Who’s Shmuel? Reflections on Jenna Ingalls, “Reflections from a Non-Jewish Instructor of Yiddish”

When I studied in the YIVO summer language program a few years ago, I had under my belt a handful of Yiddish classes from my first two years of graduate school coursework and several supportive conversations with my advisor, but little direct contact with the world of Yiddish enthusiasts and scholars. Carefully writing “Sem,” the name I’d be using for six weeks, in Hebrew letters on my program-supplied name tag the first day, I felt a little bit like I was getting my back up off the wall to really dance. I had come to Yiddish not through a family connection but via a meandering path of interests: first in Russian literature, then in religious cultures of the Russian Empire, then in one very engaging book about Sh. An-sky, then finally starting graduate coursework with the alef-beys of Yiddish language and literature. Up until that summer I had been relatively comfortable as the dutiful student, methodically wrapping my head around this new world in text, but what was new for me at YIVO was not only the challenge of language study. That summer, I began to present myself as someone invested in and even knowledgeable about some aspects of Jewish culture, despite not being Jewish. I signaled, by my very presence in the program, “Yes, I’m serious about this Yiddish thing.” 

Admittedly, this feeling was not too different from my first days studying abroad in Russia several years ago. I am a classic nervous speaker when it comes to learning languages. But the first-day YIVO experience did contain significant differences. Going around the room during our first class, several students introduced themselves with the name they’d like to use during the program. These were names that carried meaning in their Jewish families and, in an exception to daily life outside the home, they knew that at YIVO the consonants would be familiar enough to count on a correct pronunciation. Someone reassumed “Chana,” someone else preferred “Moyshe.” 

“Sholem-aleykhem, ikh heys Sem,” I introduced myself. “Ikh bin an eybershul student…”

“Vilstu nisht ‘Shmuel’?” the instructor encouragingly offered. 

“Ah, neyn. Nor ‘Sem,’” I responded. 

This was a small moment, but I have come to recount it again and again whenever I talk about the questions that Jenna Ingalls raises in her 2015 In geveb pedagogy piece, “Reflections from a Non-Jewish Instructor of Yiddish.” Ingalls writes very thoughtfully about the experience of unintentionally passing in Yiddish Studies. When colleagues and students are “sharing their (re-)connection to their Jewish heritage” with her, it is as though she has played a trick on their identificatory sensibilities without having done anything more suggestive than knowing Yiddish. In these moments, she acknowledges, “it seems churlish to say, ‘By the way, I’m not Jewish,’” as though one wouldn’t want someone to get the wrong idea. 

I read Ingalls’s piece sometime around that summer, which means I would have recently learned about In geveb itself (I can also date this discovery to sitting on a Metro-North train and reading, to my delight and astonishment, facing translations of several Osher Shvartsman poems by someone I was currently rushing toward Manhattan to learn from). I don’t need to tell you all why In geveb is good or important, but I’ll underscore that having that kind of breadth and access to Yiddish Studies and culture in so many forms––scholarly articles, pedagogical essays, translations, images––catalyzed my fascination and curiosity at a stage in graduate school when, to be honest, I wasn’t exactly clear on where you actually find academic journal articles. Like an early Google user clicking the “I’m Feeling Lucky” function with relish, I would just open my computer and read something on In geveb and consequently know at least one more thing about Yiddish. 

Amidst everything else that came in when the In geveb floodgates opened for me, Ingalls’s piece struck me. “There’s someone else!” I have had many instances of the same interaction she describes: the realization that a new person is trusting you and attempting to further your nascent connection along the lines of a cultural identification. The longer I let the person keep thinking this, the more it starts to shade into a lie by omission and, at the same time, interrupting them to explain feels a bit like slapping a jump rope out of someone’s hand as they extend it toward you to swing together and chat. Ingalls astutely notes that this scene has something to do with the way in which Yiddish linguistically assumes all of its speakers to be part of the in-group. She characterizes her presence as, for better or worse, a “rupture” in this membrane, a rupture with “the power to open Yiddish language and culture to the outside.” As I understand it, Ingalls concludes that this is basically good, opening up the language to new students, new speakers, new perspectives. 

Now, with a few more years’ worth of talking to people about Yiddish, I’m not sure that the moral of the story lies for me in opening Yiddish up. What would it really look like for me to cross the membrane and be “inside” Yiddish? Would I ask different questions than I do now? Yiddish doesn’t need me to open it up, but there’s one thing that’s very interesting about Yiddish today: It exists in places and programs where someone like me can come across the language, converse in the language and about the language, and love the language despite having no family connection. In fact, studying Yiddish has been similar to my experience with Russian, another language with which I have zero familial connection: some people are nice, some people are difficult; it just takes time, genuine curiosity, good teachers, and respect. I tend to agree with something an advisor once told me: the ultimate stakes lie in keeping language-based education and scholarship from intuitively self-sorting into snug, one-to-one identity and specialization pairings: Jewish scholars solely responsible for and assumed to study Jewish languages, Russian scholars spiritually tied to Russian literature, and American goyim like me claiming to understand everything in principle. 

I don’t think Yiddish needs anything from me, but the language also doesn’t need me to pretend to be someone I’m not in order to get “inside.” As Psoy Korolenko urges in his oral history interview, you can’t go wrong by “telling the true story about you and Yiddish… Share the experience of being in love with Yiddish.” There’s simply no need to seize a language as an opportunity to pretend to be another person entirely. I don’t even know who Shmuel is, but I feel certain that I’m Sem, who organizes the Stanford Leyenkrayz. So it’s actually quite easy to walk this line and live this truth: when someone asks you if you meant to go by Shmuel, it should be pretty effortless to smile and respond with Sem if you’ve been acting like Sem up to that point. 

Ingalls opens her reflections with an anecdote about being kindheartedly outed when introduced at a festive department event as the “first Gentile instructor of Yiddish at UC Berkeley.” I’ll close by reflecting that in being fortunate enough to join the ongoing textual record of Yiddish Studies that is In geveb by celebrating the journal’s tenth anniversary, this blog post might serve as a standing announcement of my best unintentionally kept secret. So thanks to In geveb for being a forum for Yiddish unlike any other, and here’s to ten more years!