'cause when I was in college, I was not -- people assume once you become a scholar of Jewish studies, you must have started on this early. And the opposite is true. In college, McGill, a very, very Jewish, Jewishly identified city -- I had Jewish roommates. Most of my social cohort was Jewish. But my studies were not. People assume that I graduated with a BA in Jewish studies or that I worked on Yiddish in college. Not true. I was a major in Middle Eastern studies and political science. And it was only near the end of college that I found myself dissatisfied with that as a -- if I was going to carry on in education, it wasn't going to be in those fields.

DS:Well, can you tell me more about how that happened, that you came to be dissatisfied with that?

JC:Yeah, I mean, I think that the late '80s and early '90s at McGill were an 16:00exciting time Jewishly, but highly contentious in the Middle East. I think I was dissatisfied with the politicization of Middle Eastern studies, their inability to come to any viable solutions, and really just to cause more problems than they solved. And I would say that my junior year in Israel was highly influential. Was at the Hebrew University, was during the Gulf War. Had to come back -- I was forced to come back during the Gulf War, something that I didn't like but I obeyed. Then, we went back, just before the end of the war. It was a great year and it was a year where I didn't have to do courses in my major but really got to study Jewish history, do a full year of Hebrew that was rather intense. That focused a lot of new attention on things that were interesting. And I would have to say the transition -- my contact or my meeting and then my 17:00studies as an undergraduate, with Ruth Wisse, prior to her being hired away by Harvard, would have to be the sort of the key intellectual transition because you had -- I took two courses with her while I was at McGill, two courses that were electives. One general introduction to modern Jewish literature, where, for the first time in my life, I read Roth and Bellow, Malamud, Ozick. And then, in my senior year, I took a seminar with her on Yiddish poetry in interwar Poland. And it was that that convinced me that here was a field that was being underserved and that was extraordinarily interesting and that would allow me to 18:00not necessarily -- it also provided a certain richness and wholeness, so that Jewish identity wasn't just diasporic, the American variety that I knew. It wasn't just the Israeli variety that I was coming to know. But there was this whole world out there and I saw other students who were trying to say something original about Shakespeare. I mean, how many more -- obviously, you can say things, but how many more books do we really need about Shakespeare? Then you would talk to someone like Ruth, who made this literature so interesting, so accessible, so important and who acknowledged that there was -- who invited you into the field by saying, "Nothing's been done. So little's been done. If you come into this field, there'll be things for you to do, and everything you do, if it's done well, will be important." So, I'd say that her influence was so critically important that I'm almost understating the importance. And she 19:00deserves a lot of credit, because she took someone on like me for graduate work in a way that would be unheard of now. Even I wouldn't do it if I were the professor. That is, I had no Yiddish. She accepted someone to do a graduate program in Yiddish who really didn't have Yiddish at the time. And she had the confidence that I would put in the effort and the time to master the language, to master the history, to be able to function as a scholar who could really control that. And it took time, it took effort, and it took a great deal of confidence and investment on her part, but that's what it meant in those days to build a new program. And when she got to Harvard in her first year, there was no Yiddish program. There were no students. There weren't a lot of people who were learning Yiddish at the time. And I agreed to do a longer graduate program or a longer sort of master's program, and as they were figuring it out, it was a 20:00wonderful experience because I was the first one who'd done it. So, they kept giving me courses. They kept saying, Oh, for -- what do you need to be a good scholar of Yiddish literature in Eastern European Jewish culture? Nowadays, people do two years of coursework and then they move on. I think I did four years of coursework -- not only in language, but I took at least ten courses on Yiddish literature. Then, I had to do the entire sequence in modern Jewish history. And then, I had to do courses in Hebrew literature. So, every time there was a visiting -- I remember Gershon Shaked coming to do two courses on Agnon. And I had to do one course with him on Agnon's short stories and one whole semester on "Ore'ah Noteh Lalun [A Guest for the Night]," just with him, in which the only two students -- there were three students: me, Ruth, and a colleague of mine, Doug Hauer -- the whole semester. So, in a sense, the degree in Yiddish studies really wasn't a degree in Yiddish studies. It was a degree in modern Jewish literature writ large with a very high component of Jewish history 21:00and with equal respect for Yiddish and Hebrew as core components of what it meant to be a literate professor. And that program, I wouldn't exchange for the world. It was a wonderful graduate program. It was intense, it was difficult, it was challenging. And it was really through sort of her vision that she's now grown it and turned it into something else. And she was right, if you -- as a teacher, she was right in the sense that if you believe in people enough, if you give them the resources to succeed, most of the time they will. So, it was wonderful to have that sort of mentorship from someone who was so senior in the field.

DS:And she obviously took a leap of faith in --

JC:Right.

DS:-- encouraging you to come. But it seems as though you also took a great leap of faith having studied something quite different as an undergraduate.

JC:It was. It was entirely a leap of faith. I think that people were a little surprised, interested -- what is someone supposed to do with a PhD in Yiddish? 22:00(laughs) And I'm underplaying it. It's not that I didn't know any Yiddish. I had taken Yiddish over time, I knew Yiddish from other people who had spoken it. But it wasn't as though I was at the graduate level when I started. That took a couple of years to really bone up on that.

DS:Well, can I ask about your experience studying Yiddish as a graduate student and using Yiddish, also --

JC:Sure.

DS:-- and how it compares to your experience of having learned Hebrew and how -- the different places where you use the different languages?

JC:Yeah, I mean, Yiddish -- I had wonderful Yiddish teachers. My first -- my Yiddish teacher -- well, first of all, I did two Yiddish summer programs. My first summer, I was at YIVO. The second summer, I went to the Oxford Yiddish program, which subsequently moved to Vilna. Then, while I was at Harvard, I took three years of Yiddish with -- or two years of Yiddish with Marion Aptroot, who's now a professor of Yiddish studies at Heinrich-Heine University in -- I 23:00think it's in Dusseldorf. And so, I had the benefit of having sort of, I'd say, two continuous years of intensive Yiddish. And at YIVO, I really had wonderful teachers, as well. I had Ellie -- Ellie or Elke -- and I had Mordkhe Schaechter, at the time. While I was a graduate student, I also had the opportunity -- they instituted what then was the Yiddish International Graduate Students Conference, where a group of graduate students from American universities came to Israel and spent one week in Tel Aviv working at Beit Shalom Aleichem and one week at the Hebrew University. And there, I remember having Anita Norich and Dovid Roskies, Avraham Novershtern -- so, in terms of an education, it was superb. Really the best people you could possibly want to study with. In terms of using Yiddish, I 24:00mean, again, I feel comfortable in different ways in the different languages. I would say that my spoken Hebrew is superior to my spoken Yiddish. But my reading and studying of Yiddish is so much better than my Hebrew, so -- and that just goes to show you the difference between when you have an opportunity to use a language in a thriving society, which language is going to prevail? So, I'm very comfortable speaking Hebrew when I go to Israel, but have difficulty sometimes -- I work with Hebrew materials a lot, especially scholarly materials, but it's just a little bit slower. With the Yiddish materials in written form, it's very smooth and it feels very comfortable. In verbal form, one of the things that the graduate education did not emphasize at Harvard but did emphasize very deliberately in other places was necessarily the need to come out of the program 25:00being the most fluent Yiddish speaker. So, I can understand anything that someone says to me, I can certainly communicate in Yiddish. But I'd say that it's not the area that I'm the most comfortable in. I'm much more comfortable researching, using Yiddish as a research tool, than I am just using it to chat with someone.

DS:All right. I want to come back to the Yiddish in a second.

JC:Sure.

DS:I was interested in -- you visited Israel, you lived in Israel, 1991?

JC:Oh, I've been to Israel about -- now it's about eighteen times. So, I first went in 1988, before I started college, on one of those Canadian Zionist Federation teen tours. Then, I went back in '90, '91. When I was in college, I went back with another group for a three-week trip. And then, during graduate school, I'd say I was there every second summer for one reason or another. Other research or a type of academic program. I was a student at the Hebrew University 26:00Jewish history graduate seminar and then at the Yiddish seminar. And then, I went to use the Sutzkever archive at the National Library. Then, as we became adults, I was there on sabbatical with my whole family in 2007, as a fellow at the Hebrew University and even since then have gone back twice. And I'm supposed to go back twice this coming year to work with students. So, I would say that I am very committed to what's going on and interested intellectually, personally in what's going on in Israel. And I see absolutely no division between my scholarly work as a scholar of Yiddish in Eastern Europe and my interest in the culture and society that's being produced in Israel. I seem them as absolutely integral, as linked, and anyone who would demand that I delink those and privilege one over the other is not going to find much currency with me. I don't 27:00see these -- I see those ideological debates as quite tired and boring and rather infantile. I think it's wonderful, for instance, that Tel Aviv University has an incredibly vibrant Yiddish summer program, that Ben-Gurion University in the past year has started a Yiddish program. I mean, where else other than in a Jewish state should there be interest in all aspects of Jewish history and culture? So, it makes total sense to me that Yiddish would now find a home and should find a home in the Israeli academic universe. So, if I can play a role in that by bringing students to Israel, by participating in these programs, which I have, or simply by introducing my children to that, I'm going to be the first one there.

DS:And do you see the language wars as generally as something that are --

JC:Oh, I think it's over.

DS:Okay.

JC:I mean, I think it's over unless -- except among some kooks who can't get over things, it's over. I mean, it's clear that Hebrew is now the language of a thriving independent Jewish state and Yiddish is the language of -- for better, for worse -- for worse, I would think, but you have to look at things realistically -- it's the language, yes, of a very large number of Hasidim, but it's not the secular language that people think about. It's not the progressive, humanistic Yiddish of -- that people think about when they talk about Yiddish culture. So, you do have Hasidim speaking it. You do have scholars who use it as a language. And you, of course, have people who are ideologically attracted to Yiddish as a symbol of some type of diasporic nationalism. And I think that you probably -- I've read about them, I haven't necessarily met them -- some who use Yiddish as an anti-Zionist tool. I'd say the latter category really don't interest me. I think they're rather pathetic. If people want to use language to 29:00play out their own ambivalences about politics, that's their business, but it's not something that I'm going to involve myself in. You go back to Bal-Makhshoves and others, everyone says that if you really want to understand Jews in the modern period, you have to know at least three languages: Hebrew, Yiddish, and the co-territorial language. So, to me, if you're going to choose one or the other, you're really putting yourself at a disadvantage and you're not -- you're fooling yourself. You're lying to yourself in thinking that you can make that choice. Clearly, ideologues in generations earlier, both Zionist ideologues, Bundist ideologues, humanist ideologues wanted to use -- wanted to harness politics onto language. And language has always been political, all -- any choice of speaking a language is political. But I think -- I would hope that we're at a stage now where we can respect the achievements of both of these linguistic, literary, and cultural traditions and do our best to communicate 30:00them to students and to children. That's the most important thing.

DS:So, I also wanted to return, then, to transmission, because --

JC:Yeah, yeah.

DS:-- that's something that we started out with in terms of talking about education, your involvement in your children's education, your parents' involvement in your education.

JC:Yeah.

DS:But I want to bookend that for now and talk about Yung-Vilne --

JC:Sure.

DS:-- which I know has been central to many of your studies.

JC:Yeah.

DS:And I want to ask the question of how you got interested in them, in the group.

JC:How did I get interested in Yung-Vilne? It would go back to the seminar that I took with Ruth at McGill. I'm not sure if the seminar was about Yung-Vilne. May have been, but it was certainly about Vilna as an organizing principle for understanding modern Jewish culture. And as I went through graduate school, certainly the influences of Sutzkever and Grade continued to resonate. I found them interesting, and when coming up with a graduate project, it became clear 31:00that very little work had been done on Yiddish literary groups. Seth Wolitz has written a number of very important articles on groups, but no full-length sort of archival biographies -- biographies that are both group biographies and literary analyses and cultural histories. Hadn't been done. And it was actually Ruth who was working on one about Di Yunge, which came out while I was a student, which provided, I think, as we were talking sort of the understanding of, Oh, this is a viable project. These are important writers who haven't really been written about in their earlier stages. This could be something that could really keep someone busy for a long time. And it certainly did keep me busy. I'm a linear thinker, and the challenge of balancing different personalities was a challenge. You had leading personalities, minor voices, and the effort to figure 32:00out how to tell that story was one that I worked on, both on my graduate dissertation and now recently have turned into a book. But intellectually, it wasn't only because these were important writers and because they were an important literary group that deserved to be written about. That was one part of it. Actually found it interesting. It occurred to me at one point when I was retitling the book, or the book manuscript that's now called "When Yiddish Was Young" that we had become -- in teaching my own students, I came to realize that students were attracted to Yiddish because they saw it as old, they saw it as quaint, they saw it as grandfatherly. So, they attributed certain nostalgic feelings of loss and of an attempt to recapture aspects of identity that they weren't in control of -- that's what Yiddish represented. And Yung-Vilne wasn't concerned with those things. It was about -- it was young, by definition. It was 33:00active. It was politically engaged, it was culturally engaged. I mean, there was no sense of oldness in what they were doing at the time. For them, it was all new, vibrant, and exciting. So, the opportunity to write this book was an opportunity to really reflect on a moment that we may have forgotten about, really, when Yiddish was young, when Yiddish was the language of children, of young parents, of love, of betrayal, of politics, not of what it has become in the post-khurbn [Holocaust] period. So, for me, that was interesting. And really, an ability to also bookend other interests. I've also been interested, in my scholarly work, on Sholem Aleichem and have translated some early stuff of Sholem Aleichem and translated another work by -- nineteenth century woman -- of Jewish life in the nineteenth century shtetl [small Eastern European village with a Jewish community]. So, really, when I think of it -- not on purpose, but 34:00if I look at what I've done up until this point in my career, I've really written on Jewish literature and cultural history in the late nineteenth century and in the 1930s. So, it really bookends sort of the beginnings of the modern Jewish literary period and sort of the end. Not that they knew that it was the end at the time, but it really ends in 1939 in some ways. And the middle ground, I haven't yet figured out what to deal with, but I should probably do that just to make sure that I always go in different directions.

DS:Right. And the timelines are so -- when you're talking about your polyglot identity --

JC:Yeah.

DS:-- and thinking about Yiddish not as old, necessarily, that the -- when you look at the timelines as being so similar in terms of the -- how modern Yiddish literature, modern Hebrew literature, both of which are growing up alongside one another -- I think that that comes through in a lot of what you're saying here, too. I think -- and I want to get back to the youth aspect of it --

JC:Sure, yeah.

DS:-- and why it's important to you to convey these things when you're teaching, to convey -- idea of Yiddish as something that is not necessarily just a haven for nostalgia.

JC:Well, I think it's a fascinating topic. I think that anyone interested in Jewish history, culture, transnationalism, globalism, languages -- I mean, Yiddish is -- I find it the most interesting thing I've ever done. I think it's far more interesting than other topics because it really encompasses everything. The political challenges the Jews faced at the time, the aesthetic transformations the Jews underwent, the geographic shifts -- you can really follow the course of the modern Jewish experience through Yiddish, the move from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, the move from Eastern Europe to the Americas, to South America, to Africa, to Australia. The treatment of Yiddish in the 36:00Yishuv and then in the State of Israel -- I mean, really, you can use it as a prism for reading modern Jewish history. So, I find it interesting and I think that students find it -- once they get over the fact that it's not only Sholem Aleichem -- or not even that it's not only Sholem Aleichem, because I think that if you teach Sholem Aleichem well, they realize that Sholem Aleichem was an incredibly complicated, sophisticated, and interesting literary figure, but that it's not only Sholem Aleichem and it's not only Bashevis. There's a lot in there. And when you introduce them to that, the fact that it's unheard of and most people don't know about it, it's exciting. Students are excited by what's not known. They don't want to do things that everyone else is doing. So, for those who want to do something interesting, a little bit offbeat, I think that it attracts them and also enables us to ask very serious questions that aren't 37:00only being asked in Jewish studies but are being asked across the academy. So, I found, certainly at a place like Smith, which is a small liberal arts college, my students have come to Yiddish literature courses for all different types of reasons. Certainly aren't all Jews. I would say maybe half, on a lucky year. But often times, not even. And those same students will take courses in Eastern European Jewish history. And what I try to do there is to provide them with enough of a sweep of Jewish culture that a student could take a course in Yiddish literature one semester, a course in Israeli literature another semester, a course in Holocaust literature another semester, a course in American Jewish literature another semester, and at least have these different linguistic and generic things to think about so that they could come out of an undergraduate education really as well-versed in Jewish literature as they would 38:00be in, let's say, an American literature program or in a French literature program. I think that's what an undergraduate education should be. I don't think we should be training scholars. We should be training breadth. And one of the things that I like about being able to teach at a liberal arts college is that I can do my own scholarship, which is very specifically on Yiddish, but teach beyond Yiddish. And in teaching beyond Yiddish, I always come back to an appreciation of what Yiddish can offer and why students, young students, are interested in it.

DS:Well, can you share more about that? I mean, if you have specific experiences of teaching Yiddish-related subjects to folks that may not have had prior exposure?

JC:Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot -- people will come to Yiddish for different reasons: some of them for the reasons of identity and nostalgia, some of them because they see Yiddish and they may not think that it's as serious as another topic. I think they realize that it's perhaps even more serious, depending on -- 39:00a subject is only as serious as an instructor makes it and as a student dedicates to it. So, I don't think that there's any -- there's no such thing as a course that's serious or not serious. Specifically, I'm not sure I can come up with anything that I can put my finger on that would directly address what you're asking.

DS:Well, how would you introduce your course to students coming in for a first day?

JC:A Yiddish literature course?

DS:Say -- yes.

JC:I would probably -- normally, I would start with a broad overview of what Yiddish is. I define for them what Yiddish is, what some of the debates about Yiddish have been, get them into the general controversy just about what Yiddish was called and the various names for Yiddish. So, you first have to teach them, you know, what is Yiddish? What has it come to represent? What are some of the attitudes that are embedded with things Yiddish when we think about them? Then I would be sure to offer them at least a lecture on old Yiddish, that is, Yiddish 40:00prior to the modern period, prior to the Haskalah [Jewish enlightenment], so that they can understand Yiddish in its medieval context. And then, I would provide them, in a general Yiddish literature course, with a broad survey of the classic writers, of Soviet Yiddish, of American Jewish literature, of Yiddish literature in its -- during the Holocaust. And then, usually at the end of the semester, return back to the question with which we began about what does Yiddish represent, but then talk about that in the modern context. And that's where you really get to the opportunity, once students have studied the field, to really ask them, "How does what you know about Yiddish now differ from what you wanted Yiddish to be and that brought you to this course?" So, that's where you get into issues of Shandler-ish post-vernacular Yiddish, the politicization of Yiddish, queer Yiddish, Yiddish anti-Zionism, and all of the Yiddish nostalgia, all of those question-- Yiddish as inherently funny, as though a language can be funny and another language cannot be. So, all of those things 41:00that they've wanted to talk about, perhaps, all semester but that I don't let them talk about till they have something to measure it against. That's where it really comes out, in the last two weeks, and you can really see, Wow, they really thought that about Yiddish and now, hopefully, they think something very different and you can really challenge some of those assumptions that they've been wanting to bring out but you haven't been able to. So, it's about -- I believe in teaching that all courses should have -- I'm not a postmodern teacher. I believe that courses should have a meta narrative and students should -- that there should be an arc, there should be an arc of a plot. Each course should have a plot and that like any good novel, there should be moments of climax and of denouement that allow students to think and then lead up to the next climax. And if you provide them with that meta narrative, then you've provided them with a framework for them to deconstruct it. But you can't deconstruct something you don't know. So, my goal in teaching Yiddish literature 42:00and Eastern European Jewish history is to provide them the framework, the major signposts that they can then use to investigate something a little bit more clearly. I'm not interested in using Yiddish to get into issues of modern -- very contemporary modern Jewish culture, culture wars, or identity. I don't think that's the role of professors in the secular academy. I don't teach identity. And I tell students that, in the first class. "If you're here to get identity, you've come to the wrong class." I say, "It may be that after taking the class, you will have a greater sense of your identity. But the purpose of the class and my relationship to it is not to teach you how to be better, more culturally literate Jews. There are non-Jews in this class. That's one reason for" -- and, in fact, I make an effort in the class never even to -- I don't even allow students who happen to be Jewish to refer to Jews as we or us. I always make them talk about them as "the Jews." It has to be the same as any 43:00other field, where you look at this clinically, you look at this objectively, and you try to come to certain conclusions and allow students to ask their own questions in ways that don't privilege an in-group. Having said that, of course, I know that there are some students who come out of this with a much different sense of their own identity and I don't object to that. I think that's great. But it's not the purpose of the course and it shouldn't be the purpose of the -- of involvement, I think, of teachers in Yiddish in the academy. Totally different. I mean, if you want to get into Yiddish and teach it to high school students in Jewish high schools or in Jewish day schools or if you want Yiddish to be in summer camps, there, of course, your role should be to use whatever tools you can to promote your vision of Jewish identity, but not -- I don't think it's appropriate in scholarship.

DS:So, you see -- do you kind of build a wall between your involvement in, say 44:00-- you said the day school that your children go to and your involvement in the academy? Or do you see these as related?

JC:I do. Well, I think that -- no, I mean, I build a wall. I like walls. (laughter) Taller the better. (laughter) Why -- do I build a wall? No, I'm very able to have different parts of my life that I respect and treat with the integrity that they deserve. My work as a scholar is one thing. I happen to be a scholar of Jewish studies. So, that might give me, in the eyes of some, a certain amount of street credit when I speak about issues of Jewish day school education. But that's purely a voluntary -- I do that out of my commitment as a Jew and as a member of the community, that I want to make sure that there is the best quality Jewish day school in the community and also for my children and I devote my volunteer efforts to that. But I don't see it as related, necessarily, 45:00to my professional work as a scholar of Yiddish.

DS:Well, let me ask then about the Yiddish Book Center --

JC:Yeah.

DS:-- and where that falls on this spectrum of -- whether you're talking about transmission and activism on the one hand or scholarly pursuits and academia on the other.

JC:Right.

DS:Where does your involvement with the Yiddish Book Center fall on the spectrum?

JC:I'd say it's probably more -- it's almost entirely on the academic spectrum. The work that I've done with the Book Center, which has done such an extraordinary job in collecting materials and now is moving into a new moment, exciting moment in its history where the question of transmission and teaching will become important -- what I've done with the book center has mainly been teaching in their Yiddish summer program, teaching in their postbaccalaureate fellows programs. So, that is teaching students. A couple of book rescue missions. Working on exhibitions and writing materials for the Yiddish Writers Garden, for the new Yiddish exhibit -- those I see as part of my scholarly 46:00commitments and involvement. I don't think -- I don't see that work as identity work. If people get something out of it for their identity, fabulous. But it's not -- I don't put that in my own -- I don't put that there. One of the things that -- if you're looking for a way that these things might penetrate one another, I have been giving thought about ways Jewish day schools might be able to better integrate the Yiddish and the Eastern European Jewish experience. Because our school's at a K through six level, it's a little bit more difficult, because K through six, you really -- it's hard to teach one second language, let alone two. And at the K through six level, you can't do things that are as complex. So, you want to really make sure that they have the back-- the basis in Hebrew. You want to make sure that they can negotiate the siddur, you want to 47:00make sure that they know something about the holidays. You want to introduce them to Tanakh and then to Talmud. There's not a lot of time, then, to fit in something else. But I think that we've done a poor job, not as a school but as a country, in not figuring out a way, even at the K through six level, of doing a better job within Jewish day schools of keeping Yiddish somewhere in that conversation. And I'd see -- I'd like to see more of that and I've been trying to think of ways to do that. I think that it's probably easier in middle school and high school. And Jewish middle school's or high school's where you often times will then introduce a second language -- students will want to take Spanish or German or Chinese -- where you can talk about more complex issues. That would be a wonderful place for Yiddish and Yiddish literature to be taught. My reading of those Jewish high schools that exist in major urban centers, not here, is that they don't do that. And I think that's a failure of Jewish 48:00education at those schools, and it's also a failure of the Yiddish academic establishment to be able to articulate a way where they would be able to do this and provide a fuller portrait of recent Jewish history and literature. It seems to me that this is a natural environment for high school students, high school students who are interested in reading great literature. There's so much Yiddish literature that could be taught that would be relevant to their experiences and also introduce them to a culture that is not so distant from their own experiences. So, I think that there's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of work to be done in terms of the relationship between the private and -- or the personal and the scholarly on transmission. I think that -- transmission thorough translation. So, I'm very interested in issues of, how can we create a 49:00mass-scale translation project that would open up these books? Because clearly, having one or two books of Yiddish literature translated a year is not going to do it. So, we now have, in one place, most of Yiddish literature. How are we going to translate that in a way that will really open it up to more and more people? Now, you could be a purist and say, Well, there -- Yiddish literature. What we should do is undertake the greatest teaching of Yiddish language in history so that people can read the books in the original. That's great. I think it's wonderful. We should teach as many students Yiddish as possible. But it's not realistic. You're not going to create -- America is not going to become Yiddish speaking again, as far as I can tell. American Jewry. So, if you want these books to be relevant and if you want them to have some type of meaning, if you want adults to read them, if you want students to read them, then you have to translate them. You have to make them accessible. And I think there are ways now in the digital age where you don't have to publish things in the traditional 50:00way. You can publish things electronically. There are wiki translation projects out there. There are a lot of people out there who enjoy sort of this public translation. I think that there needs to be some type of organizational effort put into, how can we translate as much as possible? And my understanding of this is that this would be a seminal moment in American Jewish history if there was sort of a national translation, Yiddish translation project, where you had hundreds of people translating in different places around tables with dictionaries spread out on them. I think generations from now, people would look back on this as a major achievement and a major achievement of cultural innovation and creativity. But it takes time and it also takes organization. It also takes money. So, someone has to spearhead that massive translation project and I'm hoping that -- there are various -- there are enough people now who see 51:00it as important that I think it may not come about with the speed or the breadth that I'm proposing, but I think the people are going to start realizing that translation is absolutely critical for this literature to have any meaning. One doesn't just collect books to say that they have the books. One needs to open those books. And they can't be opened unless they're understood. And there's only two ways to understand them: either undertake massive Yiddish teaching in language so people can read them in the original, or massive Yiddish translation. And the -- someone's going to have to be figuring out what the best strategy is. I've already played my cards on that, I think.

DS:So, then, what do you see, just looking into the future, as the place of Yiddish, both within the academy and without?

JC:Well, Yiddish -- first of all, I put no currency in the notion of Yiddish renaissance. This notion that Yiddish is undergoing a renaissance? I don't know. The fact that more and more people are interested in Yiddish does not make a 52:00renaissance, I think. Renaissance to me seems to be a cultural moment or movement that will hold some weight in subsequent generations. I think the fact that you might now have more young people interested in Yiddish is not a renaissance. It just means that Yiddish is becoming more accessible and something that they're interested in. Nonetheless, I think that the home now for Yiddish is the academy and I think -- I find the -- I'm very fascinated by the fact that the two places where Yiddish is growing in the world is in Israel and in the Polish-German academy and that the one place in the world where Yiddish is falling in its influence in the academy is in the United States. So, I think that's something worthy of think-- and perhaps it's natural if you think of it, and I'm not sure it is. But, of course, Yiddish should be important in the Polish academy. After all, much of Polish history is tied to Yiddish, so it 53:00makes perfect sense to me that as Poland comes out of its communist period, that there's an understanding that Polish history cannot only be written in Polish, but has to be about everything that happened in Poland. It's understandable to me why Germans would be interested in Yiddish. After all, this is the legacy of a perpetrator country that is now interested in somehow recapturing the culture that it destroyed. It makes total sense to me why a Jewish country would be interested in things Yiddish. The United States is a little bit of a problem, because many Jewish studies programs historically have been funded by outside donors. I don't think that they are as forthcoming as they used to be. And as the generation that built Jewish studies retires and those positions need to be refilled, the number of jobs actually advertised for someone who does Yiddish are few and far between. And I think that that's probably scary for the future 54:00of Yiddish in this country. It doesn't bode well. I was lucky. Smith was not looking for a Yiddish scholar. They were looking for a Jewish studies generalist. So, they had people apply who were historians of different fields, literary scholars of different fields. It so happened that I was lucky and I was able to convince them that I had something to offer them. But they didn't set out looking for someone whose specialty was Yiddish literature. And if you look at the listings of the Association for Jewish Studies, the amount of jobs that actually are looking for specialists in Yiddish are not robust, let's say. So, when I tell students who are interested in Yiddish and want to go graduate school in Yiddish what to do, I am not encouraging. I don't discourage, but I don't -- I encourage them to do something very broad in which Yiddish is a core 55:00component but which allows them to still apply for other jobs. So, go into Slavic studies. Use Russian and have as one of your languages Yiddish. Go into comparative literature and make sure you have something else other than Yiddish. There are more jobs in Jewish history than there are in Jewish literature. So, if you're interested in Yiddish, you could do something very good in Jewish history where you can use Yiddish literature a lot in your teaching but still perhaps make yourself more marketable. It's going to take a lot of effort, both among people in Jewish studies and among those who decide where Jewish studies jobs should go and what's important, to make the argument for the importance of Yiddish literature. To me, it's obvious. But apparently, it's not obvious to everyone. To me, it's obvious that if you're going to teach the history of Israel or Zionism, it's just as important to teach the history of East European 56:00Jewry. It's obvious to me that if you want to have a decent program in American Jewish history or in American Jewish literature, to do that without Yiddish probably isn't intellectually responsible. It's obvious to me that if you want to do something on modern European history and culture, to do that without anyone who knows Yiddish is probably selling that program short. So, the argument could be made about its importance but there are still certain prejudices out there against what Yiddish really is. Jewish history is serious. But you do Yiddish literature. It's very nice, it's important, and people say, It's important, it's nice. But if you have to choose, are you going to choose someone who's a specialist in Sholem Aleichem or are you going to choose someone who's a specialist in Mendelssohn? I don't know. I could make an argument for why studying Yiddish literature is more important than studying Moses 57:00Mendelssohn. But those who have tended to be in positions of power in American Jewish studies, they tend to be more in the prototypical Mendelssohn camp, let's say, than in the Yiddish literature camp.

DS:Got it. Well, we're just about out of time and that you --

JC:No way! (laughter) Schlitt! We can't be out of time! You've just gotten started! I love this interview! (laughter) I could talk -- I'm going to have some of this vaser [water], okay?

DS:We'll see if that helps your voice.

JC:Mm! This is lovely! (laughter) I love this! This is good Yiddish vaser. It's good, it makes my throat all nice. (laughter) Mm! See, I'm just warming up.

DS:Yeah, I know.

JC:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

DS:Now comes the mugging.

JC:Now comes all the different characters.

DS:Yes, exactly, for hour two, three, and four.

JC:Yeah, well, so we could continue. So, you have no other questions? I'm that uninteresting?

DS:Oh, but you preempted my last question, the --

JC:I've said nothing? Last question.

DS:The last question was advice to Yiddish scholars, future Yiddish scholars. You did that one --

JC:Don't do it!

DS:-- we did it and --

JC:You're nuts! (laughter) No, it's a great field. You should come. I will 58:00embrace you with open arms, future Yiddish scholars.

DS:And beyond that, I just wanted to ask if there's anything else that you wanted to share before we wrap things up, if there's any -- whether it's advice, pearls of wisdom, what have you?

JC:Pearls of wisdom coming from me, this would be scary. (laughter) No, I have no pearls. I wish I had pearls in this case.

DS:Or anything else that you wanted to touch on before we wrap up?

JC:No, I think this is a great thing. I think that my interview is going to be something that is going to fascinate people --

DS:Hundreds of years --

JC:-- for hundreds of years from now. I think that it should probably be the lead interview on the website. But I understand that sometimes these things can't be, and I'm just happy to be part of this project.

DS:Okay.

JC:In fact, you're doing a great job.

DS:I really appreciate it, Justin.

JC:Hey, I appreciate being interviewed.

[END OF INTERVIEW]