JACK KUGELMASS ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney, and today is December 21st, 2010. I am here at the Association of Jewish Studies Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, with Jack Kugelmass, director of the Center for Jewish Studies and professor of anthropology at the University of Florida. And we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Professor Kugelmass, do I have your permission to record this interview?

JACK KUGELMASS:Yes, you do.

CW:Thank you. So, I thought we could start by you telling me briefly a little bit about your family background.

JK:Well, I grew up in Montreal. And my mother was born in the region of Kiev and migrated to Montreal when she was about three. And she comes from a 1:00Yiddish-speaking family, of course, but also my maternal grandmother, my mother's mother, played a pretty important role in my family. She was very present. She was a worker, a seamstress, worked in the garment industry. And, you know, typical what Irving Howe referred to as having -- semi-intellectual, that she was very active in the labor -- in the union. She was very active. Used to talk to me about every strike she participated in. And was well read in Yiddish literature and, you know, was very literate person. And my paternal grandparents -- my father was born in Montreal -- and my paternal grandparents came from somewhere in Galicia, and were of a very different type. They were more religious in orientation, not Yiddish in orientation -- they spoke Yiddish, but they weren't culturally Yiddish in any kind of way. They had a very large 2:00family, about twelve kids. I always joke that it's characteristic of French Canadian families. But sort of the Yiddish component of my background really comes from my mother's side, and --

CW:What other languages did you speak in the home?

JK:Well, you know, of course, you grow up in Montreal, you speak French. I mean, you know, French was pretty much stressed. Although, of course, we learnt it in school. But my parents could speak it. My father was fluent French speaker. He used it in business all the time. My mother less so. And that's really about it.

CW:Can you tell me a little bit about your home environment?

JK:Well, it was basically middle-class. I think back about my childhood, and what constituted middle-class then versus today is very striking. I think of the issue of proxemics, for example. I mean, size of houses, that the first house we 3:00lived in, that we bought, had one bathroom initially. Try to imagine families living with one bathroom today. I mean, that would constitute poverty. And so, I remember for much -- a certain component of my life -- sharing a bedroom with my older brother. And I think a lot about the furniture in the house and the linoleum on the floor and the kitchen and the lack of appliances and things. It's a very different world than the world of today. As I said, we were middle-class; we weren't poor, but probably in terms of standard of living, it would be much closer to poor today. But neither of my parents had college education, which is very characteristic of Canadian Jews. Actually, neither one of them had finished high school, also characteristic of Montreal Jews at that 4:00time. And they were married very young. My parents were married very young. My father, I'll say that after he retired, did get his high school leaving certificate and then got his junior college degree and was finishing a BA and contemplating going for a PhD at the time he died. In other words, my parents believed in education. They believed very strongly in it. But they assumed that their kids would go into professions at one level or another. And, of course, the assumption is that they would be doctors, and that would be the preferred thing. My older brother became a doctor and became a psychiatrist. I was a black sheep in the family, so I didn't. And so -- paid the price for it, too.

CW:And what were the Yiddish components of your household?

JK:Well, you know, my parents spoke I guess you would call it "kitchen Yiddish" in the sense that they didn't really speak Yiddish. And they certainly didn't 5:00read in -- I mean, they in theory could. They could look at a newspaper if they wanted to. But they never -- they didn't have a Yiddish newspaper in the house. So, the Yiddish was really for communication with their parents. And so, I did not grow up in a Yiddish-speaking family. They were familiar with the language but didn't use it, except in certain phrases here and there or certain words here and there.

CW:Can you tell me more about your grandmother?

JK:Mm. Well, my maternal grandmother was -- again, from the Kiev region. She'd married, I think, a man from Warsaw and certainly had lived in Warsaw for a very brief period of time on the way coming over, as far as I understand it. Her husband died en route to Montreal. I think originally the family went to Quebec City and then made their way to Montreal. There was a mushrooming community of 6:00Jews in Quebec City at the time, but for various reasons much of that community had migrated to Montreal, probably connected to the garment industry and the kind of employment that was possible in Montreal. But there were members of the family who were peddlers in the Quebec region, and I assume there was a primary activity for some of those Jews who had moved there. Speaking off the top of my head, because I don't really know. And it was never a subject of much interest with me. I'm interested a little more today than in the past, but not a lot more. So.

CW:And how did you get the news in your family, or was that important to you?

JK:Well, the news came from the "Montreal Gazette." We subscribed to that. We didn't subscribe to any Yiddish newspaper. I'm pretty sure we got in those days the "Keneder Adler," so we had the Yiddish newspaper. And I don't know how 7:00carefully my parents read it. I don't recall their reading it, but if they got it they must have looked at it.

CW:And who were your friends growing up?

JK:Well, the neighborhood I lived in when I was probably about -- we moved there when I was probably about five or six or something like that -- was Côte Saint-Luc, which is the major Jewish neighborhood in Montreal. And so, as far as I know, all my friends would have been Jewish. I do recall going to primary school -- and initially I had gone to a Yiddish school, but the Yiddish school was located in downtown Montreal, so the bus driver couldn't continue to take me. So, I had to cease going there, and went to what we would think of -- a public school, except in Montreal they were denominational school boards. So, 8:00you either went to the Catholic school board -- the French Catholic or the English Catholic or the English partisan school board. Those were the three school boards. And so, in our area it was the Protestant school, and we went there. And every morning they would sing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and you know, almost everyone in the class was Jewish. Not a hundred percent, but certainly in the nineties somewhere. So.

CW:Can you tell me a little bit more about your education?

JK:Well, so I went there. And then, the Yiddish school moved to that section of the city when I was in grade four. So, for several years I went to the Yiddish school. And then, high school was a regular high school. They built a new high school in the area and -- brand new high school -- so I went there. And in college, I went to McGill and graduated from there, and then went to the New 9:00School for Social Research in New York for my MA and PhD. And at the same time, I took courses at the YIVO Institute, at the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies, and so I kind of did a dual program when I was at the New School. So, it was interesting. I mean, I'm probably one of the last people on earth who took graduate courses in Yiddish. And it was interesting.

CW:Just one small question: what was the Yiddish school that you went to?

JK:The Peretz Shule.

CW:Peretz Shule. Okay. And --

JK:By the way, I should add that if probably any school had a lingering impact on me, it was that school. It was the three or four years I was there had a huge impact. It was really striking. We often don't think about what form of pedagogy, what type of teacher has an impact on us. And if you think back on 10:00your career, I mean, what -- you mentioned what got you into what you're doing. And it really was those few years I spent there.

CW:Can you tell me more about that?

JK:Probably not. (laughter)

CW:Okay.

JK:I think because -- look. It was an encounter with a completely different culture. You know, the teachers were all East European Jews. They were native speakers of Yiddish. And so, as a child it was my -- I had an early sort of anthropological experience, where I had to immerse myself in a culture -- in a language -- which was not my own. So, it wasn't my parents' culture. I mean, it was -- except by extension. But they didn't -- I didn't grow up in a Yiddish-speaking household. And when I entered the Peretz Shule, the afternoon classes -- not afternoon, but half the day was instruction was in Yiddish. So, it wasn't just the pedagogy; it wasn't just the teachers. It's also having a total cultural language immersion that you're not really prepared for, but you -- eventually you sort of figure out how to do it. And so, I think from that time on, I always felt comfortable entering environments that I was not adept in 11:00initially, that I had to learn to be so.

CW:And how did you come into anthropology?

JK:Well, I think that was part of it, you know. I had a very strong interest in archaeology and things along those lines. I was very interested in the past and very interested in the extreme past. And so, when I was in McGill, I took my first archaeology courses and hated them. I was utterly bored with them. So, you know, it's like sometimes you take the wrong course with the wrong person and you turn off. But I took my introduction to anthropology course, which was a four-field or, I think, a three-field course. You did cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, and archaeology. And I loved the cultural anthropology. 12:00I mean, I was fascinated by it. So, that's what did it. And then, I just kept taking more and more anthropology courses.

CW:And then, how did Yiddish become an academic focus for you?

JK:When I went to graduate school, I decided I was intrigued by the New School for Social Research. I thought I'd go there. And someone had told me about the YIVO Institute -- a relative and aunt had told me about the YIVO Institute. And I think that actually Ruth Wisse had led a tour to New York from Jewish studies, McGill Jewish studies. And I went on that. And we had a session at the YIVO Institute. I looked at the catalogue, so I was intrigued by what they were teaching, and I started taking courses there.

CW:And can you describe the community at YIVO or the environment at YIVO at that time?

JK:Hm. Well, yeah. It was -- it was very old-worldly in many ways, in both the positive and the negative aspects of that. It was an old type of scholarship. Very positivist in orientation, very document-oriented. It really hadn't been influenced at all by what was taking place in humanities elsewhere in the country. But the truth is, even at that time, the humanities was very staid in much of the country. The New School was very cutting-edge. It was Marxist in orientation. Very much into critical theory. It was kind of like the legacy of the Frankfurt School. And none of that was present in Jewish studies. And certainly not in Yiddish studies. And I always felt -- I mean, certainly as a -- there was sort of an in-joke at YIVO at the time that the secret language of 14:00YIVO was not Yiddish but Polish, so that if things were really important, really serious, the conversation would immediately switch into Polish. And there was also a certain sense of hierarchy, that the students were -- here and there, there would be a student who had been -- or a young person who would hang out there who was a child of one of the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto. This was like an elite (laughs) within it. So, it had a kind of in-groupness to it, and very staid staidness. On the other hand, it was a very interesting place. The people were -- and again, like that experience I had when I entered the Peretz Shule, that it was a language and culture which was somewhat foreign to me. I mean, certainly I no longer had much fluency in Yiddish when I entered graduate school, so I had to relearn it. I was intrigued by these people and by their culture and by their experience. I had no Polish connection. I had no interest in Poland when I started graduate school. And suddenly, I was introduced to 15:00people who were very -- partly some of them very Polonized -- many of them very Polonized. I became interested in their fantasy life, and their cultural imaginary became part of mine, in a sense. You know, I was just reading a paper in which part of it was talking about ski jumping in Zakopane in the 1920s. And it's funny, Zakopane means something to me at this point. How would a Jewish boy growing up in suburban Montreal, who would care about Zakopane? But it's become part of my world, this --

CW:Considering so many Yiddish scholars came from Montreal, do you think there's something about that place that sort of fostered Jewish scholarship?

JK:Yeah, it's the smoked meat. Well, Montreal is unique in many ways. One, it's 16:00a very lovely city, and two, it's got wonderful food. And the best bagels in North America. And the best deli in North America. But I always talk about it -- the uniqueness of the Montreal Jewish experience is that historically, it was a very bounded community. So, you had an Anglo elite that was itself bounded. And a French Canadian -- so the masses with their own elite, which was bounded largely by religion -- partly by language, but I think largely by religion. It was a very, very Catholic part of North America. Today, it's the least religious part of North America. It's made this amazing revolution. But for a long period of time, part of its way of survival was that religion constituted its buffer against Anglo domination. And there was a large Italian and Greek and some -- I 17:00think those were the major ethnic groups in Montreal. So, the Jews constituted an in-between enclave, between the Anglos and the French. They were a business community, so they had to know French; they had to be able to function within it. Certainly, the men who were in business would know the language. But I think it's sort of that existing between two different worlds, two bounded worlds, also helped set up boundaries for the Jewish community itself. It was territorially bounded in certain ways. It lived in certain neighborhoods. And, I suppose, as long as the Jewish community in Montreal was -- prior to its professionalization, its contacts, social contacts, with the non-Jewish world were much more limited than they are today. And you also have to look at 18:00Canadian Jewry, Montreal Jewry, as at least a generation behind American Jewry. And that means everything: in terms of class, education, intermarriage, et cetera. So, I think these are some of the factors. The United States is a more open society than Canada was at that time. I think there were far greater restrictions in this country on discrimination, on exclusion. And in some ways, Canada functions in an older kind of way. But again, I'm sort of speaking without expertise at this point. I have personal experience but never read anything about this to know, like, is this what scholars have to say about it? I really have no idea. I just know my own experience. And in some ways, when I moved to the United States, it was shocking. It was a completely different world. I wasn't used to it. To this day, I must tell you, that I go into a deli 19:00in this country, and I'm shocked by the presence of ham or bacon in what is supposed to be a Jewish-style deli. As far as I know, that never happens -- it certainly never happened in Montreal. I don't know whether it's still true today. But this idea of sort of separating things and keeping a cuisine distinct and at least nominally observing certain kind of dietary -- if not laws, at least aesthetics -- is very much part of the Montreal Jewish experience. And it's shocking to me that it's not part of the American Jewish experience.

CW:What else was different about the States?

JK:Hm. Well, the food is a big one, by the way. To this day, I mean, I have complete disdain for the American bagel. Anyone who knows me knows my disgust when someone hands me a bagel, and it's supposed to be good, and I say, "It's 20:00not," and -- you know. So, food, and aesthetics are another one. I find it very hard to get used to American cities, how ugly they are and rundown, and sort of the lack of sense of pride in downtowns. Of course it's not true everywhere, but it's fairly common in -- I mean, to me it's because -- it's something laughable. It's pathetic. And so, I think there's a big issue here of -- and many of us in Montreal sort of had a sense of superiority, you know, that it's a nicer city. It's not all true, by the way, but I think it is a pretty prevalent Montreal Jewish -- and Montreal in general -- prejudice. By the way, in the '70s and '80s, maybe even -- there was a very different feeling. There was a sense of the city's in decline, that it's not -- but in recent years, I noticed that the 21:00sense of pride has really come back. And the sense of arrogance has come back. (laughs) So.

CW:How do you --

JK:If I can add something else -- it's also partly why I'm an urban anthropologist. Montreal sort of gave me a tremendous sense of love for cities. And what interests me in anthropology is very much the city, and it's something I like writing about. And I really do have a very intense relationship with cities.

CW:So, what did you think of New York when you came to --

JK:It was frightening, actually. It was very hard to adjust to it. It felt very cold, very, very -- very large, and with -- you know, this was a period of time when the Bronx was burning. There was many no-go regions in the city, areas that 22:00people were very frightened to go into. There was a lot of crime. And the subway itself was a sort of dangerous place. So, it took a while to learn to distinguish between the myth of the city and the reality and that, you know, you develop a certain sense of safety simply because you know an area. You don't expect anything to happen to you. So, you learn to ignore what I was reading in the newspapers or seeing on television. Some of it was really sort of hysteria and was not something you really had to worry about on an everyday basis. So. It took a while.

CW:You mentioned before the importance of teachers early on. Have there been any important mentors or academic influences?

JK:Well, I mean, there -- a number in different ways for different -- I mean, it would be unfair for me to really single people out because everyone has had some kind of impact in one way or another. And I worry about my faulty memory in 23:00listing people, 'cause I really would leave people out who were significant. Certainly, when I was at YIVO, at a certain point I started taking courses with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and that had an impact on some interest on my part with narrative and folklore, and that became a certain pursuit of mine for part of my career as well. I also had courses sometimes with some very peculiar -- well, at least one very peculiar person. But I hesitate right now to -- I don't know. It's funny. Not that many years ago, I was taking ulpan at the Hebrew University, and at level gimmel [level three], there was a teacher who was absolutely phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. And pedagogically, she had a 24:00huge impact upon me. And also an impact upon my love for the Hebrew language. But I think that if I went back -- in all fairness, if I went back, there probably was no single teacher who did not have some kind of impact on me one way or another. And certainly in a positive sense, I think it would be impossible to say that someone did not have that kind of impact on me.

CW:And how did you come to your -- you've done a lot of research on various topics, but specifically the ones that have Yiddish components, how did you become interested in them?

JK:Well, usually by happenstance. You know, when I was working on my dissertation I started to work with yisker-bikher [memorial books] and so -- and I think after I finished and I started working on "From a Ruined Garden," again, it was an interest in narrative. And around that time, too, I started to do work 25:00in the South Bronx, a project on the Intervale Jewish Center. I wasn't trained to do that; I didn't know anything about how you do that kind of fieldwork, et cetera, and how you write about that. I learned in the course of doing it. And various projects have come my way in that kind of way. It's funny; I did a piece once on Sammy's Roumanian Steakhouse. And a friend of mine had -- which was a Yiddish piece, by the way -- but a friend of mine was visiting me in New York and really felt he had some obligation to take me out for dinner. And I didn't feel that. But he insisted. And his father-in-law or ex-father-in-law had loved Sammy's. That was his favorite place. He insisted that we had to go there. So, and I really resented -- I didn't want to go. And the truth is, I sat there, and I said to myself, This would make a wonderful study to (UNCLEAR). A lot of 26:00things have come to me in that kind of way. They're not things that I had set out to do, but they're things that by accident I stumbled upon and then started writing about them and working on them.

CW:How do you negotiate Jewish studies and anthropology?

JK:Well, to some degree they cross over; to some degree they're separate. I mean, you know, as we were speaking, I was thinking that these happenstance things, I -- a photographer with whom I'd worked on the Intervale project was working, trying to do another project on bicycle messengers. So, he asked me to write a text for a magazine article on it. And so, I did. And that became sort of one of the studies. And then I moved onto -- and later on, a group of photographers were working on the Greenwich Village Halloween parade. And one of them had known me 'cause I had taken a darkroom class with her. She had taught me how to do darkroom. And then, she suggested that they ask me to write the text for those books that they wanted to do. And they did. So, I produced a 27:00text, and I got the book published for them. So, there's no interface with anything Jewish or anything Yiddish in that. And so, I don't purposely keep these things distinct, but sometimes they are, and I have different interests. For a while I'd worked on a project on psychics in New York. Not a successful project, but an amusing project. And to this day, I retain the skills and use it periodically to entertain people. But there's absolutely no Yiddish connection. And in fact, I must tell you that YIVO had once -- I don't know if it still has it, but there are certain nights in New York where there's an open house of all the Museum Mile. And YIVO had different things on exhibit. And some of my colleagues had suggested (laughs) that we have a booth for me to do Yiddish readings, psychic readings on -- we didn't do it, but we were talking about that as a possibility. I thought, This is too much. (laughs) They would be very 28:00negative, by the way, (laughs) the readings. All doom and gloom.

CW:In general, what do you see of the place in Yiddish within the field of anthropology?

JK:Well, it's a complex question, because the -- for example, the book I'm working on now. I debate with myself -- I mean, the anthropological component of it. And it seems to me that part of the problems I'm having in writing up the material is that it's not really anthropology. It's really literary studies. And I'm not trained as a literary scholar, so I'm kind of working in a field that's really not my own, and with very poor interface. So, I don't think that it always meshes. I think sometimes it simply doesn't. And, you know, anthropology is -- there's two aspects of anthropology which are significant at this point. One is the traditional fieldwork, where you go into a community, you study, and you write up -- as if you were a journalist, but with theory. So, the 29:00ethnography's a journalistic aspect. And then, the -- what we call ethnology is a comparative framework that you put to make sense out of the material that you're gathering. But the other component of anthropology, which is very important, is critical theory, which people don't necessarily combine that with fieldwork. They may not, but they may work on various projects which are -- anthropological texts, for example, which they do critical evaluations of them -- again, using critical theory.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

JK:Literary texts -- like, the kind of material I'm working on now in these travelogues, these Yiddish travelogues, are really literary texts. I mean, they're quasi- or pseudo-ethnography. I shouldn't say "pseudo-." There are some which are pseudo-ethnography that clearly seem to be made up. But most of them are kind of quasi-ethnography. But it strikes me as I look at the material and write up some of it that they're really not ethnographic. They're not 30:00ethnographic because they don't stay put. They're really -- so anything's about landscape, it's about travel itself. It's not about the sort of gradually unpacking a certain culture and letting the reader, bit by bit, come to understand its deeper mysteries. And I think that for me, understanding that distinction between anthropology and this literary material is helpful, because -- and just understand it, right, at this stage in my life. I'm not really doing anthropology; I'm doing some other -- I'm in some other bracket, you know? Which I know very little about. (laughs) But I have good material, and I hope that carries me through. So. You know, when we did "From a Ruined Garden," I mean, the truth is we were able to give an anthropological perspective on the material. But I think the reason why, of course, was that this material came out of a culture in crisis. The perspective is there in the introduction. It's, I 31:00think, less a literary analysis than an understanding of why this material came about and who produced it and why. I think the limitation of that project, and something I regret to this day, is that we didn't do as much fieldwork as should have been done, that really every single contributor to a yisker-bukh whom we could find and every editor should have been interviewed. There should have been an archive made of the editors. And, you know, we didn't have the resources. I think we didn't really fully understand the significance of the material -- and the fact that this was not going to endure, that these people produced them who seemed -- you know, were fairly common enough at that time, wouldn't be common for very long. I mean, they wouldn't be around for very long. So, there's that sense of loss that I really feel now that you -- there's certain moments in time when you can do certain kinds of studies, and you can collect certain kinds of data. And there are other moments in time which you can't anymore. It's gone. 32:00So, that's one of them where -- let's say the anthropological component of that project should have been amplified, should have been much more collecting of that information on the production of the yisker-bikher.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Can you talk about maybe some of these moments that you've seen over time that you feel that there's a major shift, or that --

JK:Hm. Well, one of them, of course, is the time when I was in graduate school, where critical theory absolutely was not part of Jewish studies, not part of Yiddish studies. And anthropology was not part of Jewish studies or Yiddish studies. Let's say the king of Jewish studies at that period, as far as I know, was history. It had long been the king of secular Jewish studies. And I think 33:00history had a certain arrogance about it, that it's all about documents -- it's about hard facts. History's changed quite a bit. History now is very beholden to anthropology. That wasn't true decades ago. So, I think what's the big change within the humanities is the rise of anthropology in stature. And along with it, all the theory that anthropology -- now, anthropology, the theory doesn't just come from anthropology. It also comes from comparative literature, from philosophy, from various other places. Partly its own theory, but -- but it seems to me that -- and it's true, for example, in the -- you know, one of the entries of anthropology into Jewish studies has been through religious studies. Religious scholars recognize the value of anthropology, partly because religious studies can be an anthropological exercise, partly that in its comparative 34:00framework, it's similar to ethnology, that it has to understand the place of religion within various cultures. So, overall, I would say that there's been a tremendous rise in the stature of anthropology. And that's a sea change from, let's say, the '70s to the year 2000. And it probably happened before the year 2000. I don't know exactly when it happened. The other big change -- and I sort of began our discussion with this -- and that's something which shocks me -- and I should have known this, but I -- 'cause I've been hearing it, but I didn't put two and two together -- is -- so the assault on the humanities in general within this country, perhaps elsewhere. That there's a certain degree of shrinkage taking place. Students are less inclined to take humanities courses. And obviously, this has some impact on Jewish studies as well. It's not something we experience at the University of Florida, but I understand other programs are 35:00experiencing it. And there's a certain degree of trying to make things relevant, even trying to make Jewish studies relevant. You no longer face a situation where you expect a Jewish studies student to take a Jewish studies course simply because they're interested; this is why they take courses in universities. But I think there's an increasing sense that people take courses in universities that are leading to careers. So, what's relevant is Israel studies, because it could lead to State Department-type jobs or peace studies, things along those lines. So, to the degree that Israel studies is tied into the Arab-Israeli conflict, it's very relevant. To the degree that you study Israel the way you would study any other society or culture, it seems to be a little less relevant today. It's like, less -- and these are significant transformations. It's huge transformations of what constitute Jewish studies. The other great example is that when I started graduate school, Holocaust studies didn't exist. And there 36:00were texts, there were some books, but it wasn't a legitimate field. And today, it threatens to absorb Jewish studies. It's one of the prime areas that donors are willing to give money for. And really, I think at the expense of many other aspects of Jewish studies. Shocks me that there are few, if any, donors who come forward and say, I'd like to give money for a Hebrew Bible position. It's amazing. That's another area, of course. Hebrew Bible turns out to be largely a Christian field, which also shocks me, that if you do a search for Hebrew Bible scholars, a huge number of people who will apply are trained in Protestant seminaries or Catholic seminaries. It's really striking about that. I suppose Protestant seminaries, not Catholic. So, the field itself -- people are coming to the field in different kinds of ways. Also, in Holocaust studies -- again, if 37:00you do a search for a candidate in Holocaust studies, the vast majority of applicants will not be Jewish studies scholars; they'll be Germanists. They're modern German historians. They may know nothing about Jews. I shouldn't say this on camera, but still, part of me thinks that truthfully, you could look at Holocaust studies and the Hebrew Bible as Jewish studies without Jews. Neither one of them really needs Jews for them. Now, it's an exaggeration because there clearly are people who do Jewish studies within them, but striking numbers don't. And in Holocaust studies, a striking number of people don't know a single word of a Jewish language. And again, may know nothing about Jews whatsoever. So, working on Nazism and sort of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, it's possible to do that without knowing a word of Hebrew or Yiddish. The truth of the matter, it's possible to work on Jews without knowing a word of Hebrew or 38:00Yiddish. You want to work on German Jews within the Holocaust, West European Jews, the truth is you don't really need to know the languages. It's only true as you move eastward. Bible, Hebrew Bible, again, it's a similar thing. People could be able to work with the original text in Hebrew Bible, so they have some knowledge of Hebrew, but they don't really know modern Hebrew, and they can't -- there's enough material, enough sources, enough critical discussion in various non-Jewish languages to be a perfectly legitimate scholar in the area. So, in that sense, I mean, undoubtedly this was always true. But with Holocaust, it's a new phenomenon. It's this idea of how large it's become and how significant it's become within Jewish studies programs also. And the third area, again, is Israel studies. Israel studies is not necessarily about Israel. It's quite typically about the conflict. So, we assume within Jewish studies that Israel studies is 39:00one more component of a Jewish studies, but it's -- all these areas constantly is a kind of expansion of Jewish studies, reaching out, and in a positive sense, they mean very strong linkages with other units within universities and other -- and outside of a very narrowly defined area of Jewish studies. The negative thing about it is they don't necessarily contribute that much to a Jewish studies education or to, let's say, constituting a veritable, viable major within Jewish studies. It's a complex issue.

CW:What do you think the implications of these sea changes is, or could be?

JK:Well, look, the fact of the matter is that the fields are always changing. To me, the good things is that there has been expansion, and there's movement outwards, that there's a movement away from narrowly-defined Jewish studies. And 40:00I think that's largely good. The negative implications are that people don't necessarily have the training or the patience to get the training to be able to work with Jewish studies documents, Jewish studies material. So, you know, you can be a specialist in Jewish studies and know relatively little about Jews. And that's to me, something sad about it. It's true for faculty; it's true for students. But look, we live in an age where you have sound bites. So, my kids spend a lot of time playing their video games and watching TV. And they manage to do their homework even in front of the TV -- and get good grades, which is astounding to me. But, you know. So, I think that the patience to learn, for most people, is limited. Not for everybody. There still are people who really commit themselves to gaining expertise in languages and cultures which are not their own. And that hasn't changed. That still exists. But for large numbers of 41:00people -- I think we delude ourselves as academics. First of all, we delude ourselves because we think that our students are us. And we fail to realize that we were not your typical student, that the majority of students were not students in that sense. You know, it was a scam. They were trying to get their degrees with minimal effort. And some of us were more committed to actually learning something. But we were a tiny minority. And that's true today as well, that a tiny minority of students are truly interested in any subject that they study. And I think as professors, we don't realize that enough. So, we're at war with our students because we don't understand why they don't care about this material. But if we really reflect back on how we were at that time and how our friends were, we would understand better that it makes sense that they're not that interested. But at the same time, there still are some core of students who truly are interested. And that's why we teach.

CW:And what do you see the role of Yiddish in these movement --

JK:Well, the problem I see is that we're living in a very, very peculiar era right now of tremendous financial crisis. So, there was a time when Jewish studies was expanding and new courses were emerging, new professorships. And there was enough money that you could reach out to people and say, Here's an area I would like to have a line in, and I need a major gift so I can have an endowed professor of Yiddish. But people had a lot of money to throw around. And now even rich people feel poor. They're not poor, but they feel that they're poor. So, it's much more difficult to get that com-- first of all, from the standpoint of universities, you can't get anything nowadays. I mean, the administrators don't have any money to give out. And when they do have money to 43:00give out, they're going to ask a lot about numbers: how many students are going to -- and falsely, they do believe that Yiddish will not have numbers. I think Yiddish does have numbers, but they see it as this very esoteric language that two people in the world speak, and they'll have, like, one student in a class. That's what a dean's idea is about Yiddish. Even though they may have positive feelings about it, but they're strapped by the demands now to show numbers of students in classes. So, it's hard to sell a Yiddish position to a university administrator. Okay. So, the way you do it is by coming in with a major gift. But it's very hard to sell it to donors, unless the donor happens to be an insane Yiddishist. This is what they want. But there's not a lot of those people left. And that's a question of luck. So, I am pessimistic now about the future of Yiddish in the academy, 'cause I'm pessimistic about everything in the academy right now. Things really have to fight to hold their own. And based upon 44:00the meeting of the chairs and directors that I attended, I was struck by how ubiquitous the problem is of really holding onto course offerings that people have and areas of concentration that have been generated. I don't face that situation quite to the same degree, but -- I mean, my situation right now is that every time a faculty member retires, I basically lose the position. It doesn't exist anymore. Partly it's because most people -- certainly from the older generation who are teaching -- were teaching because they decided they wanted to teach in this area. They weren't officially Jewish studies faculty. So, I never had any ownership of the line. And partly that even where people were hired to Jewish studies, the way the universities are dealing with shrinking budgets is by shrinking, by new -- lines are not being filled. And so, 45:00because Yiddish is largely a new line -- certainly for us, it would be a new line -- it's almost impossible to sell it now as an area for expansion. And again, going to the community, they're much more likely to fund Holocaust studies, Israel studies -- those are the two that they'll fund. I never, never hear a donor talk about the fact that they're -- "I'd like my name to be associated with the Hebrew Bible." I never hear that. You would think so, but I never hear them say, I'd like them associated with a religion position, for example. It doesn't mean that doesn't exist, but really, over and over again, it's Israel and the Holocaust. Those are the two main areas that people are interested in. So, I think that we also have a real problem of teaching the 46:00public that there's more to Jewish knowledge than identity, and more to it than Holocaust. And it's clear that the public itself is missing something. And I don't have a solution to it. I don't think there is a solution. But it's a hard sell.

CW:What do you think about the term "Yiddish revival"?

JK:Well, there is a Yiddish revival. There are young people who learned Yiddish. Clearly, you don't have to come from a Yiddish-speaking household in order to speak Yiddish. And it's a significant group of people, and they produce things. They do things. And so, from that standpoint there is a Yiddish revival. It's quite striking. It's very obvious in terms of music in the American musical culture now, which is being somewhat inflected by the revival of klezmer. It's 47:00interesting seeing the Coen brothers' film, "A Serious Man." The opening sequence in it was very striking. And it was spoken by, as far as I know, non-native Yiddish speakers who can speak as if they were native Yiddish speakers. The Yiddish was very good within that film. It was very funny, but my friend Zachary Baker had showed me a Yiddish dictionary that just came out -- it recently came out -- for the Haredi community. And I leaf through it, and what struck me about it was how good the Yiddish was. They were giving alternative uses of words, alternative words. And you would assume there would be a tremendous amount of Anglicisms within it, you know? And there were none. It was pure Yiddish. To me, what it suggests is that this -- it shows that the revival 48:00of Yiddish even is having an impact on the community that still uses Yiddish on a daily basis, but in their own peculiar dialect of Yiddish. But there's intent here, obviously, to purify the language, to give people a vocabulary that they don't have. So, what that means in terms of survival of the language, et cetera, I have no idea. But still, it's interesting.

CW:Have you noticed trends among your students in interest in Yiddish?

JK:Well, no, because we don't offer Yiddish at Florida. My argument is always to the administration that if we had a Yiddish position, we would fill the seats. It would not be an issue, not be an issue. But, you know, no one believes anything I say, because they know I'm trying to sell something. So, who knows. But I really cannot say -- I have no data to add to this, because we simply 49:00don't offer it.

CW:Do you use Yiddish in your daily life?

JK:I read a great deal in Yiddish, so -- and I read almost every day in Yiddish. My favorite reading are my travelogues, so -- and they're all in Yiddish, a couple in Hebrew -- but they're -- so the answer is yes, but as a subject to read. Music, sometimes. I have no one around to speak it to; I don't speak it to anyone. So, it's become very passive to me, 'cause I'm constantly reading within it, but I never have a chance to do anything more than just read and translate.

CW:What do you think is the role of academics in cultural transmission?

JK:Hm. Well, I believe it's a very significant role. I mean, it's -- on the 50:00other hand, from what I said earlier, and it's something that I struggle with, it seems to me that one of the roles that Jewish studies has played has been to deepen Jewish knowledge, Jewish -- knowledge which is not carried by the vast majority of members of the Jewish community. And along with issues of sort of giving a critical perspective on it and so on, which wouldn't take place even in areas where it is carried, let's say within yeshivas, for example. So, the question is whether that constitutes a kind of repository, where the information and the knowledge is stored and accumulated and catalogued, in a sense, through writings, or whether it can in fact be transmitted. Well, we know it was 51:00transmitted because there's always new students. Some new students take a passion for it and then become -- so the question whether the model's a monastic model or whether in fact can be transmitted outwards into community more generally. And that's a tricky issue. I mean, I run public programs. I run a lot of public programs. And they're for students, they're for faculty, and they're for community members. It strikes me that there are often enough times when a very brilliant lecture's being given, but in an academic vein, where members of the community tune out. They just fall asleep during it. So, I don't know how much academic knowledge can be purveyed to the larger community, unless it's done by a very skillful speaker who knows how to speak without reading, and few academics can do that very effectively, and when they do it, they don't always stay on track. (laughs) A lot of things happen in that process. So, I don't 52:00know. And it strikes me also that there -- you could say, perhaps, that there are varying levels of this, because you have people who specialize in taking academic knowledge and purveying it to a larger community. They're sort of like pseudo-academics or quasi-academics. They don't do original research themselves, but they take academic knowledge and can put it in a more popular form that -- and become very popular on the lecture circuit and so on. And perhaps that's the necessary route, it's the proper route, that -- so you have different levels of Jewish knowledge that are created by different levels of academics and are passed on, again, through this chain; there's some transmission chain. I don't know. The fact of the matter is that most Jews are strikingly ignorant of their -- you know, what constitutes Jewish culture? And, you know, is it "Culture" in 53:00that capital C sense where you have knowledge of Jewish languages, knowledge of Jewish literature, knowledge of Judaism? Or is it what Jews actually say and believe and live? So, in the anthropological sense, Jewish knowledge and Jewish culture is what Jews actually do, what they say and do and believe. In sort of an academic sense, Jewish knowledge, Jewish culture is familiarity to Jewish languages and with Jewish texts. Obviously, most Jews don't have very much familiarity with Jew-- most Jews don't know what Judaism is, really. They can't really distinguish -- you know, some of the classic studies have been for American Jews, what they believe -- it's pretty much what Christians believe. Except they don't believe in Christ. And they have no sense of the importance of the mitzvot [Hebrew: commandments] in being a good Jew. They have a rather -- a typical Jew has a sense that it's what they feel is what it means to be a good Jew. It's not a Jewish belief. But that's what most American Jews believe. So, 54:00you can say, Well, does this show something wrong with American Jewry, or is there something wrong with our perceptions of what culture is, and that we have a very elitist -- 'cause academics, we have a very elitist notion of what culture is. But it's out of line with reality. And probably always was out of line with reality in any -- the typical model we have is a devolutionary model, that at some point it was an intact Jewish culture, and it's been degraded, and it's degrading constantly. And to the point where people know almost nothing. Or was it not the case that two thousand years ago, what was Jewish knowledge two thousand years ago, and how Jewish were Jews two thousand years ago? I take the position that two thousand years ago Jews weren't all that Jewish and that this is -- there's no devolutionary -- the devolutionary model doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's simply -- it's a misconception based upon the fact that people have no idea what culture is and how culture actually functions. So. That's my 55:00argument. You know, it's both optimistic and pessimisti-- (laughs) it's optimistic in the sense that you can dispense with the devolutionary model, stop worrying about things deteriorating. The model's wrong. But it's pessimistic in the sense that you give up on the idea of having large numbers of people really know anything about their culture, so -- (laughs) I mean --

CW:Are there any implications of this -- someone not knowing anything about their own culture?

JK:Well, again, the positive part about it is you have to look at their culture as a culture. So, my argument would be that American Jews speak Jewish, that their cultu-- even though they don't speak a Jewish language, their English is a Jewish language. So, it's a sociolinguistic argument about what constitutes fairly unique speech communities. And you can sort of see this -- I always observe that when you take groups of Jews -- and you must have noticed this yourself -- when Jews interact among one another, they're very jocular. 56:00Especially when there's a larger non-Jewish situation, the group of Jews cluster together; they'll be horsing around, telling jokes, whatever. And sometimes even in the most -- I don't want to use inappropriate context, but a context in which it requires a certain amount of decorum, Jews don't show that kind of decorum in that. And it's part of sort of their way of being Jewish -- they know that they're among their own, and they can behave with codes that are appropriate among their own. And when I was growing up, you'd go to services on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and one of the things you wait for was a joke, the key joke that the rabbi would make as part of his speech. I'm not sure how much that's used in non-Jewish services as a -- how appropriate that would be. I don't know. But it's certainly very appropriate in sort of North American Jewish service to have that. To this day -- to this day. I mean, months, months later, a number of us within the community retell the joke that the president of the 57:00congregation made on Yom Kippur. That was an absolutely brilliant joke, and that lingers with us, that -- so -- what was your question?

CW:(laughs) Um, the implications of this.

JK:Oh, that you have to be -- I'm arguing for an anthropological understanding of culture, that stop flagellating Jews for not being Jewish enough; pay more attention to what it means, how that constitutes itself. I also argue that in the American Jewish context, you have to look at American public culture and the Jewish component within it as so much part of an American Jewish culture. Like the television. Television is very Jewish in this country. And it's very outwardly Jewish. It asserts itself in a way that's almost shocking. And -- for 58:00example, "Curb Your Enthusiasm," which is probably the most brilliant show on American TV. You know, if you look at just the Jewish component of the show, the ways in which Larry David articulates Jewishness, it's true that a lot of the ways in which he articulates it is in terms of this -- what Weinreich referred to, this distinguishing ourselves from non-Jews. You know, this sort of -- asher bakhartanu sort of way of being Jewish. And, you know, it's sort of about Jewish boundaries, about Jewish distinctiveness, our separation from a more hostile, non-Jewish environment. There's this one episode in which Larry David is putting 59:00up a mezuzah, and then he has his Mexican handyman take over putting up the mezuzah, and the guy wants to know what this is, and he says something to the effect of, "This is in case my (laughs) non-Jewish neighbors decide to have a pogrom, so they'll know which house to go and burn down." Something like that, the effect -- this insane statement. But it articulates a certain aspect of Jewish sensibility that -- it resonates. It makes some sense. And what I'm arguing for is that I think that one can understand American Jewish culture if only in terms of the boundary that American Jews believe exist between us and them. Content is almost irrelevant at this point. What's relevant is the fact that there's a boundary, that -- in people's minds. And that's very intriguing to me, you know? Because what it suggests -- we know this anthropologically, that somehow the content of culture is much less important than the boundary 60:00mechanism that separates one group from the other. And we have lots and lots of examples where groups which are, in fact, entirely the same, in terms of culture, language, even origins, but believe that they're fundamentally different. And that difference -- it would constitute separate nations or separate ethnic groups, separate tribes. I believe this is what's happened to American Jews. And truth of the matter is that historically, as far as I know, in terms of the origins of Judaism, this is probably what happened between Jews and the Canaanites, this sense of separation.

CW:Well, we're almost out of time, but I have two more questions. What do you see as the future of Yiddish?

JK:Well, Yiddish is blessed by one very important thing that not all languages 61:00today are blessed with, not all disappearing languages are blessed with, and that is that it has a great tradition. It has a written tradition. And languages that have written traditions I think have a certain degree of eternity to them, built into them. So, the community of speakers could disappear, but the text still exists. And so, it's possible to gain access to them by even just gaining a reading knowledge of the language. But beyond that, you know, as you point out, the Yiddish revival suggests that there are communities of speakers that are emerging -- or at least individual speakers, sometimes couples. And the language has some kind of future to it. It's obviously never going to be -- what's it -- again, I think it's Uriel Weinreich or Max Weinreich's line that a language is a dialect with an army. And as luck would have it, the dialect with an army is Hebrew. Yiddish didn't become the language of a single state. And 62:00it's obviously very difficult for language to thrive without state support. I guess the answer to that is that it depends very much upon the university systems. If the universities are in crisis mode and continue to shrink, Yiddish is going to be -- its future is in jeopardy, I think. If by some miracle universities reemerged and start growing again, then whole new areas will reemerge. And probably Yiddish will be among them. And so, I think we're all holding our breath to see what happens, whether we're going to -- the world's going to emerge from the crisis that it's in right now.

CW:And to close, do you have any advice for students of Yiddish today?

JK:What do you mean by advice?

CW:Well, just any words of wisdom or reflections.

JK:Hm. Well, I mean, it's a lot easier to learn Yiddish than to learn Hebrew. So -- (laughs) and we don't know exactly the reasons for it, but I do -- and to me, I'm very optimistic about the future of Yiddish studies just from that standpoint. And of course, for anyone entering Yiddish, they're entering a wonderful world of literature and culture and texts that they wouldn't have access to otherwise. So, the fact of the matter is that much of Yiddish culture would probably never exist in translation. And the only way to gain access to it is by learning the language. It's a wonderful culture, it's a wonderful 64:00language, and to me, it's a great privilege to read within it. Every time I read a Yiddish book I feel that I'm very, very privileged. It's not that difficult. I'm amazed that more people don't do it. And that's my advice, is to enjoy it.

CW:Anything else you'd like to add?

JK:No.

CW:Thank you so much.

JK:You're welcome.

[END OF INTERVIEW]