Leyenzal: Interview with Isaac Bleaman

In 2013, Isaac Bleaman launched Leyenzal (Reading Room), a website that commissions original biweekly Yiddish-language video lectures about Yiddish literature, which can be downloaded for free along with the texts being discussed.

Bleaman is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at New York University, with interests in sociolinguistic variation, language contact, and language shift. He earned an MSt in Yiddish Studies at Oxford, and a BA in Linguistics and Comparative Literature at Stanford. Earlier this year, he was profiled in “36 Under 36: Three Dozen Millenials And Gen-Xers Reinventing The Jewish Community” in The Jewish Week.

He is interviewed here by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman.

RN: What hole or gap is Leyenzal hoping to fill in the Yiddish world?

IB: How the idea came about was that I was in my senior year at Stanford, as an undergrad, and I was applying to grad school to get a Master's in Yiddish. It occurred to me when I was looking into the different programs that were out there that, first of all, if you have the luxury of being my age and being able to go to grad school, you still are pretty limited in terms of your options. If you go to School X you have to work with one particular professor; School Y has one other person.  So I envisioned a website, Leyenzal, where it would be possible to hear a variety of scholars all in one place from the comfort of your own home, rather than having to travel out to international Yiddish programs and festivals to hear these people.

I guess I envisioned Leyenzal as being sort of a TED Talks or iTunes U. The way I describe it on the website it that iTunes U meets Di yidishe folksbibliotek. Just a way to get Yiddish literature out there and Yiddish literary scholars out there. There aren't that many of them. But what they lack in numbers they make up for in geographic spread. So this is trying to bring them all together into one place where students can hear all these people in one sitting if they want to.

RN: So the lectures you have there up now — they're not just copies of things that you got links to? They're original lectures created for Leyenzal?



IB: For the most part, they're newly commissioned lectures. I recently got in touch with the L.A. Yiddish Culture Club and they have kind of a private archive of programs they've recorded, some of which they're putting on YouTube but most of which have been digitized but are just sitting on hard drives. And so they've been sending me some of those, and I just put one up yesterday that the poet Moshe Shklar gave in L.A. He died just recently so I figured it would be a good time to make that available. But for the most part, what we have up on the website are new lectures by people who are currently on the scene.

I see Leyenzal being an initial step for people who maybe haven't read the classic Yiddish literary works before, and so, in addition to having these lectures that are about 20 minutes apiece, I also have links to lectures that I found elsewhere. So: lectures from the Yiddish Book Center archive, of programs that were held at the Montreal Jewish public library — things that might not occur to people to look for. And we can make them available at one centralized place.

RN: Because things are scattered.

IB: Things are scattered and aren't very well publicized. So this just makes it all available and people know that they can turn to Leyenzal to hear Yiddish being spoken and they'll be able, ideally, to find everything.

RN: And this was your initiative?

IB: Yes. I got feedback from different people at Stanford, mostly Zachary Baker in the library there. And he was supportive and he gave me some ideas about who to initially approach. And over time, people have been voluntarily giving me ideas about how to make it better and how to expand it.

Recently, we've gotten into the webinar format. We've done one so far. We had Sheva Zucker lead a seminar about Bontshe Shvayg, by Peretz. And so I emailed out to my list and asked who wanted to participate in the seminar and I filled all the seats. People from all over the world agreed to meet at a specific time on Google Hangouts and we had kind of a lively, graduate student discussion of his text, a close reading. And it was really only possible because of the Internet.

RN: Yes, in a strange way, the Internet has given new life to Yiddish in a way that print publications can't. There is a relatively small group of people in the world who are interested in Yiddish. The Internet can bring them together in a way that wasn't possible before.

IB: It was always very important to me from the beginning to make sure that all of the materials that were associated with Leyenzal were in Yiddish. It seems strange, but this was partly for practical reasons. At the seminar, we had a woman from Buenos Aires; we had a woman from Paris; and I think if we had the seminar in English, we might have been able to get more people—like Americans who are interested in Yiddish literature—but ultimately, Yiddish was the lingua franca of this discussion. 

It's one thing to learn about Yiddish literature in a different language; it's another thing to learn it in the original. So that's part of the holistic experience of Yiddish literature. It's doing it all in Yiddish.

RN: Did you have a model for doing this? Is there anything like this out there in another culture or language?

IB: Well, Leyenzal is sort of like an online book club, so it takes that kind of format. I also had in mind when I started it the online Daf Yomi. There's an international cycle of reading the entire Talmud. It takes seven years.  This is different because it's a secular enterprise and it's Yiddish literature. And it's not daily, but biweekly. So that was sort of the model. You know, an internal Jewish model but it hadn't really been applied, say, to Yiddish literary studies.

RN: You can't do it "yomi" (daily) just yet! So what kind of response has the website had?

IB: Well, I have over a hundred people who subscribe to my email list. So they're getting announcements about the lectures every two weeks. There are people "liking" and sharing the content on Facebook. And I know at least from Google Analytics who's visiting the site and it seems to be pretty international. People are coming from all over the world to see it. The numbers are modest but probably what you would expect for a website where every page is in Yiddish except for a couple of pages about us. The whole interface is in Yiddish. The instructions on how to log in are in Yiddish.

People who wouldn't be able to hear Yitskhok Niborski or Anna Gonshor give a talk in Yiddish are now able to do that. And for people who live where there isn't a leyenkrayz [Yiddish reading club], where they could actually meet with other Yiddish-speakers and read Yiddish literature together, this is a resource.

RN: Do you have any specific future plans for branching out from here or developing the website further in a different way?

IB: I'd like to do more seminars, I would say, and fewer people just talking to a camera with you just listening. I'm looking into building more forum interfaces. There is the option to do that now—there is a comment field, like in Yedies. But I'm looking into creating a forum where people can post specific questions and you can see the threads. You know, if you have a question that's already been asked, you can see the answers and that kind of thing. It would make it more interactive. That's one goal.

RN: So how did you personally come to Yiddish?

IB: I came to Yiddish in two ways. The first way was that there was a Yiddish class offered when I was growing up in L.A. at Hebrew school, a Sunday program. And they had a class once a week on Sundays that I took a few times. And that kind of inspired me to study it further and I did the Vilnius Yiddish Institute summer program when I was still in high school and then I continued to study Yiddish in Amherst and Jerusalem, and different places.

Another factor is that when I was growing up, I listened to a lot of klezmer music. And I was always interested in the language and I was always curious about what the songs meant that I was listening to. So, Yiddish wasn't spoken to me as a child but it was always on the periphery.

Interview edited for length and clarity.