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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the EVO Institute. Produce Research Virtually. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the Public Programs Director of yivo, and we're really delighted to have you here with us for today's webinar discussion. Max Weinreich and the Meaning of Yiddish. Before we get started, just a very brief word about Yiva, which I think if you're here for a panel about Max Weinreich, you probably know a lot about YIVO already, but I'll give the quick spiel nonetheless. EVA is a very special place for the celebration and contemplation of Jewish history and Jewish culture. We have an archive and a library with over 23 million documents and over 400,000 books which are used by researchers around the world. And we do a lot of activities to bring to life the world of our collections and the world of Jewish history and Jewish culture, such as public programs like this, a variety of classes, including a lot of Yiddish language classes, exhibitions, and much more. So please continue to join us at YIVO today. We're really delighted to have an amazing panel, and I'm just going to hand it over to Kalman Weiser. Professor Kallman Weiser is the Zilber Family Chair of Modern Jewish Studies in the Department of Humanities and History at York University. His research focuses on areas of modern Jewish history and culture, specifically about language issues in Jewish life. And he has just finished a manuscript of a book about Max Weinreich, which we're all really excited to read. So we're looking forward to when that hits the presses.
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A
Paulman, thank you. Thank you for the kind introduction. So let's get started. The way things are going to work today is I'm going to say a bit about Max Weinreich, get a bit of an introduction, then we're going to have a round of questions for each panelist individually. I'll introduce each panelist before we speak to this person, and then we're going to have a round of general questions, and then we'll end this session with Q and A for all of us together. So let me just share my screen because I want to show you some great images. So give me a second. So, very briefly, I wanted to begin by starting. This is. You'll notice this title is in German, Max Weinleich aus Wilno. Why did I start this panel with a title in Germany when we're talking about Yiddish? Well, if you look on the left at Max Weinreich's doctoral, his diploma from the University of Marburg, where he defended his dissertation about the history of Yiddish language research in 1923. You'll see he's identified as being from Vilna. The introduction to his dissertation identifies Vilna as his hometown and the place where he studied in high school. This is all not exactly accurate, but it tells us a lot about Max Weinreich. Max Weinreich was not from Vilna. Neither was Yiddish's native language, of course. Here you see a young Max Weinreich. Max Weinreich came to Vilna a bit late in life. Still a young person, but a bit late. He is born in Poland, a region of the Russian Empire outside the Pale of Settlement. On the right you can see Pale of Settlement and Congress Poland you can see Maxweilerecht comes from the Baltic area, today's Latvia, from this small town of about 10,000 people, of which about a quarter were Jews, called in Latvian today Kuldiga in German, Goldingen in Yiddish, Golding, where the Jews in the course of the latter half of the 19th century had largely switched to German as they rose into the middle class. Weinreich spoke German as his home language, but he of course was exposed to various degrees of giddish sized German and the local Yiddish dialect. With older generations and the poorer classes in Goldingen, he had attended the school for the so called nobility of the region. And depending on which account you have, he left at a young age to go on to better things. Either because of anti Semitism, which is an important subject for today, his first traumatic experiences with anti Semitism, or because they had switched the language from Russian to German in the school, even though the school was functioning largely in Russian. When he was a child, the spirit of the school and the. The really the vernacular was German. Or he left because it wasn't such a good school. He ended up going on to study as a. Studying for private exams, think private exams, studying living with family in other parts of the Russian Empire, including which Poland, and then completing high school in a Jewish private high school in St. Petersburg. Now this brings us to the next point. Weinreich at a very young age became quite enamored of Yiddish. He became his cause. He became, you might be familiar with. He became largely acquainted with Yiddish because of his activity in the youth organization of the Bundest movement, the socialist movement in the early 20th century in the Russian Empire. I'm not going to go into great depth about that right now. What I want to show you is that the young Max Weinreich was already a journalist as an adolescent, publishing in both Yiddish and in Russian. On the left, you have the local liberal German press, where he published in defense of Yiddish, arguing with Zionist Hebraists. And also this is the Yiddish press of the time. He wrote on behalf of the Bund, but he also wrote on behalf of Yiddish. Here he is as a high school student when the great then champion of Yiddish, Nathan Birnbaum, champion of Jewish nationalism, was on a lecture tour in the Russian Empire. He came in 1911 to St. Petersburg, where he was greeted by a group of high school students. And they made this declaration which they presented him with. Here is the declaration on the left you can see the first name is Max Weinreich, gymnasist Max Weinreich HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT and I'm almost certain that Max Weinreich composed this. Despite what we might consider Deutschmarisms, Germanisms by today's standards. Weinreich became much more of a. Of a language purist over time. Now, of course, Yivo is in Vilna, and Vilna was really the city that Max Weinreich was attracted to. After finishing university in St. Petersburg, where he studied philology and history, Weinreich went to Vilna to live for a year. He had already spent time in Vilna. After all, Vilna was the center of the Bund. He was active, editing Bundes newspapers and writing for other socialist and Yiddish newspapers. He was familiar with the Shabbad family, a prominent local family. I found letters talking about him dating his future wife, Regina Shabbat. They were dating by World War I. She was very impressed that Max Weinreich could take her out to lunch during the early years of World War I. Where was he getting the money? He was getting the money from tutoring and later from writing for the Yiddish press in New York. But he was always quite resourceful, which is a very useful thing for understanding how the history of Yivo unfolded. Max Weinreich was very good at finding sources to fund his research. He had spent the year 1918-1919 in Vilna. He'd actually enjoyed a pogrom in the city. And this is one of the remarkable things, I would say, another trauma in Max Weinreich's life, being caught living with the Shabad family in their apartment. While there are multiple days Polish legionnaires are marching into the city and take control of the city. And he can't leave because of this pogrom. He describes it. It's described about him, his experience there. Someone else. He also talks about his experience with anti Semitism around the time of the first Russian Revolution, his experience as a student in Germany. He leaves Vilna in 1919 to go to Berlin and then later Marburg to work on his dissertation, all with the goal of returning to Vilna. Why Vilna? In brief, Because Vilna for him is the ideal place for the creation of a modern, secular Yiddish culture. When I say this, I don't mean Yivo alone. Yivo hasn't even emerged yet, doesn't come into existence until 1925. In 1919, 1920, we're talking about the idea of creating Yiddish schools, a Yiddish Teachers Institute, and so on. There are a number of Yiddish intellectuals there, including his future father in law, Tzemach Shabad. And for reasons that we'll explore today, I'm sure Vilna seems the ideal place for the creation of this modern Yiddishist enterprise. So I'm going to stop my slideshow right here. I'll just add that this, of course, the Yivo Aspiranten, the Yivo graduate students in the late 1930s. Included among them is the future Holocaust historian Lucy Davidovich, in the front row in the middle, Van Liber Schuldkrit from New York City, who had spent a year in Vilna, 1938-1939. So I'm going to stop my slideshow now, and we're going to start with the questions for our panelists. So I'm going to pose our first question to Professor Jeffrey Chandler. Jeffrey Chandler is Distinguished professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His next book, and he's written many books, we're just not going to list them all today is Homes of the Past, A Lost Jewish Museum, which is forthcoming in 2024 from Indiana University Press. So this is what I wanted to ask Jeffrey about. We all know that YIVO was not the only Jewish research institution or Jewish research collective in modern Europe. In 20th century Europe, before YIVO, there was, of course, the Wissenschaftes Ludens movement, the Science of Judaism movement in Germany, in interwar Poland, we also see the birth of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. There were, of course, Jewish research institutes in the Soviet Union, in Minsk and in Kiev. How was Yivo's approach to Jewish scholarship meant to be different from other contemporary approaches? How did it reflect Weinreich's understanding of the unique features of Eastern European Jewry?
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C
Okay, well, thank you for that question, Kalman. So I would say you already have mentioned the centrality of Yiddish to his not only his scholarship, but to him ideologically. And the cultivation of Yiddish as a national language was central to YIVO's mission and publishing all of its scholarship in Yiddish, promoting the use of the language, the teaching of the language, and eventually also working to create language standards. So positioning YIVO as the Yiddish equivalent of the Academie Francaise. It's going to tell everybody what is proper Yiddish usage. That's one thing. The other, maybe even more important, is that, and it's tied to the central role of Yiddish, is that this was an institution dedicated to activist or engaging scholarship. Weinreich later says, very famously, Yiddishe Wissenschaft. The NIVO's full name is Yiddishe WissenschaftsTlacher Institute, the Jewish Institute of Research, or a scholarship. Wissenschaft is Wissenverschaft. It's knowledge that creates. And the idea that scholarship doesn't simply stay in the academy, doesn't stay in the classroom, doesn't stay in the library, but it goes out to the public. And there's a very strong sense of commitment to the public, the Yiddish speaking public in particular, Vilna being a sort of epitomizing example, but not the only example of this phenomenon in Poland, elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and of course in growing immigrant communities around the world. But this is also a community that will be a resource for the Institute. So the Institute will get things from the public and will give things back to the public. And that, to me, is a distinctive feature of yivo. There's also interesting changes over time as the center of focus shifts from what can we learn from the public about, you know, from the oldest members of the public about traditional practices and this concern that you find in other communities studying, you know, distinctive folkways, things that are disappearing, but a shift to study the present. And this is tied to this idea of engaged scholarship. What can we do for Jews of today? What can we do for Jews living in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe of the future? So those are some of the things, I think, that really distinguish YIVO in terms of its mission and its activities.
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A
Fantastic. So instead, before we can add to that, comments to that, we're going to, for the sake of time, I'm going to march us through just to make sure there's time for everything. So I'm going to go on to the next question and our next panelist. Our next panelist is Kenneth B. Moss, who is the Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer professor of Jewish History at the University of Chicago and the author of An Unchosen people, Jewish Political reckoning in Interwar Poland, and also of Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution. So this most recent book deals significantly with Weinreich, specifically in the context of interwar Poland. So I want to move us a little bit further into 1930s in particular, and before that, I need to give you a little bit of background. We know Max Weinreich as a. Primarily as a philologist, as the guiding spirit of Yivo, later the research director of YIVO until the early 1950s in New York. What we tend to overlook is that Max Weinreich was a polymath, and he was also a public intellectual who was very much engaged in institutional life, particularly in Europe, but also in post World War II United States. In 1929, he took his first visit to the United States on a fundraising trip for YIVO. And then in 1932, he returned and he spent the academic year 32 to 33 at Yale University, studying with Edward Shapiro, the famous anthropologist and linguist, and John Dollard, a sociologist, as part of an international faculty seminar on the influence of culture on personality. He came back a little bit later to Europe, studied psychoanalysis in Vienna, and we'll hear about that in a few minutes later. And he also went to Palestine for a trip in the late 1930s, writing and wrote a series of travel logs beginning with his trip by ship from Europe to Palestine for the Forwards in New York, which is really fascinating material. So I'm going to now direct this question to Ken. How was Weinreich's work and activities in the 1930s different from his previous work? In what ways was it a response to. To the declining situation of Jews in Europe, perhaps also in his own life? And what solutions did he propose?
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D
Well, first let me just say how wonderful it is to be here with scholars I really respect and have learned from including about Weinreich. I think we want to sort of sketch what's different as he enters the early 30s. I would note five points, as you yourself just noted, there's a turn from the kind of classical cultural nationalist task, in the broadest sense of the word, of philology and literary history, recovering sort of the spirit and history of the language and the culture it embodies, to a special interest in research on the social psychology of Polish Jewish youth, and especially on how they're coming to understand their own situation and their likely future, and how they're coming to understand the situation and likely future of the community as a whole. And as you noted, it's worth noting that this of course, linked to the perhaps, I'm sure the audience knows about the great Evo autobiography competitions that yielded such wonderful, roughly 600 incredible ego documents, some of which are available in English thanks to Jeff and Barakirami Gimlet and others. And though he begins that first collection is in 32, there's a second larger collection, 34. And he starts working with these very closely. And this culminates in 1935 in his brilliant, although very strange book length polygomenon to future research on Polish Jewish youth called the Path to Our Youth. So that's one dimension. It's very central. There's more and more interest if you read sort of between the Lines in Weinreich, a little bit outside that particular framework. You see, he's very interested in self productivization, particularly agrarianism amongst Jews and sort of economic self help, and in helping Polish Jews face up psychically, psychosocially, if you will, to what he sees as an inevitable fact, which is that they're going to be pushed out of the Polish middle class by a mix of economic and political factors and they're not going to be let back in when the depression ends. And this idea of helping Polish Jews face up to bad facts, fundamentally political facts that they can't change, this is how Weinrich's thinking is, I think the essential concern at the heart of a lot of his work through the 30s, certainly through the mid-30s. There's another dimension that's very interesting that a number of scholars have noted and thought about is his striking interest in understanding the African American situation, particularly his situation of those that Du Bois and others call the talented tenth. That is precisely those parts of the African American community who are getting access to college and higher education, but are being forcibly and violently kept out of white society. And clearly, although he's very ambivalent and ambiguous about this, this is driven in part by his a sense that he really can't ultimately decide on, that there is some comparative traction for thinking about the Polish Jewish situation that's coming into being in the 30s by thinking about the African American situation. A fourth point, sotto voce, very gingerly, and he's very cheery about showing it. This is one of the things I like so much common about your work because you can see him having already thought about these in the 20s, but he's very careful not to show too much of it in the 30s. But it's there. There's a growing, or what I now know from your work, renewed interest on his part in trying to make sense of anti Jewish visions and anti Jewish politics in the larger society and social spheres in which Jews find themselves in Poland, in Germany and in Europe as a whole. And then finally, for the first time, as you said, there's a sustained and serious interest for the first time in his life in understanding what kind of society Zionism is actually shaping and Jewish immigration is actually shaping in British Mandate Palestine, which is striking against the backdrop of really, truly profound dismissive disinterest in the entire Yishuv and Zionist project in the 20s, which you can see in his letters. I just think it's ridiculous. But this gives way to a very interesting kind of serious engagement. And I think what binds these things together is a rapidly darkening vision of a. What is happening in Poland and in Europe as a whole politically. And the kind of the mainstreaming of more and more aggressive extrusionist visions vis a vis Jews. And also. And then primarily what is happening in Polish Jewish subjectivity under the pressure of these political and economic and cultural problems. And, you know, the last point maybe to make is he loses. Although he was a very committed Bundist in his youth and into the 20s, I think by the 30s, it's clear that he no longer certainly votes for the Bund, still, as Davidovits noted as late as 38. But he no longer sees much hope in the Bund or any other organized Jewish politics in any near future. He can imagine that they're really able to solve the Jewish problem or substantially ameliorate the Jewish situation. And you can see him getting more interested in sort of strange things in Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute and sort of ideas about bootstrapping. When politics is foreclosed, you turn to kind of economic self help. He gets interested in Kahan Vergheli's sort of rather apostate or heterodox notions of self agrarianization. And then finally, and I think this will take us to Naomi, when Bush comes to shove, he puts a lot of his attention on the question of. First of all, he concludes, and it's very clear, if you dig all the way into this is unambiguous to him, that the general tendency among Polish Jewish youth is despair, despair about their future and a sense that Jewishness is bad fate. He says this quite explicitly when he finally turns to the autobiographies around page 200 of this book. And at the same time, you can see him then struggling against that. And he's very much pulled toward the notion that this is a kind. And this is a point that Barbara Krishna Gimlet and Jeff and others made in this wonderful introduction to Awakening Lives that there's a kind of failure of maturation that Polish Jews, Jewish youth particularly, are not facing up to realities they can't change. They have to learn to adapt. They have to recognize that they're not gonna be able to live the lives their parents were able to lead. And he's pulled toward the notion that their turn, their mass turn toward Zionism that are slightly less mass but substantial turn toward communism is a kind of immature escapism. And yet this does battle in his own mind with. With growing readiness to acknowledge that it's not all in their head. Certainly they really are facing a grim future. That's where I would sort of put the pin.
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A
Thank you. There was implicit in what you were saying two things which I think are going to come up right now. One is, what's the role of Yiddish in this? And the other is what becomes the sort of multi or interdisciplinary nature of his research. And we're going to turn to our third speaker now, Nomi Seidman, who is currently in Montreal, but from the University of Toronto, who is not really blurry in actual life, just on zoom today. And let me give Nomi the proper introduction she deserves. Just one second. Okay. Noemi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman professor of the Arts. She just. At the University of Toronto, she just completed a manuscript on psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish translation. So I already mentioned that Weinreich studies psychoanalysis in Vienna in 1934. In fact, he brings his children with him. And, you know, Uriel Weinreich goes to kindergarten in Germany, in Austria, in the German language. And love. He and Gabriel love playing with the. With the toys there. Gabriel writes about this in his memoir, but that's not the focus. The focus is psychoanalysis. In this question, how was the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis, or why was this the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis, so appealing to Weinreich? And how do you think it could be used to improve the lives of Jews? Jews, excuse me, and perhaps of others. What role does language play in his understanding of Jewish psyche and its role in addressing Jews problems?
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E
Wow, thank you. So Weinreich was really interested in. I mean, he was working within such a collectivist framework and an ideologically collectivist framework in which Jewish nationalism was the big topic and in which questions of Jews as a whole were so important. But he himself was actually also really interested in the Jewish individual and the connection between an individual and this collective and it's interesting when people think about psychoanalysis, they think so much about this individual. But during the decade in which Weinreich was really immersing himself in Freud's writing, Freud himself was moving from a more individualist, and he did write about group psychology. And that was actually the first of his works to be translated into Hebrew and Yiddish. But Freud was working toward Moses and monotheism, his big discussion of what it meant to be a Jew. And at the same time that he was working on this in the world of Yiddish. And maybe people in the audience don't know that Freud was on the honorary board of the Yivos. So there were some connections and there was some correspondence between the two men. Weinreich was working within the collectivist framework to think about what it meant to be born into such a strongly collectivist culture. And I think it's already been mentioned that he participated in the seminar at Yale on the Seminar in Personality and Culture. And in this book that Ken has mentioned about Der Wetzunze Yugint, he actually, he divides certain sections of that book into, you know, Hebraism and Yiddishism or Communism. Why do people become Communists? And he's always really careful not to reduce these sections to the ideal, the explicit ideology. He says, sometimes people join a Bundes group because they fall in love with somebody in the group, or sometimes people become Yiddishists because they're angry at their Hebrew fathers or so. So for him, what's really interesting is this connection between an individual. He actually, I think, says something like, you know, no one is entirely born a Jew. He's not that interested in the hereditary or the Jewish halachic factors of how people become Jewish. He actually wants to know where in your early life he's interested in this transmission of Jewish culture unconsciously. And one of the reasons why he's interested in unconsciously is because he says all those ways that we think about Judaism, you know, texts and laws and ritual. He's trying to figure out what persists even when all that is absent or gone. And he believes that something does persist and that something actually retains its character in Jews who don't practice, who don't talk or think about themselves as being Jewish. And famously, in this, when he joined the Yale seminar, he had to write a little kind of ethnographic self description, autoethnography. And he writes, if you want to know how Jewish someone is, don't ask them if they know Yiddish. I'll get back to your question of what Yiddish means. Ask them if they're afraid of dogs. So he has this idea that animal phobia, which, by the way, Freud's only case study of a child is little Hans, who's afraid of dogs. So Weinreich would have explained. Well, of course, little Hans was Jewish. So Weinreich is interested in how the fear of dogs, which has sociological, historical origins. He explains Jews were peddlers. Dogs were used to guard the land against peddlers. And how that's communicated to a small child through even without language, even before language. And what's communicated is not only the fear of Jews of dogs, but also the fear of Jews of non Jews, because it's non Jews who had dogs. So this is. He was interested in what constitutes Jewishness outside of, you know, I'm sitting in, you know, a Jewish studies book full of, you know, the Tosefta, the Talmud. What is it that's beneath that and what is it before language? He's also interested. And I guess one more thing which I should add, and how Yiddish functions is that one of the things that he figured out in his time at the Tuskegee Institute is this concept of a persecuted minority developing certain kinds of psychological stratagems to persist, to survive, to salve a kind of wounded ego. And he calls these the compensatory mechanisms. And these compensatory mechanisms, he basically says that all of the Jewish religion is like a giant compensatory mechanism for a persecuted minority. Right. You're God's chosen people. Jews have a kind of genius for compensatory mechanisms for making themselves feel okay. But he says that we're living in an age in which these compensatory mechanisms no longer function as they once did. And actually what substitutes for them is this famous Jews, which was a kind of craze in the 20s and 30s. So, you know, those coffee table books about, oh, the Nobel Prize winners that are Jewish are a kind of secular form of compensatory mechanism. What he thought Yiddish was also was a kind of repository of an unconscious repository, especially for those who had Yiddish as a heritage language. He also famously told Don Meron that Yiva was unconscious of the Jewish people and how exact of Eastern Europeans. I don't think he said that he was a little normative, but that mobilizing that this language had certain kind of co qualities. And raising up this language through the autobiographies, through the research was a kind of talking cure for Eastern European Jews, a way of connecting with certain sources of psychic strength in this moment of persecution. So Yiddish meant for him the language in which their ancestors had developed certain kinds of powers to maintain themselves through difficult times. And he spoke about Jews who had stopped speaking Yiddish as being fragmented and requiring these sources, requiring Yiddish in order to become whole in some way. So certainly Yiddish had psychoanalytic meaning for Weinreich.
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D
Right.
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A
It's an interesting question. Then perhaps we can return to is, what does the Yiddish mean when we come to an American speaking Jewry who has Yiddish as a heritage language and fragments of Yiddish in its consciousness? Right, okay. So time is marching and I'd like to turn to the group questions. Okay, so here's my little introductory remark. Vilni Yivo was of course, built on the pillars of collection and research, dissemination through scholarly publications and training in education. It was meant to be a Jewish national institute that served the Yiddish speaking people wherever it dwelled, but foremost in Eastern Europe. But the reality of American Jewry, as we well know, was quite different from that of Eastern Europe. It was immigrant at the time, affluent in comparison with Eastern Europe and little inclined to Jewish nationalism. When Max Weinreich appeared on the scene in New York in 1940. So the first question I want to ask of all of you is how did Weinreich attempt to shape American jewelry once he come to New York and really settled in New York in 1940? How is this reflected in Guibo's scholarship and its activities in America? What's changing about Weinreich and changing about his work in America?
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C
You know, I think what's interesting is the extent to which he doesn't change, the extent to which he looks at American Jews in relationship to Jews in Eastern Europe. So things that both Ken and Naomi have talked about in the way he views especially Jewish youth in Eastern Europe, he brings the same valence to bear when he looks at American Jewish youth that they feel like they're second class citizens in America. He compares them to blacks who live at the mercy of the white man, which is, you know, it's an sort of astonishing comparison to make in the context where whatever you know, persecutions, anti Semitism Jews are experiencing in America, it's not Jim Crow. And yet he's looking at American Jews as parallel to especially youth to Polish Jewish youth who were living at the mercy of the Christian majority that was turning out to be not very merciful. And so I think he brings this view to looking at American Jews and. And he argues that what American Jews need is Yiddish and what it has to offer psychologically and also that American Jews need to understand the world that they came from. And he's assuming all American Jews come from Eastern Europe. Most do, some don't. His focus is on the, you know, East European Jewish immigrants and their children, which are, you know, the great majority, certainly in New York, and that they. They need to learn they're not worse than other people, they're not better than other people, but they're different. And that's actually a radical argument to make in the United states in the 1940s. In Europe, minority groups are looking for autonomy, but in America, minority groups are looking for. For acceptance and to enter into a mainstream, not to break away from it. So it's an argument that's very much rooted in his East European sensibility. It's largely not a good fit, especially with the children of immigrants. But in some ways, some of his vision was prescient for what, after he dies, would be what would draw people of the next generations to Yiddish and to Yivo. So it's interesting to think that he's too late and he's too early.
- [35:08]
E
Right.
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A
In some ways, he pathologizes American Jewry based on his model of Eastern Europe. He adjusts over time, of course. But I just want to add to the floral. Our fellow panelists speak. It's interesting to note that his interest in psychoanalysis and has interest in American blacks really trails off to a large extent once he's in America and he's faced with our very big problems of working with Yivo, but also the challenge of American Jewry. So it's interesting. Those are things that don't remain with him necessarily, or really take a retreat in America. So I'd like to invite comments from my fellow panelists here.
- [35:47]
E
Yeah, it's interesting because one of the things I write in this book that I just finished is that there's a. A lot of engagement with the question of the unconscious, Yiddishin unconscious during the late 1930s. And he comes up with this term for the unconscious, the conscious and the unconscious, which is unlike what other people in the Yiddish world are using for the unconscious, which is umbavusein, which he calls. Claims he coins this. It's very typically Weinreich to insist on a kind of distinct term that's Yiddish and that's not just a borrowing from German. Right. Even though he didn't go lushenkoynish for some psychological features, he did. But. Sorry, this is a lengthy prologue to what I wanted to say, which is that. And then he writes the history of the Yiddish language, and there's very little as Far as I can find, there's very little psychoanalysis in there. And even the autobiography contest, which continues, is now directed toward immigrants. So older immigrants, it's no longer youth. So certainly he's moving into different areas. But I think the most important term in the history of the Yiddish language is visakite component and visekite. So this idea that Yiddish has a particular sensitivity to the components of language. So because of the strange history of Yiddish, its combination of a Semitic and a Germanic language, and the history of movement from one place to another, people who speak Yiddish have an unusual sense of their own languages as mixed. But what's so interesting is this word that he coins for the purposes of talking about the individual psyche. And the question is of the unconscious. Now it's a question of what Yiddish knows. That Yiddish has a certain kind of knowledge that's universal because, like other linguists, Weinreich believed that Yiddish wasn't different from German, English and these other national languages that feel so sure that they're complete languages. What's different isn't that Yiddish is a Schmelzsprach, right? That a fusion language, and they're not. It's that Yiddish knows it. That there are things that Yiddish knows that are true of other people. So this idea that Yiddish is a particularly knowing language, I think is so powerful and interesting and a kind of strange reversal, almost turning upside down, of the interest in psychoanalysis in the 1930s, where the question is what people knew and didn't know? And he has this long section in Delveague where. How do you count on the autobiographies? Can people really. Do they know who they really are? To this idea that Yiddish. Yiddish really knows something and that we should all be paying attention to what it is that we know through the Yiddish language.
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B
Right.
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A
I mean, you bring up the fascinating question, but we'll maybe address later, how do we access this knowledge when it's now Yiddish is the repository of the knowledge that we don't know.
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C
We know. Right.
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A
Ken, do you want to add something?
- [39:20]
D
Not sure I have much to add on the American scene, except maybe to note that. And this is in no way to reduce his incredible postwar achievements. But my sense, you know, is this. Is. This is really somebody who. For whom East European Jewry was special and was the sort of kval, the source of whatever was worthwhile in modern Jewish life. And he's a very interesting document. He gets a talk, I guess, for the Jewish Labor Committee. I'm not sure. Something that Jim Leffler Sent my way a while back, really in 42, pretty late when people know things are quite terrible for Jews in Eastern Europe. And you can see there his undimmed romanticism, maybe more clearly than anywhere else in his work of East European Jewry. This is a. You know, that this is not just some set of Jews, but this is. And it's not Yiddish per se. It's really a romantic model of how the folk is the ultimate source of all that is vital and worthwhile. And, you know, if you. If you think about what it means to have still thought that that really the only source of vitality in modern Jewish life was East European Jewry. To say that in. I think it's late 42, and then think about what someone like that, how they have to grapple with the destruction of that community and the very poor, ersatz substitute that American Jewish life in the 50s was. I tend to think of his American life as very much a terrible, in some ways an epilogue to what he had hoped for. And I think of. I mean, this in no ways take away from, you know, the Kshichte, which is an incredible book, but it's also a deeply. I mean, it's not just as heavy as a Matseva. It has a feel of like, you know, this is. Now is the moment. The owl is flying at midnight. Now is the moment for someone to truly rezumir. And everything that Yiddish was. And it's not just Yiddish, of course, it's Yiddish culture, or it's Jewish culture. Der Hashas, the whole structure of Ashkenazi life, clearly it belongs to the past. And he's the only one who can give it its proper account.
- [41:23]
C
No, I think it's worth noting that at this moment that you're talking about 42 and 43, as everything they lived in and worked for is being destroyed in this thorough, horrible, rapid way that Weinreich and his colleagues in the YIVO in exile in New York don't just sink into despair that they actually start coming up with plans for a future for the Institute. And I think they see the Institute as the lifeline for themselves and for the culture. And they try all kinds of things, some of which don't get off the ground. The lost Jewish museum that I've been writing about is one such effort that never came to fruition. But the attempt was made, and it was one of a number of efforts, of varying degrees of success, to move forward and to sustain a relationship, a very new kind of relationship for a very new kind of constituency for East European, Jewish, Yiddish speaking culture. And I think it's. Some things look very quixotic, but I find myself really admiring the energy that goes in that direction rather than just throwing up their hands and going into a state of mourning.
- [43:06]
A
Yeah, it's almost, I would say, until about 1948. They can't stop. They're in constant motion. They won't give up on the dream of Vilna until very, very late, even though it's going to be greatly diminished. They don't give up until really 1944 that there's any going back. And then they're just one thing after the other. It's reclaiming their library and documents. It's trying to create an aspirant tour. It's trying to cope with American Jewry. It's nonstop motion. And then finally 48, they start to slow down, and that's when the infighting begins to pull them apart. I mean, I'd like to ask the question, Nomi, if you want to say something before. I'll ask the question, but before you can, you know, jump in. We talked here about how Weinreich saw America and wants to shape America, but how does America shape Weinreich? And Yivo is an extension of Vine Rif. Do I have any takers?
- [44:02]
D
Or maybe I'll just jump in to say, I mean, I serve a firm. My shared sense with Jeff that I didn't want to suggest that Weinreich abandons his commitments and another place. And I think this is always to say that I'm not sure how much America does shape him. And maybe that's for the good. But. Although you'll tell us, Colin, I think in the book. But I think, for instance, he never gives up on Yiddishism in his personal life, of course. Right. I mean, and not for a second does he consider doing so, obviously. And he looks for people who care about the language. So in that sense, I mean, he remains wonderfully and I think willfully, you know, very much a. A foreigner to certain ways that American Jews are thinking in the 50s and 60s. But there's no, I think there's no longer a sense that they'll be. They may have been wrong about this in Poland, too. They probably were. But there they could at least imagine in some way that bordered on realism that they could have a very. That evo could, could, could radiate outwards in all sorts of ways and connect with all sorts of very alive and vital forms of Yiddish and Jewish engagement. And I think, you know, there's a way in which they become. They have to become much more of an academic institution in the maybe the narrower sense. Although, as Jeff says, of course, they never give up trying to find connections to things that are still, you know, and vital in American Jewish life around Yiddish.
- [45:27]
E
Helm. And would it be appropriate for me to quote a little bit from the Miron piece about. I just happen to, you know, I almost know it by heart, but I'm going to go back and I've looked at it so many times. He says, I don't know about you Israelis, Saddan Mehron, but by now I know my American Jews, young ones included. If American Jews still dream as a group, Yiddish is the language they speak in their dream. It is still the idiom of their collective unconscious. For their personality to become whole, they, at least some of them will have to go back to Yiddish someday. And there we shall be waiting for them down in the Yiddish cellar with a strong torchlight in our hand. Someone will have to spell out for them the contents of their dream to elucidate the vision they saw with bleary eyes. And we, because we made Yiddish Wissenshaft, the thing we live and die for, will be able to throw light and heal.
- [46:30]
C
Right.
- [46:30]
A
It's a beautiful quote, I think. Alec Burko, Laser Berko, makes the point in his dissertation that really the geshiftif in the. Could also be read as a blueprint, not just as a matzeva, as a memorial or a tombstone, but a blueprint for the creation of a new civilization on the ground. Foundations of Ashkenazic culture for an Ashkenazic. Ashkenaz iii, if you will.
- [46:53]
E
I love that I have to see that.
- [46:55]
A
Yeah, I would say, and I think we're running. Going to have to turn to audience questions soon, because I don't want to leave the audience out of this, that we obviously don't have enough time to explore this. But Weinreich gets to know America even though he's not happy with everything. He sees the potential for American jewelry. After all, what Yivo always wanted was an educated, generally educated population of Jews, Jewishly and generally. American Jewry is generally educated, just not Jewishly educated. So perhaps the fusion is possible, even if on a limited scale. So this becomes a mission of Yivo, which of course, will lead to the Max Weinreich center, which only the center is being created as he's really breathing his last breaths, and it's named after him posthumously, but that's really this fantastic, amazing new chapter in the history of Yivo and Yiddish studies that only is fulfilled after Max Weinreich dies because he had the foresight to understand that there was great potential in American Jewry.
- [47:59]
D
Right.
- [47:59]
A
For interdisciplinary studies in alliance with American universities. So there's a lot more to talk about, and unfortunately, I think we're running out of time for that. So, Alex, I'll ask you now to rejoin us from. So that we can entertain questions from the audience.
- [48:16]
B
Yeah. Well, thank you all so much. It's been really fascinating conversation. I think for a first question, I'd love to hear just kind of dovetailing off of what you were saying, Kalman. I think that many of us are curious your impressions as people who've thought a lot about Max Weinreich and who are also very familiar, all of you, with Jewish studies and Yiddish studies today. You know, how might Max Weinreich look at Jewish studies and Yiddish studies today if he were around to see the field today? What do you think you would think?
- [48:43]
A
Well, since I had the last word, I'll let someone else respond first.
- [48:47]
E
So, first of all, I think I'm, you know, all my students are really interested in the edition race, and I'm going to be giving a seminar on that topic. And here we have it. You know, Max Weinreich going down to Tuskegee and talking and reading Booker T. Washington and coming up with a. An understanding of, let's call it, Jewish collective subjectivity that really is very informed by the critical race theory of his day. On the other hand, there was something about him that there's a way in which we need to continue to criticize Weinreich. I mean, Weinreich says that Jewish culture teaches Jewish difference without teaching Jewish superiority. I think. I don't particularly think that's true. And I think even Weinrath's own writings stand as evidence that Jewish culture actually transmits Jewish superiority. So the whole question of how to think about Jewish difference in Jewish race. I think Weinreich provides a really significant opening for all kinds of interesting discussions that make him seem very cutting edge. I think, actually, you said that already. Sorry to repeat that. I should have said it. B' chez Mumro. Talking about you, Professor Moss. So you already brought this up. That's a very interesting and important episode. But I'm sure there are others, too.
- [50:14]
D
Would the other economists like to add. I mean, I think he would be very excited about a lot of aspects. And maybe the thing that Naomi points us to is he was shining, except I think one way he would be concerned maybe is, I think, and this comes back to Jeff's point about what Yivo wanted. I mean, I think that he and Janka Voschinsky and others were deeply invested in the idea that there would be as robust a kind of social, scientific and presentist engagement in Yiddish scholarship as history, cultural history, philology, literary studies. Not that he in any way thought those were irrelevant. They were very much the heart of his own work and what he really loved. And I think he might be sort of amazed to see the kind of mainstreaming and incredible accomplishments, if we can toot our own horns for a second, of Yiddish focused English language scholarship about the history of Yiddish culture, of Yiddish literature. And that might contrast for him negatively with the ways in which it's not clear, is there a sort of a Wissenschaft idea that reaches beyond the academy in the US and maybe the kind of questions Naomi flags would be the thing that would most would be the nice exception, the ways in which Jews are thinking about questions of race in new ways.
- [51:31]
C
So, you know, one of the things we have to bear in mind, he's an academic and he thinks the future of Yiddish relies will rely very much on academics. And as much as he was in love with Amcho, with the ordinary people, scholars going to tell Amcho what to do and what to think. So it's this very complicated relationship where you love the common people, you work, you draw on them, they teach from you, but you're smarter, you know better, you're going to tell them what to do. So the fact that there is this thriving interest in Yiddish studies, I think in the academy, he would get that at the general level, he might find some of the activities strange, but that's fine. And he, I think, would be intrigued by where the studying of contemporary use of Yiddish among living subjects is, which is among Hasidim. And that is where the action is for linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists is and has been for a while, is Hasidic Yiddish. And I think that would interest him. And I think he would be, whatever his feelings about Hasidic Yiddish might be in Klal Yiddish, I think he would still be happy to see it
- [53:02]
A
as
- [53:02]
C
a language in use and therefore, among other things, something to study.
- [53:08]
A
Yeah, I'll add the obvious point. He would embrace so much that's developed and the general integration of Yiddish into academia, which was of course, one of his major causes in life. But he would be greatly dismayed by the extent to which Yiddish has not used for this research. There's no getting around that he was not strict in the sense that he thought that all good research had to be done in Yiddish. In fact, there were complaints at an early YIVO conference that there were American speakers who didn't speak so well. And his response to those people, the critics, was better that we have people who speak in perfect Yiddish but bring new ideas than people who speak perfect Yiddish but don't bring anything new to the table. But yes, he would be upset about the general decline of Yiddish as a language of academic discourse.
- [53:55]
B
So many fascinating things to get into. We have a question that brings us back maybe to an earlier period of Weinreich first getting into Yiddish and some of the work before the war. But one viewer is asking about how Weinreich parsed this. The kind of way that Jews in different countries there was the hierarchy of, you know, of some Jews feeling that they were better than other Jews, say German Jews versus Polish Jews. Like how, how did Weinreich parse that in terms of his kind of Yiddishism and his approach to the Jewish nationalism?
- [54:31]
A
I think you have to remember that for Weinreich, these are all Ashkenazi Jews. And especially after World War II, he's even been thinking about bringing German Jewry under the branch of Yivo. It doesn't really go anywhere but you know, they're Ashkenazic Jews that historically Yiddish speaking Yivo actually branches out to non Ashkenazic Jews. Post World War II Brinson Ladino collections. Again, it doesn't go super far, but you know, there's a big change that happens with the Holocaust which we haven't even discussed. We haven't touched upon it here. Yes, he was aware of these different gradations in Jewish society. Obviously he didn't believe they had any real value. Beyond that, he was ostonormative as no means made very clear.
- [55:15]
B
There's a few questions about the Holocaust and maybe I can just ask them sort of together. One actually is a comment from the great historian of Yivo, Cecile Kuznets, who says to everyone, and I'm just going to read her comment, she says, I have a lot of thoughts, but just a few on the post war period. As I've written. I think precisely because Weinreich and the YIVO staff were some of the first to realize the extent of destruction on Europe and had such close connections to Europe, they had an intense emotional reaction. Yet at the same time, Max Weinreich very quickly pivoted to a focus on American Jewry. And because he was A follower of Dubnov, he felt both the need to eulogize Eastern European Jewry as a closing chapter and also to turn to a new chapter in the US So that's just a comment from Cecile. Thank you, Cecile. And related to that, Yael Chaver asks was Weinreich and others in the United States really aware in 1942 of the extent of the Korben at that time?
- [56:16]
C
So, yes, they were. And it's by. Even though there's hope against hope, as Kalman mentioned, that there can be a return to Eastern Europe, certainly by 43, they know that New York is gonna be their home. They get a building, and that tells you something, right? And the other thing, because since Holocaust has come up, is that this becomes another thing that animates them in a interesting way, is they are pioneers of Holocaust studies avant le lettre, and they are collecting material before the war is over. They are collecting, they are publishing, they collaborate with Yad Vashem on producing these volumes of indexes of material. As this field is a field that doesn't have a name yet is taking shape. They create an exhibition in 1947 called Jews in 1939-1946, a rather benign name, but is probably the first Holocaust exhibit of its kind in America. And because it goes to 46, it's about the community rebuilding after the war. And this tells us a lot about another area of how do you move forward? Is as scholars, you have to study the destruction. And of course, Weinreich writes Hitler's professors as his major contribution to this endeavor. So this is yet another aspect of how the institute is going to move forward.
- [58:01]
B
There's a few questions about Israel and Hebrew. Maybe we could just kind of address that together. You know, how did Von. And this maybe dovetails with Naomi, the quote that you read to Don Meron. But how did Vaynerach react to the use of Yiddish or Yiddish's place in the kind of burgeoning state of Israel? And also, what were his thoughts about Hebraism before. Before, say, before the war, or.
- [58:28]
A
Or either maybe I'm best qualified to talk about his views on Hebraism before the war. So I'll try and open it up. He's impressed by it before the war. He's not happy with it because it's obviously, it's a rival for Yiddish. And when he goes, you know, he goes to Zionist conferences writing for the Falwerts, and he talks about people speaking Hebrew in the lobbies, and he says, you know, it's really only those who are coming from Palestine who could speak it. It's much better than the fog, this dense fog of Hebrew that we hear in Lithuania. And then he goes, you know, he goes to Mandatory Palestine. He experiences Hebrew as a living language. He doesn't like the disrespect for Yiddish, that there's this crazy situation where, you know, he'll address people in Yiddish and they clearly understand him. They'll speak Yiddish amongst themselves, but they'll dress him as a stranger in Hebrew, because Yiddish is not the language for public discourse, for public life, even though people may speak it in private. And this really gets him angry. But he fully respects the revival of Hebrew. But it is a competitor with Yiddish, of course, the treatment of Hebrew, of Yiddish in Israel after 48, maybe we could all address together. And I have something to say about that too, but I don't want to let it exclude people from adding, well,
- [59:49]
D
since I don't know much about that other than that he was offered the chair and there's conflicting stories about what he answered. I'll note that from the same source that Kalman's registering, particularly his late 35 travelogue comes out to be this was from 35. He's not just impressed, but I think what's striking about his treatment of language questions when he actually gets to Palestine is he's engaged in serious sociolinguistic research that he wants to. He's trying to understand who exactly does speak Hebrew. How do the new norms work? Where has it really sunk roots? Where is there really only a very mixed grasp of it in ways that are very different from the usual, reasonably enough, I think usually Yiddish travelogues of Palestine, which are very much about oppression and so forth. He really wants to know what Hebrew has and has not managed to do in the Yeshuv and how it's been done. So I think that's. And clearly he's thinking about how this might be a model or might have been a model for what he wants from think about how to make the Yiddish language of public life as well.
- [60:50]
A
Well, I would say there's an element here that he actually misses, that he fails to explicitly recognize the parallels between creating what many saw as an artificial Yiddish, this vilna, intellectual Yiddish, and the creation of this revived Hebrew spoken language that are going through really parallel, you know, tracks by people coming from the same place, which is quite amazing. But Post World War II, he's delighted by the fact how much Yiddish has survived in Hebrew. You know, the famous, now famous arguments about Yiddish as really the parent language along with biblical Hebrew of modern Hebrew. He gets it early on and he's so excited when people make translate phrases from Yiddish into Hebrew or use Ashkenazic stress. For all of him, this is, you know, like the survival of Yiddish in English. This is the survival, the deep underlying in the minds of these Jews is Yiddish everywhere. And this is great for him.
- [61:50]
C
But we know that he did not like the idea that when the materials that were recovered from Yivo in the German storehouses after the war, one of the suggestions was that material that could not be returned to original owners and should either be repatriated, which meant returning it to Poland or to Lithuania, which was now the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. And if not, that everything should go to Hebrew University in Jerusalem. And he resisted all of these suggestions each for different reasons and made this remarkable case and actually precedent setting case that these materials belonged to yivo, that YIVO was and always had been an American institution because they had an American division founded in 1925 and chartered in the state of New York. And, and that's how they actually got the material that otherwise would have wound up going somewhere else. And the idea, we understand why he doesn't want it to go to Poland, why he doesn't want to go to Lithuania, but why wouldn't he want it to go to the Hebrew University? And it wasn't just he's in New York, he could have, you know, as was offered to him, he could have gone to Jerusalem. But he, I think he did not see it as a fruitful environment for scholarship that champions Yiddish in a country that is denigrating it and that champions the Diaspora in a country that is repudiating it. So I think, you know, that's, that's another factor in here.
- [63:26]
A
I mean, absolutely, he wanted Israeli scholars to come to study in Yivo. He wanted to influence Israel. Less so than the idea of Israel influencing the United States. Of course, when we're Talking about the 1940s, when you have so few Jews in the new state compared with 4 to 5 million Jews in the United States, the demographics were very much in his favor at the time. But he does build relationships with Israeli scholars and Israeli institutions. Of course, many of these people he knew back from Eastern Europe and that's a whole fascinating chapter. These people writing to each other in Yiddish, talking about when they last met at the University of St. Petersburg.
- [64:04]
B
This has been so fascinating and there are a lot more questions. We're already over time, I'm tempted to keep asking questions, but I think we should probably call it a close. Thank you all so much. This has been really a fantastic conversation.
- [64:19]
A
Thank you for organizing it.
- [64:20]
C
Yes, thank you.
- [64:21]
A
Thanks so much.
- [64:22]
D
And thanks to the audience and the deeply learned audience that are also here.
- [64:27]
A
Thank you to my co panelists, Sam.