Roni Masel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, and holds the Norma and Sam Dabby Professor of Jewish Studies. Professor Masel’s main research interests include Hebrew literature, Yiddish literature, Jewish history, queer theory, and postcolonial theory. Masel is currently completing a book for which the working title is, Bad Readers: Misreading, Mistranslation, and Other Textual Malpractices in Hebrew and Yiddish.Dr. Masel received a PhD from New York University, and a B.A. from Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
To start, can you introduce yourself? How did you originally decide to pursue academia?
My name is Roni Masel; Hebrew and Yiddish are my primary languages in the Department of Comparative Literature. I am also affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies. I very much see my work in both fields, Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies.
How did I get to do this? It wasn’t really a decision – it just sort of happened. I started university when I was 21, and I was very depressed. I knew that I wanted to study, but I couldn’t afford it. I ran into an old high school teacher of mine who told me that if I studied Yiddish, I would be able to get a scholarship. So I did. I guess you don’t hear very often about people going into the humanities for the money, but that’s sort of what happened. But of course I’m partly joking: I’ve always been drawn to the humanities. My dream was to be a professional soccer player, but I wasn’t very good at it so that wasn’t an option. I grew up in a religious community, and I loved the humanities part of that education: religious studies, literature, history, language, philology. I wanted to be a rabbi, but that was also not among the options where I grew up for someone born to the “wrong” gender. So I decided to become a secular version of a rabbi [laughs]. But again, it wasn’t really a decision. I knew that I liked it, but when I started studying at the university, I guess I realized I had a knack for it and that it gave me ever-expanding forms of pleasure. I wanted to continue, and eventually got here. But pleasure remains a driving force in all of this - both in teaching and writing.
You’ve mentioned the languages you work with, but can you speak more about your research interests, and some of the recent projects you have been working on?
I work in Hebrew and Yiddish, and I’ve been doing all sorts of different things with it. I’m now completing a book project that thinks mostly about reading and reading culture. It’s titled Bad Readers, and it thinks through a moment in the 19th century in Eastern and Central Europe where there was this emerging idea that Jews have a problem with texts – that they don’t know how to read properly, or write properly, or engage properly with the written word. This intensified, especially toward the end of the century, toward the 20th century, when Jewish intellectuals developed this idea that if Jews only finally had a proper literature of their own – in Hebrew or Yiddish – that would somehow solve all of their problems, on all levels – political, cultural, physical, religious, etc. The idea that Jews don’t know how to read actually has a very, very long history in Judeo-Christian polemics, but what’s interesting about it in the 19th century is that it emerges at the very same time that something else emerges, which is a new mode of textuality of fine literature, belles-lettres. It’s an understanding of literature as a specific and unique cultural artifact that is different from all other kinds of reading. In that perspective, literature is not like liturgy, for example, and it’s not like philosophy; it’s not like history, or self-aid books or folk-wisdom books. It does, or supposed to do, a different thing. Readers of literature are meant to do something else with those texts than they do with other textual modes. So, the two things happen at the same time, and it’s not really a coincidence.
Part of the book documents the emergence of this idea, that literature would somehow save the Jews. But the part that is more interesting to me is how that project of reforming and modernizing the Jews through literature didn’t work out as planned. This is where the ‘bad readers’ come in. This “badness” that haunts discourses on reading isn’t unique to the Jewish context nor to the 19th century, but I work on Yiddish and Hebrew of the period. Essentially, whenever such an accusation of “bad reading” emerges, it comes as a response to great shifts, whether those are technological transformations (think the advent of the WWW, or AI), economic crises, social disasters. Those critiques of reading present all these expectations, but eventually people continue doing their own thing, in defiance of attempts to reform them. The book focuses on a series of what I think of as textual malpractices: misreading, mistranslation, plagiarism, vandalism of library books, graphomania. It thinks about how we can let go of the desire to correct such behaviors, how we could work analytically with them, and what they can give us as a new way of telling a story or telling a literary history where we could place literature among, within, and in conversation with, other modes of textuality and cultural practice that operate at the same time – where we could pay attention to the materiality of literature as physical books and journals. How do you read? Do you sit at home? Do you read on the subway? These are all things that shape reading. What do you do with a text that you read? How do you think of it as something that is meant to educate you or entertain you or annoy you, or make you arrive at an intellectual or religious enlightenment? When examined on the same plain with, rather than as a privileged form of cultural practice, literature seems quite different.
I’m also thinking of this attention to malpractice – this attention to all the things that don’t work out, or fall apart – as a way of telling a history that is not triumphalist. We can’t say, “Aha! The Jews have indeed modernized themselves through literature.” A history of malpractice is much more messy, and to me also much more pleasurable and interesting. Most importantly, I am thinking with Donna Haraway, who says that we need to be able to tell new stories. We think that we are stuck in an impasse, ideological or political. The only way out of that impasse is to imagine new ways of being in the world beyond just critique and analysis. I’m thinking of malpractice as a way of telling new stories, and a new way out of the political impasses of modernity in general, and in my case – a way out of what feels like the impasses of the modern Jewish experience.
I’m also working on a project about Yiddish culture in South Africa. There’s an understanding in the field of the Jews of Eastern Europe – which is my field – that in order to fully grasp their history and their culture we need to understand that they were the subjects of colonizing missions and colonial discourse. Without appreciating that, we can’t really understand how their culture operates within the wider European culture in which it is situated; we’ve failed to understand things about their cultural and historical dynamics if we ignore how the European empires under which these communities lived were invested in articulating colonial projects toward these subjects. I agree with this argument, and in many ways, my first project relies on this argument. But my question in this new project is: What happens to this understanding when we shift the lens, and what can be the next step for this argument? So, for example, what happens when we look at the circulation of Yiddish culture from Europe through immigration to the colonized world. Does that change our understanding of these peoples’ relationship to colonial discourse, or their construction and understanding of race? I look at Yiddish culture from South Africa, some essays, some literature, poems, novels, the local press, some philological writings, and it’s very interesting to see what emerges, all sorts of surprising things.
An example: one of the groups of authors that I focus on are all Marxists and progressives coming from Eastern Europe, very excited about the Russian revolution. They arrive in South Africa and ask themselves what to do here, and somehow, in their process of translating and implementing their understanding of politics onto the South African context, they align themselves with white Afrikaner nationalists, right at the moment when Afrikaner nationalism rises alongside fascism and antisemitism in the 1930’s. That’s very surprising; it’s not the anticipated political alliance for these committed socialists. I’m asking: What happened there? What happened to that political worldview in the process of adapting it to the colonized world? The idea is to ask ourselves how a transnational history can inform us better, how it can teach us something about what happened in the Eastern European context, and also what are the dangers of telling a transnational history? This is basically what these authors did: they tried to apply a political theory born in one context onto a different one, by universalizing ideas that were in fact particular to the settings in which they developed. And so what happens when we ourselves do the same, when we sit in an American university and try to tell a global story – what are our potential blind spots? How can we be mindful of them?
Related to your first project, I was wondering if you could tell me more about how these emerging theories of reading affected literary pedagogy in the university? How did these ideas impact the way that we currently think of literature departments?
There’s a great book on that called Paraliterary by Merve Emre that I recommend. She does fascinating work in bringing the complex of so-called bad textuality to speak to how that notion developed into the way that college literature programs developed in the mid-20th century. However, I focus on earlier contexts, and also I should note, a non-institutionalized way of reading. My protagonists are not hired in universities; most of them, actually, never get to study literature in a formal institution at all. Hebrew and Yiddish in the 19th and early 20th century happen under the radar. People educate themselves, they exchange books, they come up with local versions of libraries; they teach each other and they do that through the press, and it’s much less institutionalized.
The question of how we learn how to read does not have to be told only from the institutionalized perspective. A genre is, in some ways, also a cultural and social institution. After you’ve read seven novels of the same genre, you are already taught to come to the next one with certain expectations. This is also a form of training, through reading. One of the main questions that I’m interested in is precisely this: What sort of reading culture does that literature inculcate? Or, how does that literature that is being produced train its readers? What are emerging expectations from reading? And it’s interesting to me because at the very same time that these authors are complaining that their readers don’t know how to read, they themselves do very weird stuff. Many of them are both writers and translators, and they do really wacky things with translations, which is a major topic that’s on my mind. They intentionally mistranslate, or give an abridged version of works, or completely adapted versions. So they themselves also encourage practices like selective reading, like reading out of order, like plagiarism, like misattributions: all of the things they complain about, they also replicate. This is a good example of that messiness that I’m interested in. I think that looking at reading, rather than at writing, makes that more visible.
And I was wondering if you could speak more about the history of the Yiddish language?
Sure! The sociolinguist Max Weinreich tells this historical narrative: In the medieval period, there were Jews who lived in a few communities on the Rhineland, along the Rhine river in Germany, and in a few other places close by. They spoke the local version of German that they heard. They started writing it in the Hebrew alphabet, and integrating some words of Hebrew and Aramaic which they took from their written corpus traveling with them. What happens, though, is that there is a series of expulsions and shifts, and they end up moving around for various reasons. Ultimately, some of them arrived in Eastern Europe, first in Poland and then in Ukraine and elsewhere in the region. They have quite a few good and prosperous centuries over there. What’s unique about what happens in that moment in the immigration eastward is that, rather than adopting the new local language, like the Slavic languages that are being spoken in those areas, they bring with them instead that medieval German (mittelhochdeutsch) that they’d been speaking. They integrate into it Slavic components, both in syntax and in vocabulary, as well as those Hebrew and Aramaic components, and there’s even some input from Romance languages which previous generations (prior to the Jews of the Rhineland) had been speaking in northern Italy. And so it becomes this merger, this lingual hybrid of all these different components – Slavic, Germanic, Semitic, and Romance. Throughout the centuries they wrote and printed more and more in that language. Up until the 19th century, the convention was to print in a more centralized version of Yiddish so that Jews across the continent could understand it, so they wrote in a more German-centered version. In the 19th century that mostly ended: the Jews of Germany mostly spoke German, and so Yiddish becomes this language predominantly used by the Jews of Eastern Europe. They begin printing locally. The Yiddish press emerges in the 19th century, and it becomes massive and influential toward the beginning of the 20th century. At the end of the 19th century there is also a movement of mass migration of Jews out of the Russian Empire to elsewhere in the world. A lot of them arrive in the U.S – the majority of the Jewish community in the U.S. came in those years – but also everywhere else in the world. Wherever they go, they sort of pick up that language and bring it with them.
At that third stage of migration, Yiddish also includes English words if they arrive in an English-speaking country, or Spanish words if they arrive in Latin America, or French if they arrive in Paris. So there’s something about Yiddish that is very tolerant toward adapting or adopting local languages. That characteristic is something that was thought of in the 19th century as something that is wrong. In the 19th century, philological discourse believed that languages should be pure, and that mixing languages was a form of “bastardization.” This ties to emerging racial thinking of the 19th century as well. In that context, Yiddish was portrayed as the ultimate racial bastard. This is part of that colonial discourse being targeted at the Jews of Eastern Europe which I mentioned before. There was the idea that their impure, hybrid language is a representation of just how much their minds are completely contorted and twisted – they don’t speak a pure language, and therefore their thoughts cannot be pure, and they are these primitive backwards people and racial hybrids who are unredeemable.
So, anyone who’s drawn to lingual impurity - come study Yiddish! I’ll also give a shout out to my colleague Isaac Bleaman here in the Linguistics department, who does incredibly interesting work in Yiddish sociolinguistics and computational linguistics – if you’re interested in Yiddish as a language, he’s your address. Next year Isaac and I will be running a “Yiddish Forum” as a Townsend Center working group, which encourages interdisciplinary connections between graduate students and faculty interested in the language, literature, and history of Yiddish-speaking Jews. Anyone pursuing work in/on Yiddish is invited to join!
I know that you often teach a Comparative Literature 100 course called “Fantastic Beasts” – can you tell us what this course focuses on, and a bit about the thought-process behind creating this course?
This is an introduction to comparative literature, so my thinking was that I wanted to give students the taste of what it is like to pursue comparative literature as a field of study: What sort of questions people in this field ask themselves? Why do they read? How do they approach the comparative craft? The initial inclination that I developed more later was that there is something about focusing on the fantastic, and thinking about monsters and demons and the monstrous in literature, that would be particularly accommodating for that. That is because I got the sense that a lot of students who were first stepping into a literature class in college were coming with expectations from high school that literature is supposed to do a very specific thing for them, like educate or enlighten them. They might think that literature is supposed to have a message and tell you something – that something should be clear. But I think that literature is supposed to mess with you, rather than teach you. The idea was to try to come up with a topic that would help us, through discussion and reading, to flesh out this sense of surprise, ambiguity, undecidedness, and pleasure, which is where analysis and thinking begins. In the context of literary monsters, this is a point that I picked up from Jack Halberstam: thinking about how monsters are infectious, how they’re never only representation – there’s something about the monster that keeps exceeding the ability for representation – and you think it’s supposed to do something, supposed to demonize someone or terrorize you, and then all the sudden it flips. And those flips and that move of infectiousness is very powerful as a destabilizing force in a literary text. When all of the sudden a monster becomes funny, or when you’ve used it as a way to demonize a minority but all the sudden it reveals that in fact you are the one who’s in the wrong – this is what Jack Halberstam calls ‘biting back’ as a theory of monstrosity. Those constant flips and glitches are interesting and a very good way to train ourselves out of that desire for literature to do something stable and expected. And then monstrosity also becomes a good way of thinking and talking about its fraternal twin – humanity; and so we end the semester by thinking about the history of humanism and a speculative, hopeful, resistant futures of humanity, finding ways in which literature of monstrosity cannot necessarily teach us, but can certainly drive us, compel us, attract us towards change.
You also mentioned that you are affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies. Can you tell us more about the offerings of this program? What options are available for undergraduates who are interested in Jewish Studies?
The Center for Jewish Studies is basically a hub on campus for all of the people whose work relates to that field. It’s not a discipline; it’s sort of an area-studies, except it’s not centered around a certain geographical area because Jews throughout history have been all around the world. It’s a way of connecting people working in that field. We have two programs. One is for graduate students. It’s called the Designated Emphasis in Jewish Studies, where graduate students are admitted to a specific department but have an additional diploma from the Center of Jewish Studies. And we also have the Jewish Studies Minor, for undergraduate students. It’s a great program. It’s great for someone interested in the topic, but it’s also a wonderful program for students wanting to get a thematically and methodically broad training.
We have faculty affiliated with the Center who are spread all over campus. We have Jewish Studies courses or affiliated faculty in the Linguistics Department, History, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese, Rhetoric, English, myself obviously in Comparative Literature, as well as East Asian Languages and Literatures, Sociology, Political Science, and the Law School. It’s a great way to get a wide interdisciplinary education while being centered on one topic. There is a sense of continuity, and you get a good grasp of how people across the humanities and social sciences think and work, and what sort of questions they ask themselves.
We also have partner institutions on campus, among them is the Magnes Collection for Jewish Art. They do interesting exhibitions and programming, of course, but the Center for Jewish Studies has also been partnering with them on undergraduate education, with all sorts of opportunities to get hands-on experience working in the archive (and they have an incredible archive!). What is it like to do museum work? What is it like to do curatorial work, archival work, public-facing work in the humanities? Aside from these academic programs, the Center for Jewish Studies does a lot of really interesting public programming, which we’re very invested in and which is very accessible intellectually and culturally to our undergraduate students, and so I highly recommend checking out the event calendar.
What book would you recommend to everyone reading this interview?
I would recommend Olga Tokarczuk’s The Book of Jacob. It’s an incredible book, even though it’s a bit hard to get through. It does all of that messing with your head that I like literature to do. I also think that, especially now with many wars going on, in Ukraine and in Gaza, there is something truly remarkable about her ability to tell those stories of the past that don’t shy away from conflict, but offer a different view of the future. There is pain and trauma, but she is somehow able to still truly give us hope that we can tell stories not only about our past, but also about our present and our future – that there will be ways out of these wars, that there will be ways out of our present predicament, and that this is through some kind of attunement to a polyphonic or even cacophonic, heterogenous voices of the past.