JESSICA KIRZANE ORAL HISTORY

AGNIESZKA ILWICKA: This is Agnieszka Ilwicka, and today is eighteenth December, 2016. I am here at the AJS conference in San Diego, in United States, with Jessica Kirzane, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Jessica Kirzane, do I have your permission to record this interview?

JESSICA KIRZANE: Yes.

AI: Thank you very much. I would like to start with a brief description of your family background. Can you please provide me -- what do you know about your family background?

JK: Sure. So, I have -- I grew up in a family with a mother and a father and one sister. My dad, his name is Sam Kirzner, and he is from Highland Park, New 1:00Jersey. And my mother is also from Highland Park, New Jersey, Debbie Kirzner, and -- Debbie Mont is her maiden name -- and they went to high school together. They were high school sweethearts. And my sister Rebecca is two years older than me. My mother's family is -- they're from Eastern Europe, I'm not exactly sure where. Both of her parents grew up in America. Both grew up in New Jersey. And her great-grandparents were all -- but one -- immigrants -- I think one of her grandmother's parents -- were immigrants. So, she didn't grow up speaking Yiddish, she didn't grow up hearing Yiddish, and none of -- I think her parents also didn't speak Yiddish, but their parents did. My father, his mother had a family that had been in the States for a very long time, in New Jersey for a long time. But she grew up with a grandmother in her household. And so, she grew 2:00up speaking Yiddish. And her mother was involved in a Ladies Auxiliary that was a Yiddish-speaking society, so she talks about addressing envelopes in Yiddish for her mother's kind of philanthropic work. So, she knew Yiddish, and she talks about Yiddish a lot. She doesn't speak a lot of Yiddish anymore, but it matters to her. And my grandfather grew up in Cuba. His parents were both from Odessa, and they came to -- they wanted to come to the US, but it was after immigration restriction laws had been passed, and so they weren't able to come here. So, they came to Cuba, and he was born and raised in Cuba, and when he was in his early twenties his entire family were sponsored by some cousins and were able to come to the United States. So, he grew up speaking Spanish and speaking English. 3:00And when I was a kid I didn't know that he knew any Yiddish at all. He had a very, very thick Spanish accent. And in his older years he was a court interpreter, a Spanish-English court interpreter. So, I always associated him with the Spanish. And my sister became a high school Spanish teacher, and kind of knew about him as a Spanish speaker. And it wasn't until I was older that I knew that he actually knew Yiddish as well and spoke to his parents in Yiddish.

AI: Wow. Wow. Do you have any famous or infamous family stories you would like to share?

JK: You know, I -- famous or infamous family stories.

AI: Something that you always laugh about when you sit together over Pesach or --

JK: I can't think of anything off the top of my head that would --

AI: Maybe it will come later.

JK: Maybe it'll come.

AI: We will catch up around this.

JK: Okay. (laughs)

AI: And if it will come, then feel free --

JK: Okay.

AI: -- to share this with us. And I would like to know, did you grow up with -- 4:00Jewish-feeling home, or that wasn't the theme of your youth?

JK: Being Jewish was really important to both my parents, in a variety of different ways. My mother grew up going to a Conservative synagogue. She was very involved in the Conservative Sunday school and youth group and had a very active life with Conservative Judaism. And my father, his parents sent him to an Orthodox Sunday school, and he had a bar mitzvah through it, but at home his parents were sort of culturally Jewish, and he felt there was a kind of a disconnect between his religious education and his home life. And that was a really -- a big struggle for him. And so, I think growing up, it was very important to my parents that we had a Jewish upbringing that felt authentic to 5:00who they were and their values and that was fun and not forced. Yeah, so I grew up going to Sunday schools and youth groups, and my parents were always very involved in synagogues. Had a bat mitzvah. That was always a big -- a big part of my life.

AI: Did you feel that you are different when you are growing up? Or it was a normal thing?

JK: Depended where we were living. So, my family moved every three years, roughly. My father works for Exxon, and about every three years we would move. And there were parts of my life when I was living in New Jersey -- where I had my bat mitzvah in New Jersey, there were a lot of Jews in the school, and I was going to bat mitzvah parties every weekend, and I kind of felt like it was -- it was a normal thing to be Jewish. Not all of my friends were Jewish, but it was not atypical. But when we lived in England, where my sister had her bat mitzvah, 6:00I think there were only one or two Jewish kids in our grade, and we kind of felt unusual. I never felt like people looked down on me, I never felt like people thought it was weird. But definitely it was unusual. It was something that made me different. But I don't think I ever felt ashamed. I think I felt kind of proud or excited that I had something different to offer. Yeah.

AI: How old you were while living in England?

JK: My family lived there twice. So, the first time that I was there, I was between the ages of one and three, and I don't really remember that. And the second time I was there, we moved the summer I turned eight, and we left the summer I turned eleven. So that, I do remember better. But the second time I went to an international school, an American school. So, it was kind of an 7:00unusual experience of living in England, 'cause I actually didn't know that many British kids, except in my synagogue. But the first time we were there, when I was little, my parents talk about -- they had both grown up in New Jersey, around a lot of Jewish people, and they came to live in this kind of small town in the south of England where there were no Jews. And my sister was -- she's two years older than me, and she was starting essentially kindergarten in a British school system. There's no separation of church and state. She was in, like, nativity plays. And I think that's the point at which my parents decided that it mattered to them to raise us knowing something about being Jewish. Both of them are uncomfortable with the idea of God. They don't like to -- they don't really feel like they believe in God, they don't always feel comfortable with Judaism as a religion. But I think that culturally it matters to them a lot, and I think 8:00that that was kind of a moment for them when they realized that it did matter. So, they would have Christmas stockings for us as kids because they knew that we would be talking about it in school, and they didn't want us to feel left out. But I think almost because we had Christmas stockings, they felt this strong desire that we would also have a menorah and they would teach us the blessings, even though I don't think my dad really knew them. He had to learn them in order to teach them to us. And so, there was a kind of sense of -- the more that they realized that they didn't know, the more that they wanted us to know.

AI: That's actually really beautiful. (laughs) I think England can give this spiritual context, because it's so religious in a way, right?

JK: Yeah. Yeah. And my dad is this extremely curious -- I mean, both of my 9:00parents are, but especially my dad is this extremely curious person who really wanted to learn as we were learning. So, when we were kids we took piano lessons, and he -- my mom had had piano lessons as a kid, but my dad never had. And he took them too. So, we had this piano book with little elves pointing at notes, and my dad would practice, and then we would each practice. And he did the same -- he took lessons to learn how to read Hebrew while my sister was studying for her bat mitzvah. So, there was this kind of sense that it was something that he wanted for himself and for us.

AI: And what was the name of this town in England where you lived?

JK: Lymington. The first time was in Lymington, and the second time we lived in Surrey, which is like a suburb of London.

AI: And the second time, when you were older, did you do some special celebration of the Jewish holidays at home?

JK: Yeah. So, we lived, sort of coincidentally, around the corner from a 10:00synagogue. We didn't know that we were gonna be so close to it. It was called North West Surrey Synagogue. And we moved into this house, and then we realized how close it was, and we became very involved in that synagogue. And it was a big part of our social life and our friends. And so, a lot of what we did Jewishly was around that synagogue. That's where my sister had her bat mitzvah. And we started going to services every Saturday, which we had never done before -- I think mostly because my parents just loved the rabbi there, and so we became very involved. So, I didn't -- there wasn't so much that we did at home so much as that we became very involved in synagogue communities. And especially, I think because we moved so often, it was a way to make friends very fast and feel connected very fast -- was to join a synagogue and kind of jump right in.

AI: It always helps to have community house around.

JK: Yeah.

AI: That's so true. And after you came back to United States, how would you identify yourself after this British experience?

JK: So, we came back to the United States, and we moved to New Jersey. And right away I was enrolled in a Sunday school where it was a big synagogue, and people -- there were bar and bat mitzvahs every weekend, and people scheduled their bat mitzvahs years in advance, and so right away I was kind of signed up and plugged into that program. And that kind of got me connected -- it was a much more sort of organized Sunday school experience than I'd ever had before. We had classes with periods and report cards, and that was, I think, a little bit overwhelming at first. I felt like I didn't know as much as other kids, or I wasn't used to that kind of programmed experience of Judaism. But it was an -- it was very exciting. It was very enriching. And I became part of a synagogue choir, and so 12:00did my mother. And that was -- that was really important for us.

AI: What was the curriculum during your time for Sunday school? Like, how did it look like?

JK: So, from what I remember, on Wednesdays it was just Hebrew -- on Wednesday afternoons -- and on Sunday mornings they would have, I think, three periods, and it rotated. And it was -- adults volunteer as teaching, parents or community members, teaching. I remember that we studied from a book called "Jewish Heroes, Jewish Values," which was about American Jewish heroes who were role models.

AI: Like whom, for example?

JK: There was Sandy Koufax, I think Anne Fra-- I mean, like, a really bizarre array of people. Just, like, famous Jews you might have heard of, and some random Jewish value that this author thought was associated with them, and how it should make you think about being a Jew in the world and being a better person. I've thought about it a lot since with some skepticism and also some 13:00appreciation, because obviously it made an impact on me. I still remember the book. But also, it feels kind of reductive, at this point. (laughs) But maybe all elementary school textbooks would feel that way. (laughs) I remember that we did a class on American Jewish history, which is one of the subjects I now care most about, so -- and I remember we had a class on Pirkei Avot [Ethics of the Fathers]. And we had a class on the shtetl [small Eastern European village with a Jewish community], where I remember making a paper cutout shtetl arts and craft project. I hope it still exists somewhere. And I'm not sure what else. I'm not sure what else we studied. Yeah. So, it was pretty eclectic. My guess is it was kind of whatever the teachers wanted to be teaching. I know there was a Bible class too, where we learned about Bible stories, Torah stories.

AI: Did you have a group of friends during that time from the Sunday school?

JK: I always found it hard to make friends in Sunday school. I think because in most cases, people go to the same synagogue their whole lives, right. So, you start in Jewish preschool, and you -- maybe you have different friends in your public school life, and you get from one school to another -- depending on your districting or whatever, you might not always be with the same people as you're growing up, but your parents belong to the same synagogue the whole time. So, someone that you met when you were three, when you're thirteen you're still in classes with them, and there's this kind of long connection. And it's difficult -- I think more difficult -- to move into a new Sunday school than it is to move into a new regular school. It's a smaller pool of kids, so -- at least in my 15:00experience. So, we would show up to a new homeroom in public school, and there would be kids who maybe didn't know each other that well. But if you go into a new year of Hebrew school, the same kids have been in class together every year. So, I always found it very difficult to make friends in Hebrew school. And that was always a struggle. I sometimes didn't want to go to Hebrew school because I didn't feel like I was part of the community -- of the kids. But I always liked the classes, so I was kind of willing to go along with it anyway.

AI: And I remember that you lived one year in Israel, right?

JK: Yeah. Yeah.

AI: How old were you when you went to Israel?

JK: After college. So, I graduated college, and then my boyfriend, who is now my husband, was starting rabbinical school, and the first year of his program was in Israel, in Jerusalem. And I wanted to go with him, and I talked to some of my 16:00advisors about -- I told them I wanted to study Yiddish in graduate school, and they said to me, You know, the best thing you can do to get into graduate school would be to improve your language skills. And independently, not knowing that I wanted to go to Jerusalem anyway, one of my advisors -- whose advice I obviously took, because it was the advice I wanted to hear -- said, "You should go to Jerusalem for a year and study Hebrew instead of Yiddish." And I said, "Great. So that's obviously what I need to do." So, I went with my boyfriend, and we moved into an apartment together, and he went to his school, and I went to my school for a year. It was amazing.

AI: Who were your teachers in Israel?

JK: I studied with Hanan Bordin and Avraham Novershtern, who was extremely kind. He taught a class, in Hebrew, about Yiddish. It was, like, Mendele Moykher-Sforim -- maybe also Sholem Aleichem? Or maybe it was just Mendele Moykher-Sforim. I can't remember. And I think the first half of the year, I 17:00didn't really understand what he was saying basically at all, because my (laughs) Hebrew wasn't good enough. And the longer I was there, the more I started understanding. And I remember that, like, the last day of class I finally answered a question that he asked, in very halting Hebrew. And he was very patient the whole time. So, I really appreciate (laughs) that. And when I was studying Yiddish, it was also in a class that was taught in Hebrew. Possibly I learned more Hebrew from that class than I did Yiddish, because I really -- at that point my Hebrew and Yiddish were about on par with each other. And so, to be learning a language that I didn't know in a language that I didn't know was -- was hard. And fun. And crazy. And there was a girl in the class -- her name was Anna -- who was also a part of the -- I was part of the Rothberg International School, which is, like, the English-language component of Hebrew University, in a graduate-year program. And you can take classes in the regular 18:00Hebrew University if your Hebrew is good enough. And mine was only just good enough. So technically I could, but maybe I shouldn't have, I don't know. There was a girl Anna who was in the same Hebrew class as I was, who was not an English speaker, she was a Russian speaker. She spoke Russian, and as much Hebrew and as much Yiddish as I did. And we were both taking this Yiddish class together. And we would (laughs) pass notes to each other that said in some garbled version of Hebrew and Yiddish something like, "I have no idea what's going on. Do you?" And then I would write back, like, "No! I don't know what's going on either." But we couldn't communicate much beyond that, because I didn't know Russian and she didn't know English. So, we were just kind of sitting there in companionship and confusion.

AI: (laughter) That's a great experience from this Yiddish yeshiva. (laughs)

JK: Right? I think it's really emblematic of this fun Yiddish world that we're 19:00in, of these people making connections around something that they care about but maybe don't know that much about, and that it's kind of like -- has this global reach to it.

AI: And that leads me to the question, when was the moment when you first started to care about Yiddish?

JK: So, I'm not -- I've been wondering that about myself for a long time. And I don't know the answer. I think I always had a kind of sentimental idea about Yiddish -- nostalgic, sentimental kind of notion that Yiddish was something that I cared about. I remember that when I was in Sunday school and we did the shtetl project, we then -- that same year -- so I guess I was in sixth grade -- my history teacher in public school had us do reports about countries where our family was from. I don't know, that school was into the idea of ethnicity 20:00somehow. And so, I remember that I brought my shtetl project and had these paper cutouts, and I was showing the class, and I felt very proud of this feeling that I was from somewhere, that I didn't kind of pop up out of nowhere. And then when I was in high school -- so when I was in high school, my family moved from New Jersey to Virginia. I lived in northern Virginia. And just for whatever reason, my family never found a synagogue that they really liked. So, we belonged to a synagogue, but we didn't go very often. And I kind of was, for a couple of years, disconnected from organized Jewish life. But at the same time, I started developing a real intellectual curiosity about it. So that -- and when I was in eleventh grade I was in AP US History and AP European History at the same time, and both teachers had a project after the AP exams where you had to write a paper or give a presentation about some part of the history that had not been 21:00covered in class. And I did a project about the Lower East Side in the US history class, and a project about Eastern European Jewry in the AP European History class. And I did a lot of research. And I'm sure they were both horrible and full of stereotypes and not real information at all, but I kind of have been thinking about that, as, like, Wow. Already -- from this place of having no knowledge and no one to train me, I had this real curiosity about it, even at that point. I remember that my AP US class -- it wasn't a paper, it was a presentation. And I stood up in front of the class, and I handed out poems that had been translated from Yiddish, and I had people stand up and read them out loud. And then I did, like, a walking tour of the Lower East Side with a PowerPoint presentation where I said different buildings that had been there. 22:00And I didn't know anything -- I mean, it was just whatever I had found on -- I don't even remember if Google existed then -- but whatever I had found in whatever books or internet sources that I had used. But it was very interesting to me, and it felt like it was about me somehow.

AI: Wow! (laughter) And when was your very first exposure into Yiddish? Like, super first?

JK: Well, probably from my grandmother. My grandmother spoke some words of Yiddish. And her mother passed away when I was in high school, so my great-grandmother -- who also grew up in America, but her -- she knew some Yiddish, and she was in a nursing home, and I remember my -- she was in a Jewish nursing home, and there was someone there who didn't speak very much English who spoke some Yiddish, and my grandmother, I remember, was speaking to that woman in Yiddish. And I heard her do that and trying to communicate with her. So, I suppose that might've been the first time that I actually heard someone speak 23:00Yiddish. But it wasn't something I really heard a lot.

AI: Of course. But it's important to have this opportunity to be exposed. And after that, you choose to go to the Yiddish Book Center, right?

JK: Yeah. I went to the University of Virginia as a college student. And I was the secretary of my school's Hillel, so I was in charge of the weekly email. And I was studying English literature, and I was thinking about majoring in Jewish studies as well. And I was reading and writing this email every week. And at the bottom of the email there were announcements from other institutions, things you might be interested in doing. And I saw the announcement for the Yiddish Book Center. And it was just like -- it sounded awesome. And there I was sending it out week after week. People should apply for this. People should apply for this. 24:00And finally I was like, Hey, I should apply for that. I'm not sure that I would be where I am today if it weren't for the fact that it was a paid internship. Because my mother had told me at that point that she wanted me to earn money over the summer, and that I had to get some kind of summer job. She was trying to teach me responsibility. And I was like, Hey, look, I could do this learn Yiddish thing, and I could make money. So, it's not irresponsible. I could totally do this. So, I convinced her to let me apply for it, and then there I was.

AI: How old you were?

JK: So, I applied twice. The first time I applied was for the summer after my sophomore year of college, and I got in, but I didn't -- I deferred. My parents were moving that summer; I wasn't able to do -- so then, I applied again for the next year. So, it was -- the summer after my junior year of college, which I guess means I was twenty -- nineteen. I guess I was nineteen, that I went to the 25:00Yiddish Book Center and started studying Yiddish.

AI: What was this place, that time, back then, in your memory?

JK: I had no idea what to expect. It was this rural, beautiful place, with all these -- it was very much like summer camp, all these young people living in dorms together, kind of in the hot Amherst summer with our food rotting all around us 'cause we couldn't keep control of our space 'cause we were college students and didn't know any better. And I was kind of shy and overwhelmed by all these people. But it was stunningly beautiful. And we didn't have -- none of us had a car. Maybe one person had a car. And so, we were just kind of stuck together on this campus, learning to care about Yiddish together. And the only thing we really had in common, some of us, was that we wanted to study Yiddish. 26:00So, it was the only thing we could really talk about was that we were studying Yiddish together. So, I think it made it feel so much more important and so much more all-encompassing. Because it was the only thing there to do -- was to study Yiddish and think about Yiddish. And also think about each other, I suppose.

AI: Sure. (laughter)

JK: I mean, I'm sure you can relate to that.

AI: I absolutely can. (laughter) But hearing this from you, whom I have met later at the Yugntruf meeting for the young Yiddish people --

JK: And it's a very similar kind of feeling. Like, you're not going anywhere; you only have each other and Yiddish.

AI: Yeah. When was your first time at the Yugntruf Yidish-vokh [Yiddish week]?

JK: Was when I came back from -- I've only done it I think twice -- or maybe three times. I think twice. So, the first time was when I came back from Israel. 27:00So, I was -- ooh, I guess I was twenty-two. And then, I did it again a couple years later.

AI: Right. We have met in 2010. So that means six years ago.

JK: Yeah.

AI: I remember it was -- beautiful summer.

JK: Yeah. (laughter)

AI: And at that time, I envied your whole New York Yiddish group. So, my question to you is -- because, from my perspective, you kind of created a New York Yiddish care group. And is this true? Is this a true perception, or --

JK: Hm. I think -- so when I first came to New York, I became really close friends with a girl named Feygi Zylberman -- now her last name is Phillips. She lives in Melbourne, Australia. And she was at JTS doing a master's. And she had a lot of Yiddish-speaking friends. She -- her -- had connections to Yugntruf. 28:00And I kind of followed her around and met a lot of her friends, and we had a -- for a very short while, we had a Yiddish women's speaking -- Yiddish-speaking group. We would meet in cafés and speak Yiddish together. But she grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home, and a couple of her friends had also grown up in Yiddish-speaking homes, and I always kind of felt like an imposter. Like, my Yiddish never was what theirs was. So, after she graduated, I didn't really feel like I was part of that anymore. And part of it also is I felt really uncomfortable and out of place in the Yugntruf circles because I'm a -- and it might not come across -- but I'm actually a kind of a shy person, especially in groups, in larger groups. And it was very difficult for me to go to a place where the only activity was talking, to people you didn't know, in a language 29:00you weren't necessarily so comfortable with. There was no other activity. The point was to be talking in Yiddish. And even when I'm speaking in English, if I go into a crowded room with people I don't know, I don't really want to be there, unless there's some other activity. So, it was very difficult to get me out the door, or get myself out the door, to go to these social events for the purpose of speaking Yiddish. 'Cause I often would rather just be in my room reading a book, you know? I do think it's hard to be an introvert and a Yiddishist, because talking is such a big part of the Yiddishist purpose. So -- yeah. So, I could see where from the outside, I maybe looked like I had this kind of ideal social circle, but actually, I always felt kind of on the outside of it.

AI: Do you have feeling that you missed something in the Yiddish world by the 30:00fact that you did not grow up in the Yiddish -- I mean, from the Jewish perspective -- because you did not grow up in the Yiddish-speaking home, do you feel like you are entitled to belong to this world or that this kind of stops you from this feeling?

JK: I think, in my mind, and I don't know if this is an accurate representation, but in my mind there are kind of, like -- in a gross generalization, two kinds of Yiddishists. There are Yiddishists who want to speak Yiddish in their daily life, and there are Yiddishists who want to study it. And there are a lot of overlap, and especially on the -- there are many Yiddishists who want to speak it and also want to study it. But I think that early on, I almost gave up on the idea that I would be a Yiddishist who would speak it for a number of reasons. One was that I was dating someone who didn't know very much Yiddish. And he told me that he was willing to learn. He actually -- we went to Vilna together, and 31:00he took a summer course in Yiddish. And he knows a little -- knew a little bit. I'm not sure how much he still remembers. I think he would have been willing to keep going. But it was never something that I felt passionately about, and I also kind of always felt like I would never quite be up to snuff. I would always be someone who was still learning Yiddish and struggling with it. And I -- I maybe didn't want that struggle. But I was always very comfortable with the idea of being someone who was gonna study it. So, I think pretty early on, I recognized there were Yiddishists who were gonna speak Yiddish at home with their children, and there were Yiddishists who were going to not do that, and Yiddish was going to be kind of something more private, more about my profession or my intellectual engagement and not about my social life or my family life. I 32:00think there was a while when I was sad about that, but I think I became very comfortable and felt like it was practical and made sense for me. And I kind of had given up feeling embarrassed about it and started feeling like that's just my way of being a Yiddishist.

AI: And you followed this, because you became a scholar. Soon, you're gonna get your PhD.

JK: That's right. (laughs)

AI: Columbia University.

JK: That's right.

AI: And I would like to discuss this topic, because it's very -- to me it's very fascinating. First of all, why you choose this subject? Can you introduce your subject to our audience?

JK: Sure. My dissertation is on interethnic romance in Jewish American fiction in the turn of the twentieth century. And -- okay. So, I -- when I started studying Yiddish literature the summer that I was in the Yiddish Book Center, I 33:00was an English major, and I was taking a lot of classes in African American literature. That was my focus. I was almost an African American studies minor. I was one class away from it. And while I was studying African American studies I had this amazing professor, Lisa Woolfork, who I am not in touch with anymore, who was just the best mentor an undergraduate could ever have. And she taught me a class called "Fictions of Black Identity," which was about very contemporary novels where African Americans were kind of questioning the construct of racial identity and kind of poking around the edges of it and exposing its fictions, as it were. And a number of the novels were about African Americans thinking about Jewishness or passing as Jews as a way of thinking about what race in America 34:00is. And I became very interested in that question. And that was kind of what drew me into studying Jewish literature in the first place, was I was studying African American literature and I kept writing about Jews and realizing that actually, what I wanted to be studying was Jewish American literature. So, it was kind of a roundabout way to get there, but there I was. So, when I applied to Columbia, I wanted to write about race, Jews and race, in Yiddish literature. And I found that the topic was just too big, and I didn't know where to start or how to approach it. And I was writing my dissertation prospectus in this pool of utter despair about where to even begin and -- I don't know, this imposter syndrome about the enormity of the topic and my inability to do anything with it. And at the same time, my husband, who was in rabbinical school, was writing 35:00his senior sermon, which is their big and kind of -- one of their big capstone projects. You get this big sermon that's supposed to kind of say something important about what you want to do with your rabbinate, I think, in some way. And he was writing a sermon about HUC, which is his rabbinical school's policy not to accept or ordain students who are with non-Jewish partners. He was against that policy. And we had all of these conversations about what that policy meant and what intermarriage means in a kind of theoretical way, about Jews as a race, Jews as a religion, and what the borders and boundaries of Jewishness are, and how we think about them and what kind of symbolic value we 36:00place on the idea of intermarriage.

AI: And what was your conclusion from that -- conversations?

JK: So, we never had a con-- like, there's no one big conclusion. But I think one of the major things that came out of it was our feeling that the stigma around intermarriage comes from a Jewish feeling that Jewishness is not just a religious thing, but a racial thing. And also a discomfort with articulating that, because of the history of how the idea of Jews as a race has been employed. And so, somehow this converges around the idea of intermarriage. So, we had been talking about this over and over again as he was writing his senior sermon, and the same time I was in this quagmire of dissertation prospectus land. And then finally I was like, You know, what I need to do is write my dissertation about this question, because if what I want to talk about is Jews 37:00and race, what better way to do it than to poke at this -- fictions of Jewish identity, if you will, through the question of intermarriage? And that's where I am.

AI: And how did you find your supervisor?

JK: So, the first time I met Jeremy was at the Yiddish Book Center when I was a summer intern there.

AI: You're talking about Jeremy Dauber.

JK: Jeremy Dauber. And -- yeah. He came for one day to give a talk. I don't remember what his talk was about, at all. But I remember that afterward we were sitting in, I don't know, some kind of lounge area, and he was chatting to students. And he was having a conversation about the idea of horror and horror stories, and the way that what people are afraid of in real life gets transformed into the horror literature of that day. And just what he was saying 38:00felt so -- not just smart, but, like -- and not just smart and not just historically grounded, but also absolutely relevant to people's lives today. It was this amazing intersection of literary analysis and historical knowledge and a real grasp on what popular culture is and how people's minds work. And it was just a few sentences, and I was like, Wow. I need to work with this person. He somehow gets what literature does for people. So, I was extremely excited when he wanted to work with me.

AI: And later your topic became this American Jewish fiction --

JK: Yeah.

AI: -- and look at the Yiddish culture, right?

JK: Right. Right.

AI: So, I would like to discuss some of your chapters, because in our brief conversation before, I already got (laughter) goosebumps over the names.

JK: Okay. So, there's a num-- I haven't quite hit on an absolute thesis for the dissertation, which is kind of unfortunate because it's done, and I'm still (laughs) not sure what the thesis is. But it's roughly about kind of two things. One is that -- I believe that in this period women and men write the story of intermarriage differently. In a large part, when men write the story of intermarriage, they are thinking about the question of the continuity, which I think is the major question about intermarriage today in kind of sociological literature and in Jewish communal conversation. It's not about the content of the marriage itself, it's about will Judaism survive through the children. And in my mind, that is a reading of intermarriage that discounts women's experience 40:00-- discounts the experience of marriage in general, but in particular, thinks about the woman's body as a reproductive tool. So, because only Jewish women can produce Jewish children, you have to marry a Jewish woman. It's a very much a masculine perspective about creating progeny through the Jewish woman. And I think that Jewish women writing the story of intermarriage tend to focus much more on the content of the relationship itself. There are fewer children, at least in the narratives that I've been reading, and much less discussion about children, and it's much more about how the marriage gets negotiated between a man and a woman. I don't necessarily think that the conclusions that they reach about intermarriage are different. I think on a large part, both men and women in this period writing about intermarriage generally reject the idea of intermarriage. But I think that the content of the narratives is different 41:00around gender. So, that's kind of one major thesis. And the other is that -- just to say that intermarriage was an extremely important -- or interethnic romance. A lot of these don't actually have marriages, but interethnic romance was an extremely important topic in this period. In the symbolism of this period, people thought of it as kind of like America was the land of intermarriage in some way, whether it was the symbolic marriage of Jews with American-ness or whether it was actual intermarriage. And that we think about it as being such a contemporary concern, because the numbers of intermarriage, the rates of intermarriage, were so much lower in the early twentieth century. But I think it loomed much larger in the sort of symbolic imaginary of Jewish Americans in that period than we realize. Yeah. So, I have a chapter about 42:00Reform Jewish women writing in English, mostly from a Central European/German Jewish background, who write these narratives of intermarriage that are much more about the negotiation between a man and a woman than they are about continuity. And I have a chapter about Abe Cahan and his -- the "Bintel Brief" advice columns and also his English-language fiction that thematizes intermarriage and this kind of balance that he had between a kind of pragmatic approach and a more kind of theoretical approach. So, in his advice column, he's kind of wavering between an idealism about socialist universalism and saying, Well, intermarriage represents this idea that we're all brothers, and we're all common humanity and the unity of the working class, as opposed to ethnic 43:00differences, versus a kind of pragmatic approach that we want to keep families and communities together, and so you shouldn't intermarry because it's disruptive to families.

AI: That was the "Bintel Brief" right?

JK: That's the "Bintel Brief." Yeah. And then on the other hand, in his English-language literature, it's much less about proscriptions and whether we should or shouldn't have intermarriage, and much more about what does intermarriage mean, what can it represent, how can it help us think about what American Jews are and can be? So, that's the second chapter. The third chapter is about Jewish women in the 1920s writing in conjunction with, in dialogue with, early feminism, and how they used the intermarriage narrative to tell stories about feminism. So, a kind of an anti-patriarchy argument about breaking free from the father by marrying outside of that tradition, and an idea that 44:00Judaism is somehow confining, and intermarriage is about breaking free. But then, I think there's a swing against that, because feminism in that period is really linked to eugenics, to an idea of a kind of -- to white racism, right? There's a lot of white racism built into early white feminism. And I think that a lot of these Jewish authors writing within these intermarriage stories are kind of butting against the white supremacism, really, that's built into early feminism by saying that this intermarriage narrative, this kind of melting pot narrative, is not authentic to their feminist experience. So, you have Edna Ferber, who wrote a novel called "Fanny Herself," where a woman considers this 45:00kind of marriage that's outside of maybe Jewishness. The person that she's -- becomes romantically involved with -- it's not really marriage -- the person who she becomes kind of involved with may or may not be Jewish, maybe he's passing as a non-Jew. It's kind of unclear. But she finds her authentic moral, artistic self with a Jew. And so, there's a sense of, like, it's about women authentically representing themselves, having a public persona that they're comfortable with within Jewishness, almost like as a saying, This can be a kind of feminism too.

AI: Can you share some names from the chapter?

JK: Sure. So, Edna Ferber, Anzia Yezierska. I have a section on a woman named Marian Spitzer, who was kind of a Hollywood screenwriter who wrote some magazine 46:00stories. And she wrote a novel called "Who Would Be Free," which has a woman who goes through a series of romances. Some of them are -- the last one's with a non-Jew -- but then ultimately she decides not to marry at all. So, it was almost like -- again, a rejection of this intermarriage narrative as an authentic feminist experience. Yeah. So, chapter three. Chapter four (laughs) is about modern Yiddish writers -- Joseph Opatoshu, Isaac Raboy, Yud Yud Shvarts, [David Ignatov] -- and the way that they represent American geography, cities versus countries -- city versus country, rural versus urban -- through and against intermarriage narratives. So, Isaac Raboy has a narrative where -- that 47:00takes place entirely in the kind of countryside, and equates a woman's possible romance with a non-Jew as a possible romance with America. And then, she ends up deciding to marry a Jewish farmhand and move to Palestine. And so, she's kind of choosing a Jewish nationalism through both land and body and reproductive choices and the person that she's with. So -- versus David Ignatov, who has this kind of back and forth between country and city in his novella "Phoebe," and also a kind of back and forth about the idea of romance with America and with this non-Jewish woman who kind of represents America for him. So, I think it's about how Jewish -- these Yiddish authors are using non-Jewish bodies and American landscapes kind of together.

AI: Wow. I can't wait to (laughter) hear the dissertation.

JK: Thank you.

AI: So please make sure to finish, publish, and (laughter) (UNCLEAR) the audience.

JK: Thank you. It's -- it's been a long time coming.

AI: Who's your favorite one from all those (UNCLEAR) writers?

JK: Oh, goodness. I like them all in different ways. And in some ways, I don't like them. I have to say, not all of the books that I'm studying are ones that I think are really excellent works of literature, just I think they're interesting. I think the one that I got most excited about was this Marian Spitzer novel, because no one has written about her at all. Not that she necessarily deserves someone to write about her. There are a lot of people who no one has written about before. I found her book mentioned in a footnote somewhere, I think in Jenna Weissman Joselit's book. And I looked it up, and I 49:00bought a used copy and read it. I just -- I have a thing -- I really like learning about women who had these public lives and balanced work and motherhood in interesting ways and who we don't know anything about. So, it was just very exciting. I read everything that she ever published, and I just got very -- I felt like she was my person somehow, because no one else was reading her.

AI: I know this feeling (laughter) of belonging to someone academically. (laughs) And you yourself, you're married, you're a mother, you just recently gave birth to the second child. And you're thirty. And I'm curious how you manage all of those roles. Because you are also very strong in academia. You are 50:00at Columbia, which is a well-known university, well received. And my question is, how you manage to combine all of those roles -- wife, mother, scholar -- and follow-up question to this is how academia treats you.

JK: So, I have to say first of all that I have been in many ways extraordinarily fortunate and privileged, and I don't take it lightly, and I don't think that everyone can do what I've done. And it's not because I'm extraordinarily capable in any way. I think it's much more about the resources that have been available to me. So, okay. So, I started trying to conceive my first child when I was working on my prospectus. And it was a very difficult year, because both the prospectus and the trying to conceive were not going well. It took me longer to 51:00do both than I wanted. And somehow, the two got wrapped up together in my mind sort of psychologically. So, I became really very depressed about both possibilities. And for me, the one allowed the other to happen. I actually can't remember which happened first, that I started feeling better about my dissertation or that I realized that I was pregnant. But I really think that maybe knowing that I was pregnant made it possible for me to write my dissertation. It gave me a sense of purpose. It gave me -- I was saying to you earlier that I think for me, having something else in my life that wasn't the dissertation somehow made the dissertation matter less to me, which made it possible to write. That when it was the only thing in my life -- well, not -- I 52:00mean, obviously I had a husband, I was -- you know, had friends, whatever -- but it felt like the dissertation was me; I was the dissertation. It could never be good enough; it could never be enough. I couldn't even get a word down on the page because it was so overwhelming. And then all of a sudden, I was gonna have a baby. And I had to write something, because there wasn't enough time. Soon, I was gonna be watching a baby. You know, I had to just get off my butt and write something down, even if it wasn't gonna be perfect, because who has time to wallow in self-pity and watch Netflix all day long? You just have to write the dissertation, you know? And then I had my son. And my husband started his job the same year -- he graduated just a month or two after I had my son. And he started working, and he was working full-time. And my mom was living in DC, and we were in New York, and my mom came -- she's amazing -- my mom came every other 53:00week and lived in our one-bedroom apartment and slept on our sofa and watched my son every other week so that I could go to the library and write. So, I wasn't paying for childcare, and every other week I was a full-time graduate student, and every other week I was a full-time stay-at-home mom. And there were things about that that were really hard. Stopping and starting like that, writing, was really hard. By the time Monday came around, it had been a full week since I had last looked at my dissertation, and I didn't remember what I had been writing about. And I don't think I was built to be a stay-at-home mom. When I was with my son, I was kind of bored and wandering around looking for playdates, and when I was not with him, I felt really guilty because I wasn't with him, and it was whole days, and I was dragging my breast pump and my computer -- this is a thing 54:00too. Being a graduate student with no office and pumping is really hard. Like, my -- I have my breast pump with me here, 'cause I'm still nursing Esther. And, like, it is heavy. So, I'm carrying three books and a laptop computer and a breast pump, and I'm walking to the subway, and then by the time I get there I already have to pump -- Columbia has a communal pumping room. You have to sign up for hours. So, I would have an appointment. So, I'd be in the middle of doing some microfilm reading, and I'd be, Oh, it's two o'clock. I'd pack up the microfilm, lug all my stuff over, go to the pumping room, pump, and then, you know -- so it was very -- a huge time drain, too. But I did it. And now it's much easier. Now I live in Kansas -- my husband has a pulpit -- and I have an office in my house, and I have a babysitter who comes to the house and watches 55:00the kids downstairs while I am upstairs. And so, I can nurse Esther -- I can just go downstairs and nurse her, and I don't have to do the whole pump thing and the lugging things around and whatever. But again, this all is to say that I have these extraordinary resources. I have a husband who has a job that can support me so I'm not earning any money, so it's okay that I'm writing part-time and I'm staying home with the kids part-time and I'm not earning any money. That's an extraordinary privilege that I recognize that not everyone has. And I have a lifestyle that allows me to do it. And I don't -- you know, I don't take that lightly. And I also think that it comes -- for me -- at a pretty big sacrifice to my career, because I -- when I look at my resume, there's a lot of emptiness in it, because I have been a part-time, stay-at-home mom. So, some people have fellowships, some people take a post-doc for a year. That's not a 56:00thing that I can do. And I think that's a thing that academia sort of requires at this point. The job market is so narrow, you really have to be able to take a visiting associate professorship. You really have to be able to go take a research fellowship somewhere for a couple months. And that's something that I'm not gonna do. So, I really don't know if I'm gonna be able to stay in academia, because I imagine that the jobs that I can take will be limited because I rely on my husband's job for our primary source of income. And also, my resume will be too sparse, I think, to earn me a kind of position that maybe I imagined I would have. But I still feel extremely fortunate that I can sort of have it all, in a sense, because I go up to my upstairs office and I write my dissertation for a couple hours -- this is a typical schedule for me: My husband drops my son 57:00off at school. A babysitter comes for my daughter. From 9:00 to noon I write my dissertation -- 11:30. 9:00 to 11:30 I write my dissertation. Then I pay the babysitter. I take my daughter. We have lunch together. And then, I pick my son up from preschool. I bring him home, put him down for a nap, put my daughter down for a nap. Sometimes they're both sleeping and I can work a little bit. At three o'clock in the afternoon, a high-schooler comes and watches my kids for two hours, and I write my dissertation. And then, I pay the babysitter, I give my kids dinner and I give them a bath and I put them down to sleep, and at about 7:30, I sit down and I write my dissertation for a couple hours. So, in some ways that's a crazy schedule. Nobody does that. You know, people work full-time on their dissertations. People have better dissertations because they work full-time on their dissertations. And in some ways, that's an amazing schedule, 58:00because when I was sitting down before I had kids and writing all day long because I was on dissertation leave -- you know, I had my dissertation year -- and, like, I'll admit it, I was watching Netflix. You can't -- a person can't sit and write an entire day long. So, this is almost a much more normal and natural way to write, to sit down for a couple hours, take a break, think about something else, and then come back to it. So, I almost think that as crazy as that schedule sounds, it actually is a good one for writing a dissertation. So, I have been extremely fortunate.

AI: Do you think that having family and being in this place in your life where you are now gives you better understanding of your subject?

JK: Yes. I do. I remember when I first started with this topic (laughs) I was -- you know, you always imagine finishing, even right at the very beginning. So, I was writing my acknowledgments section in my head. And I was thinking about what 59:00I would say about my husband and how he'd kind of inspired this dissertation. And lately, I've been feeling a lot about these -- especially these women authors who are writing about love and marriages and, like, that's all that their lives were in some ways. That's what they were valued for. And in some ways that is the case with me too, because -- I have a lot of online relationships with scholars. I am extremely grateful for them. I'm involved in online publication. But in my day-to-day life, I'm largely a wife and a mother. The only people that I see from day to day tend to be congregants at my husband's synagogue, who often don't know what I do for a living, as it were -- don't make money, but whatever -- don't know what I do professionally. And to them, I'm just a wife and a mother. And so, I really kind of have started to understand and be sympathetic to and much less scornful of women who wrote about 60:00love as though it were the only thing in the world, because I can understand how for them it kind of was.

AI: Thank you for saying this and for sharing this personal perspective with people, especially with me. (laughter) I would like to come back for our -- we're nearing to the end of this interview, but I would like to ask you about your favorite things in Yiddish world. What makes you love Yiddish?

JK: So, when I was researching my chapter about Abe Cahan, I didn't know what I was looking for, I just knew I wanted to write about intermarriage. And I was going through historical newspapers, just reading microfilm and looking for stories of intermarriage. And I decided to write about the "Bintel Brief" 'cause it was a great place to find those. But while I was doing it, my lifeline was 61:00that I was finding absurd articles and translating them and posting the translations to Facebook. Like a newspaper article about a woman who was arrested for cross-dressing. Something about -- the thing that got me so excited about studying Yiddish in the first place was that you can go and you can study Shakespeare. And yes, you can say something that nobody else has ever said before, and possibly you can find things that no one else has ever said before. But everybody's read something about Shakespeare, and a lot of people have written things about Shakespeare. But if you are writing even about Isaac Raboy, who people know about and care about and people cite as being one of the most important writers in Yiddish in America, he's never -- he's only been translated once, and it wasn't a very good translation. I don't know if I should say that on camera. Whatever. He was only translated once. And it was only one book. And 62:00nobody's written anything about him, really. Novershtern just published something about him. But you can be a pioneer in the field of Isaac Raboy, who should be one of the Shakespeares of Yiddish literature. And that's so awesome and crazy. Like, I don't know. I just did some translations of Yente Serdatsky, who I love. And so, I translated one short story. And I had it published in jewishfiction.net. And then, I get this email from Ezra Glinter, and he says, "You know something about Yente Serdatsky. I'm doing this anthology for the "Forward" of short stories that were published in the "Forward." Will you do some translations?" And I wrote back to him, and I said, "I don't know anything about Yente Serdatsky. I was looking for 'Bintel Brief.' I saw this story. I thought it looked good. I went home and read it -- I printed it off a microfilm; I went home and read it; I liked it; I translated it. The only thing I know 63:00about Yente Serdatsky is she wrote that one story. I know nothing else about her. I am not an expert. I would love to do the translations, but I'm sorry, I can't really help you." And he said, "In my books, that makes you the world's expert on Yente Serdatsky. Nobody else knows more than you do." And I was like, Well, that is utterly crazy. And also, like, how cool is that? This is a person who wrote so -- she was extremely prolific. She was highly regarded. She ran a soup kitchen for Yiddish poets. People knew this person. And I am the world's expert on Yente Serdatsky, because I read one story she wrote once. So, it's such an opportunity to really bring people back to life and be an expert.

AI: Kol Hakavod [Hebrew: Congratulations]. (laughter) I'm very happy that you do what you are doing, especially in the field of literature. It's so important for all of us to acknowledge existence of all of those people from the past whose 64:00name otherwise just simply will be forgotten or not brought up, and maybe one day in a hundred years.

JK: Yeah.

AI: But we need them now.

JK: Exactly.

AI: So, what is your favorite Yiddish word? Do you have any?

JK: Favorite Yiddish word. I like the word "khokhme [wisdom]," in the kind of sarcastic joke kind of way. It reminds me of my grandfather, who was, like -- my grandpa Gerry, the one who spoke Yiddish and I didn't know it, was kind of a wise-ass, and it reminds me (laughs) of him.

AI: (laughs) And you sang in the Jewish choir, right?

JK: I did, yeah.

AI: Do you sing some Yiddish songs to your children?

JK: Very rarely. I do.

AI: You do. What is this?

JK: I like "Abi mit dir in eynem tsu zayn [As long as we're together]." I don't remember what the -- the titles -- I don't -- I sing them "Rozhinkes mit mandlen 65:00[Almonds with raisins]," kind of the basic, obvious songs. Mostly I sing to them in English, 'cause those are the songs that I know from my own childhood.

AI: How you would sing this in English?

JK: What -- oh, no, no, I don't sing "Rozhinkes mit mandlen" in English. I sing to them other songs in English.

AI: Other songs in English.

JK: Yeah.

AI: Okay.

JK: Yeah.

AI: I thought maybe you did (laughter) some crazy English --

JK: No.

AI: -- translation. Maybe that's an idea.

JK: That was a good idea. But I love to sing. I was always a singer. So, yeah.

AI: And what is your favorite Yiddish song? Do you have one?

JK: Oh, goodness. I love "Margeritkes [Daisies]." It's so sad and so beautiful.

AI: Do you remember the words?

JK: (singing) "[Yiddish - 01:05:27 to 01:05:41]." I don't remember the rest. (laughs)

AI: Thank you.

JK: You're welcome.

AI: Thank you for bringing Yiddish literature out to the world. That's very important. And thank you for sharing your love to Yiddish, Yiddish and Yiddishkayt, and to the audience of the Wexler Oral History.

JK: Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for -- I felt very humble accepting the invitation. I didn't feel like I was someone who should be interviewed. But I -- I appreciate the opportunity.

AI: Thank you for sharing your story with me. A sheynem dank [Thank you very much] on behalf of the Wexler Oral History Project and Christa Whitney, director of the program, and the whole Yiddish Book Center group. A sheynem dank and dziękuję [Polish: thank you]. (laughter)

[END OF INTERVIEW]