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- [00:01]
Anita Norich
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
Eddie Portnoy
Welcome everyone, to another edition of what has become YIVO TV. We've been broadcasting our public events via Zoom and YouTube. Today we will be discussing Jeffrey Chandler's new book, this Is what It Looks
- [00:25]
Jeffrey Chandler
Like,
- [00:28]
Eddie Portnoy
Biography of a Language, which presents the story of Yiddish from its origins to the present. And it's a very sort of unique structure he's created. It's in the form of a biographical profile. So through a series of thematic chapters, from name and date and place of birth to religion and life expectancy, Professor Chandler offers surprising insights into the dynamic interrelation of of the language, its speakers and their culture, and explores the varied symbolic investments that Yiddish speakers and others have made in the language. We'll be joined today by the author as well as two scholars, Anita Nourik and Ayala Feder, with whom we'll be discussing this marvelous new book. Now, please, before we start, let me introduce, officially introduce our panel. Jeffrey Chandler is the Distinguished professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His publications include Adventures in Yiddish Land Post Vernacular Language and Culture and Shtetl of Vernacular Intellectual Intellectual History, among other titles. He is also the editor of Awakening Lives, Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust, and translator of Emil and Carl A Holocaust Novel for Young Leaders by Yonker Gladstein. Chandler has served as the President of the association for Jewish Studies and is a fellow of American Academy for Jewish Research. His most recent book is that We Will Be Discussing Today, Yiddish Biography of a Language, published by Oxford University Press. Anita Norich is the Tikva Framer Kensky Collegiate professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She's the author of Writing in Yiddish, translation in the 20th century, discovering exile Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America during the Holocaust, among many others. She translates Yiddish literature and teaches, lectures and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature. Ayla Feder is a professor of anthropology at Fordham University. Her ongoing research agenda ethnographically investigates contemporary North American Jewish identities and languages in urban centers. Feder's scholarship engages key issues at the intersection of religion, Jewish studies, gender, and linguistic anthropology. Her most recent book is Hidden Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age. I am Eddie Portnoy. I am the academic advisor and director of exhibitions at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research. With all that out of the way, we can now begin. So please, Dr. Sandler, take us away.
- [02:58]
Jeffrey Chandler
Well, thank you, Eddie. And first, just I want to thank Alex Weiser and Jane Tushinsky for organizing this event and Eddie for being our moderator. I can't think of a more appropriate venue to talk about this book than Yivo, including the fact that it's where I got my start and in the field of Yiddish studies almost 40 years ago. And I'm especially honored and delighted that Ayala Feder and Anita Norwich are joining as discussants. They are two of my all time favorite colleagues in Yiddish studies. I've learned so much from their work and I'm looking forward to hearing what they have to say. So I thought I'd begin by talking a little bit about how I came to write this book, because it's a little unusual, at least for me. This book was a commission and one day got an email from an editor at Oxford University Press saying, we have a series called Biography of a Language and we'd like to have one on Yiddish. Would you like to write it? And I thought that's an interesting proposition, but raised a lot of questions for me. And my first question was, well, if this is a series, does it have to follow some kind of formula? Which University press, books and series, Often there are very specific guidelines you have to follow, in which case I didn't think I'd want to do it. They said, no, you come up with your own approach. So I thought, well, that's interesting, I'll give it some thought. They said, why don't you look at the other books in this series? There was one on German and one on Dutch and you can see how they went about it. So I went online and I could look at the table of contents and look at the introduction of the books, and each one is different, but they're basically histories of the language. Which got me thinking, so why is this called Biography of a Language? You know, why not Introduction to the Language, Story of a Language. What's with biography? And I discovered that when you type into a search engine Biography of immediately a whole slew of titles of books come up that are not books about people, which is what we conventionally think a biography does, but are about, you know, anything from a germ, a theater, a river, a planet. I mean, the list goes on and on. So I thought, well, maybe this is just a sort of, you know, piquant way of saying the story of whatever the subject is. I wasn't quite sure what to what to make of that, but I thought, well, you know, when you do that, you're treating a subject that's not a person as if it were a person by calling it a Biography or anthropomorphizing your subject, at least nominally. And when it comes to languages, that's actually something people do a lot, and in the case of Yiddish, quite extensively, sometimes very provocatively, sometimes very productively, sometimes really problematically. And I thought, you know, that's something a book about Yiddish should address. And it occurred to me that this would be a key way to tackle what I think a book about Yiddish ought to do, which is sort of two things. One is tell the story of the language, but also tell the story of how the language has been conceptualized, how it's been discussed, how it's been scrutinized, how it's been imagined. This is really key for understanding Yiddish past, present, and future. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that biography actually provides a really interesting model for how to organize that discussion. As Eddie mentioned, I decided that the book should be a series of short thematic chapters following a biographical profile, as he mentioned, a name and date of place of birth onto religion, occupation, political affiliation, and ending with life expectancy. And I thought this would not only be an interesting way to address the material, but it would allow the book to speak to two different audiences. One is, for those who don't know much about Yiddish, this would serve as an introduction and a point of entry to further learning about the language. For those who do know about the language, such as my panelists today, it's less about sharing new information about the language and more a way of proposing new ways of thinking about Yiddish by employing a different way of presenting the language, and in doing so, posing new possibilities for thinking about how Yiddish has been conceptual, actualized, and how it can be conceptualized going forward. So, on one hand, I would not have written this book on my own initiative. It very much came from this invitation. On the other hand, I imagine that my approach isn't what the press envisioned. So this book emerged out of a very distinctive confluence of possibilities.
- [07:59]
Eddie Portnoy
Okay, that's. That should take us into our discussion. I think we can start with little responses. Why don't we start with Ayala, and then we'll move to Anita. You're muted, Ayala.
- [08:19]
Ayala Feder
How could I possibly do that after all this time? That's so humiliating. I'm sorry. Anyway, I'll start again. Thank you for including me. It's really an honor to be part of this conversation with you all to discuss and celebrate Jeffrey's wonderful new book, especially since I count him as a mentor and a friend. And in just a very few brief comments, I'd like to raise some issues that really resonated for me as I read through the book. So let me begin by saying that what I really appreciated about the book is its long art, its breadth, and the diversity of materials, which really allows Jeff to be in so many different intellectual conversations with such varied interlocutors. This is really something that Jefferson, who, everyone who knows him, this is true, is a real expert at, and it's unusual in academia. And I read the book as an anthropologist, of course, interested in dynamics among language, culture, and politics. There's a lot of ethnographic scholarship on historically multilingual non Jewish communities whose linguistic repertoires are also hierarchical and are anthropomorphized. And from this work, we know that attributes of people are semiotically linked to their languages. But what Jeff's book contributes to these kinds of conversations is that we see how the anthropomorphizing of Yiddish has changed over time and space through the relationships among a range of Jewish and non Jewish languages. And again, that's where his interdisciplinarity and the temporal perspective is so valuable. Jeff shows us that the dynamics of Jewish multilingualism have been complicated in part because of the actual blurring of boundaries so often among those languages as they are used in speech and writing. And I'm reminded of a Hasidic friend I was once chatting with who said to me that when she was growing up, she never knew if the word cher was English or Yiddish. So toward the end of this book, Jeff brings up the recent sociolinguistic concept of translanguaging as a way to understand Yiddish as it's used and to leverage a focus on linguistic boundaries as political rather than normative, which I thought was very pretty, very productive. One of my favorite parts of the book is that Jeff treats the scholars, and you mentioned this. Jeff treats the scholars who study Yiddish with the same gaze as his portrayal of Yiddish itself and its speakers. That is, the scholarship around Yiddish is analyzed as cultural material. And what this offers us is a really invaluable intellectual history of what eventually becomes Yiddish studies. I really appreciated that in terms of my own study of Yiddish among contemporary Hasidic communities in New York. The gendering of Yiddish, especially in relationship to other languages, either lashen koedish, so liturgical Hebrew, or English, for example, was fascinating. And again, Jeff's contribution here is to reveal throughout the book how gender might be a key point for organizing linguistic access and competencies, because certain Jewish communities are structured on gender difference. But what's so Interesting is how that gendering has changed over time. This is something I'm following these days in my own work as I sort of track the evolution of a new variety of what I'm calling actually thanks to Jeffrey, enlightened Hasidic Yiddish, which is a variety predominantly for, quote unquote, open minded Hasidic men, so that the feminizing of Yiddish that we read about in the 20th century in this book is actually reversed and Yiddish becomes a masculine marker. Similarly, I found Jeff's tracing of the Haskalah and Yiddish and Maskilim's relationship to Yiddish and language more generally really provocative for some of my own work with again, these enlightened or ofkeleter Hasidim, open minded today, especially around literacies and changing technologies and the circulation of texts. And I'll just conclude with two of the many intriguing ideas that I learned from this new book and a question which you can feel free to answer or not, but I found the chapter on Yiddish appearance especially great. The aesthetic of orthographies of how letters look in addition to how words are spelled, really opens up new questions to think about. And in addition, of course, to how language sounds. And at the end of that chapter, Jeff connects the appearance of language to other semiotic systems like dress or hats or wigs, but also to the Romanization or not, of certain letters and even that kosher style, as he calls it, of Romanized letters, which is something he first alerted me to in his book on post vernacularity, of course, Adventures in Yiddish Land. Another really interesting sort of tidbit from the book was to read that in the religion chapter that the word, the Yiddish word for religion, religion is a relatively new one, in contrast to more specific words denoting religious conviction or practice. And he lists many Din das chokh yer hashem'. Imina. What I really love is how Jeff says that there is no simple connection between Yiddish and Judaism and then questions whether religion is even a useful concept for understanding Yiddish speaking Jewry for much of its history. So for me, while I take exception to Jewish exceptionalism, I do think that the diasporic Jewish experience more generally makes us question how Jewishness and probably Jewish languages really challenge contemporary, often Protestant, ideas of what constitutes religion as a category, which for me is the real provocation that Jews and Judaism provoke for the social sciences more generally. And then my final question is, I'd really love to hear about the challenges and or not of amassing so much varied information and sources. And also, what surprised you about the most recent literature about Yiddish studies? Which you hint at toward the end.
- [14:04]
Eddie Portnoy
Thank you, Ayella. That was great. And I can just add, before we get to Anita, that this book is. One of the reasons that this book is so fabulous is the incredible breadth. Incidentally, that's my dog barking, not me. Sorry. The perils of working at home. So one of the things that I noticed with the broadness of this book and how you touch on so many different topics is I was concerned for your indexer. There are so many. So many things, so many topics. It's just absolutely phenomenal. And, you know, like when you said when you started for the general reader, it's an amazing introduction to Yiddish for them. All right, Anita, please take it away.
- [14:55]
Anita Norich
Well, you just said everything that I was going to say, so. No, no, no, I'll try to cut. I also want to talk about, or at least mention this extraordinary range at some point. I know that Jeffrey was worried that those of us who were in Yiddish studies quite fully would not find much that was new in this, which is absolutely not true. It's an incredible array of not just sources, but of arguments, of perspectives, and of media, which is, of course, one of Jeffrey's fortes. One of the running threads through this book and indeed through any study of anyone who studies Yiddish literature, culture, language. One of the running threads is the question of the status of Yiddish, which is always a little prickly to pose. That is, it suggests a kind of anxiety about the very use of the language, which some of us will resist and others will embrace. Which leads to a number of questions that Jeffrey addresses, I think rather profoundly. One of the questions that I have is throughout this is, was the use of Yiddish ever not about its relationship to other languages? That is, it's almost impossible to talk about Yiddish without saying Yiddish in Hebrew or, you know, Max Weinreich's Interlinguistic communities, multilingual. Was it ever not in relationship to other languages? And also, one of my problems, sort of historically has been about the use of Yiddish language as a choice. Right. That is, that indeed, Yiddish speakers, Yiddish writers, had multiple languages almost throughout their history at their disposal. My work is in literature, and I am not sure that using. And Jeffrey doesn't do this, but I guess I'm creating a polemic against those of you, I can't see who may have this somewhere in the back of your mind. So I apologize if it's not the case. I would resist the notion that Yiddish was a choice for writers in particular. Right. That is, that, you know, parrots could have written Polish or could have written Hebrew and chose to write Yiddish. That choice, to the extent that we use that concept, it's almost always a political concept. And I think that's rather an obvious thing to say. One of the potential problems with writing a biography is that we usually think of a biography as something that is written after the fact, that is, after the demise of the subject. Not always, but certainly if you want a full picture of a life or of a thing that you're writing a biography of, it is after the fact. And Jeffrey's very clear about avoiding some of the major pitfalls of Yiddish scholarship, which is either eulogizing it, it was great. Look what we've lost, or defending it. There are still hundreds of thousands of people who speak Yiddish, and there are new things coming out all the time. That is that kind of defensive tone, neither of which. And it's very difficult to avoid them both, but neither of which Jeffrey uses or descends to, I would say he focuses instead on the speakers of the language, which is, of course, tied to the biological, but lets us avoid a lot of these. A lot of these problems. One of the most compelling perspectives or one of the most compelling questions, I think that also runs as a thread throughout the book, is the question of stakes. Jeffrey asks at various points, what are the stakes in asking when exactly when and exactly where Yiddish was born? What are the stakes in calling it Jagon or Nishtluschenkoydish? Nobody actually calls it that or in naming it.
- [19:27]
Jeffrey Chandler
Right?
- [19:27]
Anita Norich
I mean, in a biography you have to have a name. What are the stakes in arguing about its relationship to Lushna Kaidish or to Hebrew more specifically? At a later point, this will recall for many of us, I think, I suspect for all of us, you know, the Chernowitz conference argument about whether Yiddish is a national language of the Jewish people, or Yiddish is the national language of the Jewish people. But Jeffrey lets us avoid that kind of question by asking again about the stakes and calling it national, that is, in associating it with some national ideal. I was struck by a number of things. Ayala mentioned her own work, which I think is fascinating in this context that Jeffrey also cites, which is the movement from Yiddish as mameloshen and family language and the mother tongue, the woman's language, about which I've argued in various places elsewhere as well, and the switch, so that it's now a sign of masculine learning that I think is fascinating. I think one of the other things that Jeffrey mentions is that Yiddish was taught Christian seminaries before it was taught in Jewish schools. I'm going to repeat that sentence. Yiddish was taught in Christian seminaries before it was taught in Jewish schools. Why it may seem obvious after the fact for proselytizing reasons. You know, if Christians wanted to go out and proselytize the Jews, they better do. It's like the Muskillen. They better do it in the language that the masses will understand. And finally, I think, or penultimately, I think one of the key discussions that emerges from this or that is explicit in this is the not quite debate or argument, but the distinction between Pralutsky's view of language and Weinreich's view of language that Jeffrey points out that is is standard Yiddish what is in popular usage. Is that the guide for determining what standard Yiddish Pralutsky or is it up to the authority of scholars? Weinreich. And I'm not sure that that, I don't think that that has ever been settled. Linguists, which I am not, still argue about this with other languages as well. Right. But it takes on a certain oomph, not a profound word, but a certain emphasis when we're talking about Yiddish. And finally, I think what this book is an enactment of is something else that Jeffrey quotes Max Weinreich's definition of Wissenschaft as in Yidische Wissenschaftre Institut Ivo. Right. Wissenschaft, he said, is Wissen Woschaft, that is knowledge that creates. And I really can't think of a better way to describe this book than exactly as Wissen Wushchaft, I'll stop. But if I can ask, I know whenever and it's never over. But my questions that can easily be ignored at this point for Jeffrey is what he saw as the disadvantage of anthropomorphizing Yiddish. That is where that was a block in something. And finally, I think people will be. This has been an ongoing argument since the post vernacular argument that Jeffrey put forward, which is at some point you say in this that sometimes Yiddish is used as an end in itself. And I guess I'd ask you to flesh that out a little bit in our discussion if you want to.
- [23:52]
Eddie Portnoy
Great. Anita, thank you so much. I just want to point out before I let Jeffrey start, if people have questions, please put them in the Q and A section, not the chat, put your questions in the questions and answers, the Shayla and Chuvas section. So please, Jeffrey, feel free to answer the questions.
- [24:13]
Jeffrey Chandler
Thank you. Well, I couldn't ask for two more thoughtful readers and I've scribbled down lots of notes from things that you've mentioned and Eddie also. And actually you sort of echoed something that the others raised, which is about dealing with breadth. And this was. When I decided to do this, I thought part of the challenge was how can you sketch out as fully as possible a language in its entirety of usage and its entirety of conceptualization, which is a huge order, especially when, you know, I did mention that the press basically said in terms of structure of the book, it was carte blanche. They did have one restriction, which was they said the book can be no longer than 80,000 words, including the references, which may sound like a lot of words, but I see my colleagues shaking their heads. It's actually. It's not a lot of territory to cover a huge topic.
- [25:18]
Anita Norich
So.
- [25:18]
Jeffrey Chandler
So this required being very, very selective and strategic, which was. Which at times is very frustrating. But it also got me to be really incisive and could have written a much longer book, but in a way, a book that's tighter sort of foregrounds what are key points. And so one of the key points, and this goes to something Anita raised about. She said, is there ever a time when people don't talk about Yiddish in relation to other languages? And my instinct is to say, I don't think so. Doesn't mean that necessarily a consciousness of use is often automatic among native speakers in environments that are fully just people speaking Yiddish. And it feels sort of automatic and natural. But when people start talking about the language, because it's a language that never stands alone. And that, I think is probably the most important thing to think about with everything else about the language. There are always these other languages that are present. And as I think Ayala mentioned, there's a hierarchy. They're not. They don't. They're not parallel and equal, but they're complementary. And this is a language you use at home. This is a language you use at work. This is a language you use in the synagogue. This is a language you use in school. This is a language you use when you're talking to other Jews. This is a language you talk to this non Jewish population, to that non Jewish population. This is the language that women are using, that men are using, that children are using. This is the language of state. These are languages of culture. And. And they all have a different value associated with them. Yiddish is almost never on top of that hierarchy, which is also a key thing to bear in mind, as I think both of you mentioned, this really complicated constellation of languages keeps shifting because the speakers keep moving or even if they're staying in the Same place, new opportunities or restrictions arise, which could be political, intellectual, educational, economic, social. And so where, you know, Yiddish is always being checked vis a vis these other languages, both in terms of how people think about it, but also this shapes the language as you know, it's a language formed out of contact between two different speech communities, and that, shaping by contact, continues to be what informs the language. So that immigrant Jews coming to the United states in the 1910s would encounter immigrant Jews who are Yiddish speakers who had been there since the 1880s. And they can't understand what these people are saying in Yiddish because the Yiddish has been shaped by the contact with English. And there are many other examples of this kind of thing. That's part of what makes it so interesting. And as Anita mentioned, this is ultimately, it's about language and its relationship to people and their culture. And as Ayala knows well, whenever people talk about language, they're invariably talking about something else. There's always something, you know, extra linguistic. In other words, things are happening around the language. And that's. I mean, that's what has kept me so engrossed in the study of Yiddish, and it's what I tried to find a way to embrace in its fullness, in a limited number of words in this book.
- [29:20]
Eddie Portnoy
Was Jeffrey able to respond to the questions that you asked initially?
- [29:24]
Jeffrey Chandler
Probably not all of them.
- [29:26]
Eddie Portnoy
Do you want to do? Is it something you wanted him to get to?
- [29:30]
Anita Norich
Good. Yeah.
- [29:31]
Eddie Portnoy
All right.
- [29:32]
Jeffrey Chandler
So,
- [29:34]
Eddie Portnoy
you know, I'll just throw one in. Obviously, to me, one of the interesting things about this was that this was conceived, as you said, as a biography and structured according to these different life cycle events or little biographical topics. I'm wondering, first, did you look at the other books in the series that, you know, that are, you know, biographies of languages, and how similar or different is yours from theirs, from the other ones? And I'd like you to comment on. Also on the personality chapter, which was particularly appealing to me.
- [30:18]
Jeffrey Chandler
Yeah. Okay. Well, I would say in the books on Dutch and on German, which are the ones I looked at, a key difference is that they're very geographically rooted in a way that's different from Yiddish, even though these are languages that travel. And especially in the case of Dutch, there's a chapter on Afrikaans, there's a chapter on Yiddish because of Yiddish speakers in the Netherlands, and how there's Yiddish terminology that becomes part of slang, certainly in Amsterdam. And. And. But they're much more stories of languages that eventually become national languages in a conventional sense of. Tied to a polity, tied to A geographical region that doesn't happen with Yiddish. There are imagined and projected and hoped for possibilities of defining Jewish nationality in relation to language, but by and large, not anything like what happens with languages like Dutch or German. And of course, in the case of German in particular, what's so interesting is how it becomes a defining force of. Of a German nationality. When you know before you have Germany as a state and you've got all these different polities and Holy Roman Empire and there's not a shared religion. Half the people are Catholic, half the people are Protestant. They fight over this in wars that go on forever. Language becomes a defining force of creating a sense of shared Germanness. This then winds up having really powerful and eventually fatal implications for Yiddish, as Yiddish marks Jews as. Cannot be assimilated into German people because of language and because of the language as an index of their peoplehood.
- [32:42]
Anita Norich
And
- [32:44]
Jeffrey Chandler
this eventually feeds into modern racialized notions of antisemitism that lead to a genocide. But it has its origins, to a large extent in language as the marker of this difference, which you can see dating back to the late Middle Ages. And relates, of course, to, as Anita brought up, the fact that the first textbooks written and the first university courses offered to teach Yiddish are to teach Christian Germans Yiddish for the purposes of proselytizing and for other purposes as well. So there are handbooks in German about doing business with Jews. You need to understand their language so that they, in effect, can't talk behind your back in front of you. And so there is this ongoing scrutiny of language as a way of scrutinizing and eventually trying to regulate a population that is understood as other. And that's something that. Is a distinctive feature of the language in its history and which eventually redounds to speakers of Yiddish themselves who find that the language marks them in a way they find, in some cases, unbearable. And they not only stop speaking Yiddish, they look for ways to repudiate. And this is, you know, another striking part of it. So, Eddie, you asked about personality, and I should say, actually, I hadn't thought about having a chapter on personality, but my partner said, like, you know, that's. I think that's missing. And of course, he was right. What it sort of pulled together from, you know, out from maybe what might have turned up in other chapters was the way that people ascribe to the language, irrespective of what you're saying in it, that it has a certain value, especially an emotional value of some kind. This happens as people either look at the language from a distance or as they move away from it in their own use, that the language, seen as a distance, carries these markers. And what's interesting is that they're all over the place. So for some people, it's a very sentimental language. For some people, it's a very raucous language. For some people, it's very unsophisticated. For some people, it's very nuanced.
- [35:23]
Anita Norich
And
- [35:25]
Jeffrey Chandler
that idea becomes increasingly part of the way people talk about the language, especially when they talk about it in other languages. And they will add value to words in the language that don't really exist in the language in its full use. My favorite example, which I encountered once visiting a friend for a family celebration, I think it was like a golden anniversary or something. And one of the people making a toast said, you know, this isn't just a family, it's a mishpocha. And everybody in the room is sighing. They think, this is so lovely. And I'm thinking, you know, what the heck? Because mishpocha is just. It just means family. Doesn't necessarily mean a good family, a nice family, a Jewish family. It's just a word for family. But as the word travels out of the full language, values get attached to it that aren't part of it in the full use. This was something I looked at in the word shtetl, which I actually wound up writing a whole book about, is that shtetl just means town. Any town, anywhere, anytime, whoever's living there doesn't matter. It becomes, especially as it moves into English and French and German and Russian, all these other languages, a town in Eastern Europe before World War II, largely or exclusively populated by Jews. And that is, on the one hand, a narrowing of its meaning, but then it winds up expanding its values of what people think shtetl represents. That goes all over the place, too. It's either provincial, impoverished, oppressed, or it is this golden moment of Jewish piety and authenticity and integrity and fullness of Jewish life, which are, of course, imagined constructs of what life was like for Jews and their neighbors in these provincial towns.
- [37:35]
Eddie Portnoy
One other thing in connection to the breadth of this book. Oh, yeah, go ahead, Anita, go ahead.
- [37:41]
Anita Norich
No, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. That's fine. I can go back to it.
- [37:45]
Eddie Portnoy
Go ahead, Go ahead.
- [37:46]
Anita Norich
Okay, I'll make it quick. Everything that you've been saying, Jeffrey, made me think of the arguments about Yiddish dialects, right? Regional differences and the attempt, the Yivo attempt, to standardize Yiddish, both spelling and grammar and vocabulary. And just on a personal note, I have to say, Yiddish was my first language, but when I started to do it professionally, that is, when I started to study Yiddish literature, one of the. Or when I got my first job in Yiddish, actually my only job in Yiddish. But never mind. One of the questions that I was asked was, okay, can you speak like, a normal Yiddish, or are you going to speak that lud Yiddish all the time? Can you teach a normal Yiddish? And I had never come across that concept before, but it was, again, this kind of argument between use and scholar. Right. And I think it's worth pointing to those kinds of conflicts that have obviously not been resolved or settled yet.
- [39:06]
Jeffrey Chandler
That's such a good point. And I think, you know, this is another thing that distinguishes Yiddish from state languages. Like, you know, Dutch and German become state languages. And there are. There's a state apparatus that at a certain level at least, creates a standard language through public education, public broadcasting, things like that. That never happens in Yiddish. And also that I think it's fair to say this is, by and large, the speakers of Yiddish resist the notion of standardization and find it, I think, at best, constraining. I think it's probably the politest way to put it, if not offensive of, you know, who are you to tell me what I should or shouldn't say or how I should or shouldn't spell? Which gets back to the issue about orthography. And if anything, there is a kind of pleasure taken in the language resisting standardization, which does make it challenging for teachers of the language who, you know, are expected, as Anita was, to teach a standard language. And that probably what one has to do if you're going to teach a language in a classroom which is different than vernacular use of a language that you learn through listening and imitating and experimenting with it in home or other environment. But then you encounter, once you learned, if you start with the standard language, you discovered that that only takes you so far. And I see Ayla not nodding that she had to go out and learn Hasidic Yiddish after she learned standard Yiddish.
- [40:57]
Ayala Feder
Yes, I had to actually hire a young woman to tutor me because I didn't understand anybody. But I was just going to add on to what Anita. Anita said. I think that's. And what you're saying, too, so interesting. In some of my work recently with certain enlightened Hasidic men, there's a kind of strain of linguistic purism and a desire for standardization that really shocked me. You know, they would say to me in interviews, like, well, Hasidic Yiddish, it's a Mishmash. There's no spelling. There's no standard. There's not enough words. You can't express yourself. And I'm thinking, wait, I thought Hasidim don't care about standardization. But it depends on where you stand in terms of a written literature, in terms of where you stand in trying to align your own language with other national languages who do have standards. It might align with whiteness, I'm not sure, but I wonder about that. Like standard English in particular.
- [41:51]
Anita Norich
It's also worth. I mean, I keep quoting Max Weinreich a little too much, but we remember his definition of a language, right? A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. So the political power that comes, the national power that comes.
- [42:08]
Jeffrey Chandler
You can't quote Max Weinreich too much.
- [42:10]
Anita Norich
I think not. I think that's right.
- [42:12]
Jeffrey Chandler
You know, if there's a hero in, you know, for me, it is Max Weinreich, even though there are times where I find myself daring to disagree with him. But it's, you know, there was so much intelligence and really thinking ahead of the game about not just the language, but the language and its place in culture and in people's lives and how Jewish life works, especially in the context of diaspora, and is appreciating it as a phenomenon in its own right, where he is really intellectual pioneer and I think a continuing inspiration. So keep on citing Maxwell. Try.
- [43:02]
Eddie Portnoy
I just wanted to ask, you know, we've all spoke with the breadth of the themes and topics in the book, and you mentioned that you were limited to, I think you said, 80,000 words, which, you know, for a monograph is not necessarily that much, especially including the notes, which are voluminous. So I'm wondering if there's anything you left out that you wanted to keep in or you were sort of more readily, easily ejected.
- [43:33]
Jeffrey Chandler
You know, there were lots of fuller examples of things where I sort of offered one instead of 10 because I love all 10 of them. One of the things that, for example, I got just fascinated with, and maybe I should write more about it, are dictionaries. And that the wide range of dictionaries in which Yiddish appears, most of which are Yiddish glossed with another language or more than one other language. And there are actually relatively few dictionaries that are Yiddish definitional dictionaries where the definition is in Yiddish rather than a glossing dictionary, either into or out of out of Yiddish. That in and of itself is really interesting phenomenon, tells us something about, again, the language not standing on its own. And what I decided to focus on there. And it has to do with this issue of that Anita raised of being a Yiddish professional is that there's this moment in. And it's quite striking in 1860s, 1870s, in the Russian Empire, mostly a little bit in Romania, where Yiddish professionalism begins. And you get the first Yiddish editor of a modern periodical with Tetherboim, and you get the first modern Yiddish novel is Abramovich's Desklingamentula, and you get the first Yiddish theater and first playwright with Goldfaden, and you get with Shiomot Khalifshitz, the first modern dictionaries. And it all happens at the same moment. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing to say about dictionaries was that they represent a moment of professionalization of the language in a way that just didn't exist before, and that was key to its future, to the present, and a language that's increasingly become professionalized.
- [45:39]
Eddie Portnoy
Great, thank you. If we don't have any more from Anita and Ayala, I can move to some questions from the audience. There are a number of people who are asking about the origins of Yiddish, sort of the two backends, the origins of Yiddish, and if there's a resurgence of Yiddish today and what Yiddish is like today. So maybe you could speak to that just a bit.
- [46:12]
Jeffrey Chandler
Okay. So with the origins of Yiddish, there are multiple theories of the origins of Yiddish. And I have to confess, I don't have a dog in this hunt, as we say in Yiddish. Partly it's my predilection. I'm more interested in where things go than where they come from. And partly because when I look at theories of origins, and not just of Yiddish, but of anything, the further back you go in time, the less evidence you have and the more you have to speculate. And there is often very informed, thoughtful speculation, but that's what it is. And the origins, to me, what was interesting to figure out, how was he going to write about this? Because most books, they either say, this is my theory of how the Yiddish, Yiddish where and when it begins, or they say, well, there's four or five different models. Take your pick. And neither one of those felt satisfying to me. It felt to me it was more important to address the fact that no one asks this question of where and when does Yiddish come from until the 19th century? And there's a reason for that. That's when scholars in Western Europe begin to ask about the origins of languages, different languages, but also the origins of language itself as an intellectual question. And that shapes how those Questions got asked, and in the case of Yiddish, how people assumed they were reading the evidence, such as it is, of where and when Yiddish might have begun are very ideologically informed. And so we see big differences between what are usually called German centered analyses where Yiddish is assumed to be something that deviated from German versus the model that Yiddish is a language that begins from the moment of contact between Jews encountering speakers of German dialects in the Middle Ages. They start creating a new language on the spot in a way that Jews in Diaspora had been doing for centuries before. And both of those have powerful implications, not just for the language, but for how the speakers and their culture are understood. So that to me, the question is best addressed by backing up and saying, well, what are the stakes of this question of saying where and when does Yiddish begin? Because there are always states in terms of what's happening with Yiddish today. Or I have to say, when I would give talks about Yiddish and people say, what's the future of Yiddish? And I dreaded this question because I'm not a prophet. But at a certain point I realized that my answer, this is how I end the book, is you should expect the unexpected. And that's because in the, you know, I started studying in my work in Yiddish studies in the early 80s, and there are things that have happened in subsequent years that if you went back to me and to my colleagues and my teachers in the early 1980s and said, you're going to see the following, none of us would have believed it. And they are for the most part exciting, surprising developments, some of them coming out of the blue. I mean, one that in the early 1980s, who knew that the Soviet Union was going to collapse and that communist rule over Eastern Europe was going to end, and that you could then have contact with Jews in Eastern Europe and archival resources in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union that nobody saw, and that these two communities would be able to enrich one another in their knowledge about the language and its law and its literature and create new works. The involvement of people who aren't Jews in Yiddish, which has been there for a long time, including, you know, those Professors back in 18th century, 17th century century Germany, has expanded in really interesting ways. So that Yiddish studies has an important presence in the academy in a number of European countries. Most of the scholars aren't Jews, and they have not only an excellent command of the language, but they bring a distinctive European set of skills and sensibilities to the work. So especially, I mean, the most obvious example, but not the only one, is study of early Yiddish, where it really helps if, you know, Middle High German. And of course, there's a lot more people who have learned Middle High German in Germany than there are elsewhere. And so you get really rich scholarship going on there. And there are other examples that are
- [51:35]
Anita Norich
really
- [51:38]
Jeffrey Chandler
inspiring developments that make me look forward to what's going to come next.
- [51:46]
Eddie Portnoy
Great. Thank you. There are also a couple of questions about the characteristics of Yiddish. One person asks, is there a distinctly Yiddish way of thinking and how that affects the language and the people who speak it? And someone else asks regarding the characteristic of Yiddish, not just sort of the, you know, the words and diction, but tendencies towards orality, irony, and metadiscourse that commonly appear among children and grandchildren of Yiddish speakers. So this person asks if there are academic works that focus on this issue as well.
- [52:33]
Jeffrey Chandler
I mean, it's interesting. Nothing is coming to mind and maybe Ayala or need to know of people studying at that level. This engagement with the language of people who are one or more generations removed from speakers, but who have some attachment to it other than work that actually Uriel Weinreich was doing in the 1950s. And it's interesting to think about him as somebody who grows up as not just a native speaker of Yiddish, but of standard Yiddish and comes to the United States as a young man,
- [53:18]
Anita Norich
just
- [53:18]
Jeffrey Chandler
as World War II is starting and serves in the army, comes back and starting to look at the, you know, the American scene. And he's struck by this very, you know, partial engagement with the language, of having this added value that I talked about earlier, like the example of mishpacha. Right. But I would say, is there a Yiddish way of thinking? I have to say, you know, it goes to this idea of personality. Does Yiddish have a personality? Is it ironic? Is it, you know, is it playful? Is it obstreperous? Is it carnivalesque? I mean, you name it, I would say none of the above or all of the above. And, you know, I've often heard people say, you know, it's such a colorful language. And I always think, well, you know, English isn't too shabby. It's actually a pretty colorful language, too. But you don't think of it that way because you're immersed in it. And I can assure you, I have heard people be just dry as dust speaking Yiddish. And you can be. You can be as expressive or as inarticulate in Yiddish as you can in any other language. What is noteworthy is that there is some idea out there that because. And it's because of the remove from contact with it as a vernacular language that you're encountering all the time, that it has these special qualities. And that's something not to take at face value, but to note as a phenomenon of interest in its own right.
- [54:56]
Anita Norich
This is also, if I can add, of course, the problem or the question about translating from Yiddish. I don't know. We've all heard this umpteen times. You just can't say that in English or some version of Sotnik Yiddish. And it doesn't have the flavor of Yiddish. But that's the problem with every language. You know, if you're trying to translate hockmanish, kinchinik as don't knock on my tea kettle, yes, you've missed it completely. But the idea that you can't convey what that suggests, you know, buzz off, leave me alone, don't bother me, get lost. Something seems to me another way of kind of mystifying Yiddish as a language.
- [55:40]
Ayala Feder
Can I just add, too, I think it's directly related to what you're talking about, of having Yiddish as a vernacular or not. I remember another Hasidic woman saying to me, you know, I was saying, well, I've heard that Yiddish is a kind of more refined, a more idle language, maybe slightly higher, more holy language from other Hasidim. And she said, well, that might be true here in Borough park, you know, where we don't even speak it that much, us ladies, but in Williamsburg, my sister in laws can say plenty of nasty things in Yiddish when they were. So it's a question of who's speaking and for what reasons and with what
- [56:14]
Anita Norich
history, with what kind of.
- [56:17]
Eddie Portnoy
But in. In connection to that, there are a couple of people in the audience that have asked about the relationship between certain societal groups and Yiddish, ranging from contemporary Hasidim to LGBT groups who have taken to Yiddish. So, you know, whoever likes to speak on that, please, please do.
- [56:41]
Jeffrey Chandler
Well, maybe Ayelek should talk about the Hasidim and I can talk about the lgbt.
- [56:47]
Ayala Feder
Yeah, you start first.
- [56:49]
Jeffrey Chandler
All right, start. Okay. So there's a phenomenon that sort of eventually got named Queer Yiddishkeit, which starts to emerge around the 1980s. And it's a handful of people, writers, performing performance artists, filmmaker or two, who identify as gay or lesbian, bisexual or transgender or queer, and who see Yiddish as a vehicle for expression where they can address either an affinity that they perceive between queerness and Yiddish or that they find the juxtaposition of them very enriching. And it's a fascinating phenomenon because it comes. It is just wheeled into existence by the individuals who want it. Because there is no basis either in the Yiddish world, secular or religious, or in the LGBT world, which often has been indifferent, if not sometimes hostile, towards religious or ethnic identities as being incompatible or even, you know, destructive forces in queer life.
- [58:08]
Anita Norich
And
- [58:11]
Jeffrey Chandler
this has become a really interesting development that. In which, basically, I think that sort of what is at the core of it is seeing Yiddish as an alternative culture, which you could only really claim, I think, in the post World War II period, where it has gone from being the language spoken by most Jews around the world to being more of a niche language, and that that's parallel to an alternative sexuality, and that bringing the two together is in some way culturally enriching. And it's. That's another thing, that early 1980s. I don't think anybody saw that one coming, but it's quite a remarkable development.
- [58:57]
Ayala Feder
Oh, and I'll just say, I mean, that's a very big question. You know, different Hasidic groups have different relationships to Yiddish. It's generally gendered, meaning usually men speak more Yiddish than women, but that's not always true. Satmar women speak a lot of Yiddish also. And I think one of the interesting things to me is that actually the digital age, so, you know, people writing in Yiddish online, I think, has actually created new forms of expressivity in Hasidic Yiddish, unexpectedly, and perhaps in a way that sort of counteracts what some rabbinic authorities might want to do with some of their efforts to filter smartphones and the Internet in general. But there's a growing, I think, movement of kind of using Hasidic Yiddish for personal expression and poetry and literature in the news, for entertainment, for men mostly.
- [59:55]
Anita Norich
Again, can I just say that no Satma men or women will speak Yiddish to me no matter how I dress or how sneastic I may look. They say nothing helps.
- [60:11]
Jeffrey Chandler
But I think that's a key development of what's different about Yiddish post World War II among Hasidim versus pre World War II. Certainly in Poland. I mean, not so much in Hungary, but in Poland, it was a language you had in common with Bundes, with Communists, with, you know, Jews of the Mosaic persuasion who were going to the equivalent of Reform synagogue, even still spoke some Yiddish. It was a language you had in common. After World War II, it has become, certainly in the United States and I think, elsewhere as well, it's a gatekeeper language between separating not just Jews from non Jews, but our kind of Jews from other Jews. And especially if someone shows up and they know no matter how carefully you try to, you know, women can obviously do this better than men, you know, fit into the community. They will in many cases resist speaking Yiddish with you because as a sign of this cultural boundary, that's not always the case, but it often is. And it's a remarkable phenomenon to watch in action because they understand what you're saying, but they will answer you in English.
- [61:34]
Eddie Portnoy
Great. Really fascinating. Unfortunately, we're out of time. There were dozens and dozens of questions that we couldn't get to. Although what I can say to those people whose questions were answered, if you buy the book, you will more than likely have an answer, so I highly suggest you do so. So I'd like to take the opportunity to thank Professors Chandler, Norich and Feder for joining us today. This was really terrific panel discussion and, you know, buy the book and expect the unexpected with Yiddish. Thanks so much to everybody.
- [62:18]
Jeffrey Chandler
Thank you, Eddie. Thank you, Ayla and Anita.
- [62:21]
Anita Norich
Pleasure. Really thanks for the book.
- [62:23]
Ayala Feder
Yeah.