>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Pause ] >> Peggy Pearlstein: I'm Peggy Pearlstein, I'm head of the Hebraic Section here in the African & Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress. Welcome to today's program with Professor Sarah Bunin Benor, who will be speaking about her new book, Becoming Frum and Languages. Well, this is certainly the place for languages. The Library of Congress has more than 400 languages in its collection, and here in the African & Middle Eastern Division we do collection development and reference for more than 77 countries, from the tip of Africa, all the way up to the Caucuses. If you are interested in materials in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Armenian, Georgian, this is the place to come. As for the Hebraic Section, which is actually celebrating its 100th Anniversary, it got its first collection of Hebrew books in 1912, 10,000 rare Hebrew books. If you're interested in materials in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Tat, this is the place to come, as well. So, in addition to developing the collection and doing reference work, the Division is also actively involved in programs, in conferences, and in exhibits. And, in fact, we just completed an exhibit, Words Like Sapphires, 100 Years of Hebraica at the Library of Congress, 1912 to 2012, and that's available online from the Library's home page. And now I would like to introduce Sharon Horowitz, our Senior Reference Librarian in the Hebraic Section. [ Applause ] >> Sharon Horowitz: Thanks, Peggy. Good afternoon. On behalf of the Hebraic Section, welcome to the African & Middle Eastern Meeting Room. Our speaker today, as you heard, is Sarah Bunin Benor, Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at the Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles Campus. Sarah earned a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Linguistics from Columbia University, and her Master's and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford. She's a Sociolinguist, who has focused on the spoken language of the American Jews. And her book, Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism, Professor Benor describes how newly Orthodox Jews have to adapt, not only the lives and the customs of the Orthodox or Frum community, but also their speech patterns. As a Semite frum is a Yiddish derived adjective, denoting one who practices an Orthodox Jewish religious lifestyle, with her use of Frum in the title, Professor Benor gives the reader a sense of the insider nature of language in Orthodox communities. Her book emerged out of a year-long study of an Orthodox community in Philadelphia. Before I turn the podium over to Professor Benor, let me mention that this event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcasting. There will be a formal question and answer period after the lecture, at which the audience is encouraged to ask questions and offer comments, but please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded and later broadcast as part of this event. By participating in the Q&A period you are consenting to the Library's possible reproduction and transmission of your remarks. And, now, please join me in welcoming Professor Sarah Bunin Benor. [ Applause ] >> Sarah Bunin Benor: Hi, thank you so much for coming today. I'm really honored to be here. When I give talks like these it's rare that I know even one or two people in the audience, but today I have a lot of friends and relatives, given that I grew-up in Rockville, Maryland. So thank you, all, for being here today. Can you all see the screens? Okay, this is Matt, but you might know him as Matisyahu, the Hasidic Reggae superstar, who now looks a little more like this. But I'm going to talk about his transition from non-Orthodox to Black Hat Orthodox, and in my talk today I'm going to be using two terms that are local to the communities where I did my research. BTs, meaning ba' alei teshuva, or those who return, and FFBs, meaning those who are frum, or religious from birth, people grew-up in an Orthodox community. So my question is how do BTs learn Orthodox language and culture? And to answer this question, as Sharon said, I spent a year doing research in an Orthodox community in Philadelphia and out there in the exhibit about the Americas they mentioned ethnography as a method that the conquerors used to learn about the native cultures, listening to the way that people speak and learning about their religion. And that's exactly what I did in this community with slightly different motives, and I did this research about a decade ago. I had two main field sites. One was an outreach center, and these are all pseudonyms that I use, that I refer to as Ner Tamid, and the other one was an Orthodox neighborhood called Milldale, about a 45-minute drive away from that outreach center. Now within Judaism we talk about a continuum of religiosity, with the most secular Jews on one side, and the most Haredi or Black Hat or ultra Orthodox Jews on the other side, and in the middle we have reform, conservative, and modern Orthodox. The community where I did my research is a non-Hasidic Black Hat community. They don't use the term Yeshevish to refer to themselves, but that is a term that some might use, Yeshevish modern community, and this is in contrast to Hasidic Jewish communities, which have also been the subject of some research in terms of language and culture. And you might be wondering where I fall on this continuum? Somewhere in the middle, kind of conservativish. Okay, so to give you a little bit of background about Orthodox Jews, as you know, they adhere strictly to Jewish law. They maintain some degree of social separation, different in different communities, and I'm focusing here on the Black Hat Orthodox community, which has a little bit more social separation. And they have a number of cultural practices that distinguish them from non-Orthodox Jews. Distinctive ways of dressing, distinctive foods that they eat, especially influenced by Eastern European cuisines, distinctive home decor, including kind of like this room here, bookshelves filled with Judaica, and also a centerpiece of the home decor is a very large dining room table, often covered with a white tablecloth and a plastic covering over it. Distinctive music, sort of influenced by '80s pop music with a lot of electric keyboards. Distinctive names, a lot of names from Hebrew and Yiddish, and distinctive language. Now a majority of American Orthodox Jews are descendents of Yiddish speakers. The community where I did my research, however, Yiddish is not spoken, most of the people in this community are native English speakers, they also tend to be proficient in Hebrew for prayer and study, and the men in the community also study Aramaic rabbinic text. Now their English is distinct, and this is what I'm going to be focusing on today, their English is filled with words from Hebrew and Aramaic and Yiddish, filled with Ashkenazi pronunciations of Hebrew words and Ashkenazi forms of Hebrew words, distinct English pronunciation, like saying candle instead of candle, and other distinctive vowels and consonants, and a number of grammatical influences from Yiddish, like say staying by them instead of staying at their house. Distinctive intonation, if you've heard it, you know what I'm talking about, and a number of other features. Now I'm going to give you a quote, and you'll see some of these distinctive features here. This is a quote that a Rabbi said while he was giving a lecture in preparation for Passover. The mitzvah of the matzah by the seder should be -- we're machmir, it's a shmura mishas haktsira -- that the wheat that is harvested for peysach should be already watched from the time of the harvest. So you see the underlying words are words from Hebrew, you notice they're pronounced in Ashkenazi way, the Eastern European way, as opposed to the Israeli way. And there are -- and the bold features, the by, we mentioned, and already is also an influence from Yiddish grammar. Notice that in the wheat that is harvested, the T is released, and this is not just a Jewish thing, people of all different backgrounds do this, but it sounds particularly precise and learned, and I found that even Orthodox communities, especially men, release their Ts at a much higher rate. Here's another quote, this is from an interview with an Orthodox woman, named Mrs. Adler, pseudonyms. In another community people might if they have a different sort of yiddishkeit, so they might not daven in the same shul, they might send their kids to different yeshivas. So, again, we have a number, in this case mostly Yiddish words, and we also have this shul, which is an influence from Israeli Hebrew, and interestingly even people who haven't spent time in Israel pick-up this shul, as well as the click. Now there's two different kinds of clicks. In Israel there's the no click, if you say can I get that for five shekels? Click, that means no, and it's done with a head tilt and a lip rounding, but this is a different kind of click, it's a hesitation click, and it just means I'm rethinking what I'm saying or I'm -- or sometimes it expresses slightly negative affect. So this is to give you some examples of the kinds of quotes that people use, and when they use quotes like these they refer to this kind of language as Frumspeak or Yeshivish. I'm the only person or scholars are the only ones who use terms, like Orthodox Jewish English, but there's actually a dictionary called Frumspeak, the First Dictionary of Yeshivish, and it includes not only a dictionary of words from Hebrew, Yiddish and Aramaic that are used within English, but also translations of things into Yeshivish, like the Gettysburg Address. So given all of these distinctive Orthodox cultural practices the question is to what extent do BTs adopt them? Now to help me answer that I turned to a framework from post-Colonial studies, known as Borderlands, where this notion that when an indigenous people is in a place and a Colonial power comes in and brings their culture, the indigenous people are changed and they can no longer go back to the culture that they had before and they do not completely adapt the culture that has been brought in to them. Now the situation with ba' alei teshuva is much different because they're willing adopting this culture, but the situation is kind of similar in that they have started out as non-Orthodox Jews, but they can never become FFB, no matter how long they are in a community even if they can somewhat pass as FFB people still tend to know, for the most part, that they are BT, so they are somewhere in the middle in this BT borderland. So how do they navigate this BT borderland? I found two strategies. The first is hyperaccommodation, this is a term from social psychology and sociolinguistics, it refers to how people when they're trying to adopt a new way of speaking they sometimes go beyond the norm that people who are already part of the community have. So in this case we see that BTs take on Orthodox practices to an even greater extent than FFBs. So, for example, when I told one FFB girl about my research project, that I'm interested in how ba' alei teshuva learn Orthodox language and culture, she said you mean they learn it and then they go way beyond other people, making us feel like we're not religious? There are also a number of jokes about this hyperaccommodation, every culture has at least seven light bulb jokes, right? So in this case there's how many BTs does it take to screw in a light bulb? You mean you can do that? This sense that they're afraid that they will make a mistake when they're doing something, right? We also have the joke about the BT couple, and they've moved into a new home and gotten their whole kitchen set-up, and the woman accidentally uses a flashek [assumed spelling] spoon, a spoon that's supposed to be for meat products, for her ice cream. And he says, oh, that's it, pack our things, we're moving. So the sense that they go overboard, right? Also in terms of names, Elisheva and Eliahu are common names in Orthodox communities, but the joke is that BTs name their children Kelisheva and Keliahu or Kelicacku [assumed spelling], and I'll explain this because there is taboo against using the name of God, one of which is El, and if you say Kel instead of El then it gets over that taboo, but this is not generally used in names except among people who aren't familiar with the community, and you have this saying, what do BTs drink, gingerkel, right? Now I actually made gingerkel the other day, it was really good, I highly recommend it, ginger failed Kel, okay? So one BT woman told me that she's planning to, when she gets married, to wear her hair, to wear a wig, a shaytl, which is common because Orthodox women who are married are expected to cover their hair, and she's going to do that, but she's also going to wear a hat on top, so this is known as double covering. She said I have days when I was not tsnius, so for me I feel like the way to do teshuva on that, to repent, is that I'm going to double cover. So it's the sense that it's not necessarily an unintentional hyperaccommodation, sometimes they are aware that they are doing things more than the people who are already part of their community. And there's also a common discussion about this in the community, that in their attempt to make sure they're saying things properly they end up making more of a botch of it. There are people who try too hard, every other word is some kind of Hebrew or Yiddish expression. And one word that is particularly commonly discussed in the community is the word mamish, it's Hebrew and Yiddish origin word that means really, and there is the sense that ba' alei teshuvas say mamish all the time. Same with Baruch Hashem, for example, an FFB woman told me that sometimes a BT wants to sound Frum, so they throw in Frum expressions. BTs do it more because they're trying to make-up for lost time and because they're trying to fit in, that's a mark of being Frum, they don't want to be looked down upon. They pepper their language with Baruch Hashem more. I use them, too, but not every third word. An example of hyperaccommodation is Rivka-Bracha. She was born as Rebecca, but when she became Frum she changed her name to Rivka and then about a year later to Rivka-Bracha. There's -- it's pretty common in Orthodox communities for people to use two different names. In fact, one BT comedian told me a joke mimicking, imitating Lenny Bruce a bit, he said yokov [assumed spelling], dov [assumed spelling], spi [assumed spelling], not Frum yokov T Frum [assumed spelling]. So that's the case with Rivka-Bracha, she felt that to show her new attachment to Orthodoxy she preferred to use two names, and Bracha wasn't given to her at birth so she picked up that -- she chose that one herself. Now Rivka-Bracha uses a lot of distinctive language. She uses a lot of Hebrew and Yiddish words. She uses clicks, she uses a lot of T release, her intonation sounds very distinctive. If you're going to the store get me some milk, that kind of thing, and she uses a lot of Yiddish grammatical influences, including she once said this is not what to record, meaning this is not something to record. I was a little sad that she said that because I had to turn off the tape recorder, but at least I got that one on tape. And she also was so successful in her acquisition of this language that an FFB woman cast her as the Yiddishe bubby from Boro Park in the women's Purim Shpil. And she was very proud of this, she felt that this was a sign that she had successfully integrated and acculturated. She's also aware that her language is not grammatically correct in standard English, she says I don't speak the good King's English anymore, I speak this Yinglish Yeshivish stuff which is fine by me. So that's hyperaccommodation. In addition, we have another strategy, kind of opposite strategy known as -- which I refer to as deliberate distinctiveness. Matisyahu is a good example of this. You see here in his Frum phase how he dressed in a Frum way, you have the white shirt, the dark jacket, the black velvet kipa, the long beard, and the wire rimmed glasses, and the fringe, the ritual fringe is hanging out, right? But notice it's all slightly different, so the shirt is not tucked in, his tzitsis are kind of lopsided, and his body position is one that you would not normally see in Orthodox communities, it kind of looks Christological, but that's another story, okay? And this is not just Matisyahu, we also have other rappers and singers who are ba' alei teshuva and who do similar things with their appearance. We also have people who maintain their hobbies from before they became Frum. It's not very common in Orthodox communities to go snowboarding, although some people who grew-up Orthodox do, but in this case we see a woman in her long skirt and her hat going snowboarding. Also, dogs are not very common in Orthodox communities. Now I'm not talking about modern Orthodox communities, I'm talking about Black Hat Orthodox communities, but here we see a woman who is a ba' alei teshuva, and she keeps her dog. Now I did meet another woman in the Orthodox community where I did my research who had a dog named Shana, so using a Yiddish name for a pet is kind of a way of combining things, combining practices from the different communities. And we have ba' alei teshuva who maintain their body piercings, some of them let them close-up, especially after a few years in the community, but others prefer to maintain them to show that they're not only Orthodox but they're also BT. So we also get other unique combinations, like a man who wears a black hat with trendy sunglasses or I was once at someone's house and she made gefilte fish and one of the guests said, this is so good, what makes it so good? And she said curry and turmeric, and I had never before heard those words in that Orthodox community because international cuisine is not very common, at least at the time that I was doing my research, was not very common in Black Hat Orthodox communities. Since then it has changed a bit and international cuisine has made its way into some of the communities, including the one where I did my research. We also see combinations in language, where people will use distinctive Orthodox language combined with mild profanity and slang. For example, Jacob is a BT, but he's been Orthodox for several years, and he uses many, many known words from Hebrew and Yiddish, Yiddish grammatical influences, like I told over a story, that phrasal verb from Yiddish, and he uses final devoicing, like goingk instead of going, and he also uses mild profanity, like this really sucks or someone screwed up the air conditioner, that kind of thing. Now sometimes this deliberate distinctiveness is based on ideology, ideology that the way that Orthodox Jews speak English is incorrect and, therefore, I'm not going to say staying by them. I heard one woman say that and then a few minutes later I heard her on the phone with an FFB woman saying, so are you going to be staying by us for Shabbat? And so even if people have these ideologies they don't necessarily maintain them in practice. And this is also sometimes based on concerns with authenticity, concerns that they will sound inauthentic if they use things that they didn't grow up with. So, for example, Joseph told me that he doesn't say the oi sound in words like Torah, you can say Torah or Tora or Torah, I say Torah. Most Orthodox Jews in the community where I did my research say Torah, and in other Orthodox communities that are to the right of that continue to say Toyrah. Now he said that he doesn't like to say Toyrah, he says people who say Toyrah are either BT who are really trying hard to look really Yeshivish or FFBs who have a Chasidish, Hasidic or a very religious upbringing. Now a good example of deliberate distinctiveness is Samuel, he uses no distinctive grammatical features from Yiddish, no clicks, no distinctive intonation. He uses some Hebrew words, but many of the words that he uses from Hebrew have mistakes, so for example he'll say something like that was a very Hasid thing to do, whereas, Hasid is normally a noun rather than an adjective, or saying Balchuva [assumed spelling] instead of BT. So we've seen these two different strategies for navigating the BT borderland -- hyperaccommodation and deliberate distinctiveness. But sometimes we see them in progression, and this is a progression that I refer to as the bungee affect. So a bungee jumper -- how many of you have ever gone bungee jumping -- okay, you haven't? My daughter, Alisa [assumed spelling], has not gone bungee jumping, but my brother, Aaron [assumed spelling], has. And so bungee jumping involves jumping off of a very high place, and you get to the bottom of the rope and then you bounce back up, right? So it's the same in terms of religious and cultural immersion, you jump off the deep end at the beginning, and then you gradually moderate your cultural practices and change them a bit. So an example of this is Levi. Levi told me that -- and at the time when I interviewed him he was wearing a striped shirt, not just white shirts anymore, and he still wore a black hat, but only on Shabbat. So he told me about this transition that he went through. Actually can I get a volunteer to read this? Okay, come here? My sister, Miriam [assumed spelling]. >> Miriam: Initially you're constantly trying to prove yourself and then eventually you get to a point where, you know, I'm comfortable with my knowledge, and what I know how to do and I'm not fooling anybody but myself, and you come to grips with who you are. There's a lot of sort of going out and finding where you feel comfortable, so you really have to go beyond it and then slip back to it, so that's the difficult part of the transition. >> Sarah Bunin Benor: Thanks, just to rest my voice a bit. Matisyahu was an example of this kind of bungee affect, he started out getting interested in his Judaism and he kind of went off the deep end in terms of getting involved in all of the cultural practices he could find, and then he gradually tempered that and took off, and at this point could be an example of the bungee affect. More recently he has taken off the kipa and is no longer identified as Orthodox, but in this case he could have been an example of the bungee affect. And here's a song that illustrates a lot of these things that we've been talking about, it's called BT Blues by Rabbi Moshe Shur. [ Music ] Okay, I'd like to thank Rabbi Shur for writing a song that so beautifully illustrates a lot of the things that I've been talking about. Okay, now one of the things I want to point out is the benoni, now that's a rabbinic concept, you're not a [inaudible] or a rusha [assumed spelling], you're not a righteous person or a bad person, but you're somewhere in the middle, but I think this really also illustrates this notion of borderlands, of being in an in between state. And you notice in that song not only the hyperaccomodation and the deliberate distinctiveness and the bungee affect, but also the use of a lot of Hebrew and Yiddish words within the English, right? And even though the type of music is not common among Orthodox Jews, the album that it's on, most of the other songs sound a lot like Orthodox American pop music. This one is kind of a bluegrass style, which is similar to Matisyahu using Reggae music, it's a way of combining a practice that's not common in the Orthodox community with Orthodox content. So now the question arises how do BTs learn Orthodox linguistic features? And I want to be sure to leave enough time for questions, so I'm going to focus on a particular case of language learning, and that is weekly study sessions between Andrew and Avrum. Andrew is, in this case, a recent BT, and Avrum is an FFB, and they study Talmud together every week. And, in this case, and I recorded them over a number of sessions, in this case I heard them talking about the words, meykil and machmir. Meykil means lenient and machmir means stringent. So Avrum says meykil and machmir, you know what I mean? I'm sure you've heard those terms before, like, oh, he's meykil. Yes, yes, sure, I just never knew what it meant. Exactly, because machmir I knew. But, yes, but they always say that and you never know what it means, and you're always too embarrassed to ask, and you're always expected like you know, you know it's kind of rough. So this is kind of unusual in that this is a case of direct language instruction, where the FFB is aware that this BT is going to be spending time in Yeshiva and wants him to feel comfortable, and so he socializes him to use certain words. And that was words that appear in the Talmudic text, but we also see this with a Yiddish word that does not appear in the Talmudic text, the Yiddish word shver, meaning difficult. So they encounter a difficult passage, and Avrum says, as they say in the Yeshiva, it's shver, it's difficult, it's hard for me. Andrew laughs a little because Andrew is -- Avrum was saying it in a funny way, and then Avrum says, no, I'm serious, I hear that all the time. So then Andrew says, shver, and he starts to write it down. So he's aware that he should be learning these words and he makes efforts to learn them. A little later Andrew encounters the word Pshita, meaning simple, which he had recently learned, and Andrew says Pshita, and he looks back at his notes where he wrote down shver, he says, it's not shver. And Andrew says it's not shver, it's not shver, good call. You know how to use that word, you see how well you're using these words? I want you to use shver whenever you speak to anyone now, you're just walking on the street. And Andrew smiles and says that's going to be very shver to do. Okay, so based on exchanges like this, I came up with a number of stages in the acquisition of loanwords. Now these stages are a bit different from child language acquisition because you have things like what we just saw, where they mark something as not belonging to them. Often when children learn new words they'll just use them in their speech, sometimes wrong, but they'll use them in an unmarked way. So in this case, now these stages are optional and not everybody goes through all of these stages. So, first, the novice hears the word without noticing it or understanding it. Then they hear it in a context that facilitates understanding or remembering it. Then they either ask about it or look it up. Sometimes they skip that stage all together and just figure it out from context. then they might use it with a mistake, they might use it in a marked way, and the final stage is using it seriously, correctly, and with full authority. So in my recordings I managed to capture the acquisition of the word chazer, over the course of four months Andrew is socialized to use this word. Now this is not a chazer, like pig, a different chazer -- it means to repeat or summarize part of a text. So in November I heard Andrew do stage one where Avrum used the word chaser a few times, but Andrew made no indication that he noticed it or understood it. Stage two, he hears it in a context that facilitates understanding or remembering it. That same day Avrum explained the word by telling a story about his chavrusa, his study partner, who thought that learning Gemora and not chazering it is like planting a field and not cultivating it. So that's a way that would help him remember it. Stages three and four of the next week, the novice asks about the word or looks it up and then uses it with a mistake. So in this case as Andrew is about to repeat the text, chazer, he says, now what's this called when we sort of summarize what we did? It's kaaa -- and Avrum tells him chazer, so when he tries to chazer but with a mistake and he's also asked about it. And then that same day he uses it in a marked way. When Avrum asks Andrew to go through what they just learned, Andrew says, you want me to chazer it, huh? So that pause, the rise in his tone, the smile indicates that he doesn't quite feel full ownership over that word yet. So that's in December. In February he is still using it in a slightly marked way because Avrum says, wanna chazer, and Andrew says let's chazer, right? So in this he could have just said sure, right? But he repeats the word because he is -- doesn't quite feel full ownership over it yet and he's still kind of playing with it, right? And then a month later we see Stage six, that he uses it with full authority without a smile or other marking. So that's just one example of how the stages that people go through in learning new ways of speaking. Now sometimes it's based on these kind of explicit interactions of socio-interactions of linguistics, socialization, but other times it happens in a less explicit way and often people just kind of pick-up the words on their own. Now as novices gain increased access to the sociolinguistic repertoire of Orthodoxy they're actively engaged in learning to make it their own or avoiding elements of it. We see that community veterans and other novices help them in this process through interactions of language socialization. And we see that BTs make creative use of the Orthodox cultural repertoire to navigate the BT borderlands, to present themselves not only as Orthodox but also as BT. And you can see other elements of this process of acquisition and socialization in my book, that I believe is on sale back there, and the talk that I did today goes through about a quarter of the book, and other aspects of the book are discussing the continuum between modern Orthodox and Black Hat Oxy and how this relates to cultural practices, especially language. It also talks about how the findings are related to other people who learn new ways of speaking as adults, like for example when people become parents they have to learn the new ways of speaking about their children, or when people become doctors or lawyers or car repair people or cosmetologists they have to learn the jargon of their profession. And a lot of the process of language learning happens through similar interactions and through gradually gaining increased access to various elements of the community. So I'm going to stop there and open it up for questions. [ Applause ] >> Thank you for your presentation, Professor. I really enjoyed it immensely. I just had a question, you mentioned the Exhibit out here in terms of ethnology, where these people came from, so who are they, were they reformed, were they conservative, were they reconstructionists, were they [inaudible] affiliation or are they converts? Just anecdotally are these children of three reform families and their children became Orthodox, including the former [inaudible]? So could you please more explain a little bit more about the origin, where they came from? >> Sarah Bunin Benor: Yes, the question is can I explain about the origin of these ba' alei teshuva, did they grow-up secular, reformed, conservative, are they converts? And the answer is yes, all of the above. In the community where I did my research I found people who had grown-up completely secular Jews, with no Jewish education, and I found people who grew-up conservatox [assumed spelling], and there was some question there should we consider them ba' alei teshuva or not? And I did -- I made my distinction are they ba' alei teshuva or not from my quantitative analysis, which is also in the book, based on whether they grew-up Orthodox or not and whether they grew-up in an Orthodox community or not. So if somebody grew-up as the only Orthodox Jew in their family, maybe they observed -- well, actually, I didn't have anyone like that, but I also found a number of people who grew-up very religious reform and conservative Jews, that is they were -- they observed some of the holidays and they weren't as strict in their observance of Shabbat but they did something for Shabbat every week, but they didn't grow-up in an Orthodox community, they didn't grow-up using the language and hearing the language around them. Now the question of converts is an interesting one, I thought about maybe including converts in a separate category, but there were so few of them, and I also found that it was hard to distinguish between converts and people who grew-up Jewish, but not [inaudible] Jewish, so that is if someone grows up with a Jewish father and not a Jewish mother, but they grow-up practicing Judaism the reform movement considers them to be Jewish, but traditional Judaism does not, and so they are officially converts. But I also found -- so I had some converts like that in my study, I had some completely secular Jews with much less Jewish education than them, so we can't just say that converts have to learn a lot more than Jews because in some cases they have to learn less than some other Jews. Other questions? Yes? >> Yes, do you -- ba' alei teshuva practices between how they practice here versus how they practice let's say in Israel? Do you notice any differences? >> Sarah Bunin Benor: The question is are there differences between how ba' alei teshuva practice Judaism here, meaning in America, and versus in Israel? Yes, Israel is a completely Jewish milieu so they are the Orthodox Jews who -- ba' alei teshuva who live in Israel have -- are completely surrounded by other people who are like them. In terms of observance and in America they're not necessarily, they might still live among non-Orthodox Jews, among non-Jews, even when they move to an Orthodox neighborhood it's not a completely Orthodox neighborhood, with some exceptions. There are also differences in terms of the language because in Israel they speak Hebrew, there are also communities where Yiddish is the primary language and where English, Jewish English is the primary language. In America, though, there are differences in different areas, and this is one of the dimensions that I discuss in terms of not just the Orthodox continuum, modern Orthodox to Black Hat, but there are also other continua, whether how densely Orthodox their community is where they live, and how -- where they are in relation to New York? New York is a center of Orthodox life in the U.S. and those who live in New York and especially in densely Orthodox parts of New York have a very different experience transitioning to Oxy than elsewhere. I purposefully did my research outside of New York because I wanted a smaller community that would be a bit more manageable, and the community where I did my research sees itself in opposition to New York, they -- and people who are from New York discuss others as out-of-town, and even people who are not from New York themselves refer to themselves as out-of-town. And some people have told me, well, what you found would be very different in different places. Absolutely, in fact, in a very small community, like in -- I don't want to give specific examples, but maybe somewhere in the middle of the country it would be very different than a community that has a lot of Orthodox Jews already, in a very small Orthodox community it's a little different. Yes? >> Let me ask two questions [inaudible]? The first is what you see is the relationship between what I would think are relatively superficial behavior, language, and so on, and much more, much deeper, >> Sarah Bunin Benor: Okay. >> My question is related to that, kind of correlated, [inaudible] experience of situations where let's say there's a couple and one [inaudible] and the other [inaudible]? >> Sarah Bunin Benor: Okay, so what was the first question, again? >> The first question is I sort of see [inaudible]? >> Sarah Bunin Benor: All right, okay. So the first question is about the distinction between the superficial cultural practices versus the deeper religious observance, right? >> Yes. >> Sarah Bunin Benor: Okay, and to answer that there's an interesting concept in Judaism of sevenishma [assumed spelling], we will do and we will hear. That is first we will do things and then we will understand them. And that is something that I heard from some Orthodox Jews that they didn't quite understand why they should be dressing this way or why they should be using these Yiddish words and Hebrew words, but they do it to fit into the community and then eventually they understand, and eventually the internal element of it follows. Now that's not the case with the religious observance, they're expected to -- they're not considered to be Orthodox Jews unless they observe Shabbat, unless they observe a certain other Halitic [assumed spelling] rules and restrictions, right? But in the case of cultural practices, certainly there are people, like Samuel that I mentioned, who rejects some of those cultural practices. And he doesn't -- and it's not just about rejecting some of the Yiddish influences, he also doesn't like certain practices, like he doesn't like to wear a black hat, he wears a black velvet kipa, but he has a band of blue trim around it. He doesn't want to fit in exactly to the culture of the community, right? And for him he was kind of unhappy with my research project. He kept telling me you shouldn't focus on this, you should focus on what's inside and you should focus -- that's the important thing is how, what kind of a person you are and how you follow the system of morality. It doesn't matter if you pick-up Yiddish words. So he represents a -- one school of thought. And your other question was about couples that have different rates of culturation? And I did find a few couples like that, and I have heard of cases where that kind of thing ends in divorce, but I've heard of many other cases where it ends happily. And actually one of my master's students at Hebrew Union College School of Jewish Non-Profit Management, where I teach, wrote her master's thesis on Jews who have different levels of observance and are married to each other and how they make it work. And she interviewed a number of couples like that, where one was becoming more religious than the other or one grew-up Orthodox and the other one did not, and they maintained their separate levels of religiosity, but at the same time they had to make accommodations and compromises, especially when it came to the children. But for the most part in couples that I encountered, like that, they generally accommodated to the more observant partner because otherwise that partner wouldn't feel comfortable. It's more complicated than that, but that's the short story. Other questions? Yes, Professor Modan [assumed spelling], a Professor from Ohio State University? >> Modan: I have also some questions [inaudible] so you talked about recording on the sessions on the study and I wondered if there was any [inaudible]? I really like the term [inaudible] accommodation and I wonder if I can [inaudible]? If you use it as [inaudible]? >> Sarah Bunin Benor: Okay, so the first question is about gender access? Now I was worried when I started this research that I wouldn't be able to access the men in the community, and certainly that was the case for some things, they wouldn't let me into the Shiva [assumed spelling], I could only look through the window and see a sea of black and white, both their outfits and the pages that they were reading, but I was somehow granted access to a few chavrusas, and this helped me to come up with the analysis that's part of one chapter, where I look at a number of different men of different stages of integration and those who grew-up Orthodox. And so I actually recorded one man in a learning session with another FFB, he's FFB, with another FFB, and with a BT, and to look at how he spoke differently to those different people, and that was great. And now I know that my presence may have influenced the way that people talk, and I discussed this a lot in my chapter about methodology, how people always changed the way that they spoke when they were speaking to me, and sometimes they changed the way that they spoke when they were speaking in my presence. I even observed this once when I was in a classroom in a study that preceded this one, and I left the tape recorder on and went to another room to observe something else and came back. And I had noticed when I listened to the tape later that the teacher of the class used more Hebrew words when I wasn't there, which was really interesting. So, but I actually sometimes had more negative feedback from women than from men, whereas, so some women that I had been recording and interviewing, one of them said that she doesn't want to be my research subject anymore, she just wants to be my friend. So I said, okay, fine. And another one said that she asked her Rabbi if she could be part of this study, this was after I had been recording and interviewing her for quite awhile, and she said that her Rabbi asked where is she, meaning like is she Frum, and she said she's on the dara [assumed spelling], which I had never expressed to her that, meaning like on the road to becoming Frum. And so because I was not yet Frum he wouldn't let me -- he wouldn't let her be part of the study. So she said that she didn't want to be part of the study anymore. The next day she asked me to give her a ride somewhere and I said I don't think it's a good idea because then I would be observing you and you don't want to be part of the study. And she said it's okay, it's just I'm just going to a non-Jewish tailor for my wedding dress. And I said, okay, as long as you're okay with me listening to you, and I won't record anything, but -- and she said it was okay, and I got a great datum [assumed spelling] there. Actually, I'll tell you the datum because it was a good one. It was she said to the non-Jewish tailor in preparation for her wedding dress, she said just don't take off too much because it has to be okay for another kallah, for another bride. So she had replaced the word bride in her mind with Kallah, the Hebrew and Yiddish for bride, and she continued to say that even in the presence of a non-Jew and then corrected herself. So in that case I had very little negative reaction from men, most of the men that I recorded -- maybe it was that I was recording them a little bit less, in less intimate settings, you know, more in interview settings and in this text study session. To answer your second question, hyperaccommodation, I see it as -- I see them as sort of synonyms, but I prefer the term hyperaccommodation over hypercorrection, which is another term used in sociolinguistics for trying to say something and then kind of overshooting the norm because it's not necessarily a matter of correct or not, and in some research on hypercorrection another one, another term is hypocorrection, where African-Americans who are trying to speak African-American vernacular English, but didn't grow-up with it, overshoot the norm or because there is the sense that it's stigmatized it undershoots the norm or hypo -- and I don't like that terms because it's like the sense of a hierarchy, and so I prefer the term hyperaccommodation as an umbrella term for all of that. Okay, yes, a question? >> What accommodations, if any, did you make, you personally make >> Sarah Bunin Benor: What accommodations did I make? Well, I dressed -- I wore a skirt and long sleeves, and I covered -- as a married woman I covered my hair only when I went to the Milldale part of the community, not the Ner Tamid part of the community. I certainly changed the way I speak in the community, so I absolutely used the language of the community, which made people feel more comfortable and more willing to use that language around me. So do we have time for -- okay? Yes? >> How do you feel about second generation ba' alei teshuva? >> Sarah Bunin Benor: Okay, second generation ba' alei teshuva? Now it may sound like an oxymoron because someone is a ba' alei teshuva because they, themselves, become religious, but it's not an oxymoron in that -- excuse me -- people in the community discuss second generation ba' alei teshuva. Meaning the children of ba' alei teshuva as having a somewhat different status than the children of FFBs. In the community where I did my research I did not find that distinction, but I found people talking about that in other communities and I found a number of discussions on blogs about that, about how there is still discrimination against the children of ba' alei teshuva for a few reasons. One is the reason of yipus [assumed spelling] or lineage that they are descended from people who did not follow the laws of family purity and, therefore, they, themselves are somewhat impure. And, also, a sense that they will have and they will have relatives who are not Orthodox and they have a negative influence on them. And I heard of discrimination in terms of marriages, in terms of people not willing to set-up the children of ba' alei teshuva with the children of FFBs. I heard it in terms of admission to Yeshevish, institutions of higher learning, and but for the most part I heard people saying that's discrimination in other communities, we don't have that here. Okay, maybe one more question? Yes, in the back? >> I'm really enjoying this. [Inaudible] I'm curious if you were able to determine what factors affected people choosing one path of language accommodation over another? >> Sarah Bunin Benor: Okay, what factors influenced people choosing one path of language accommodation versus another? Good question. Some -- well, first, I want to mention skill, people who have particularly good language facility were better at picking up the language. I had one woman in the study who had a master's in English as a second language or something like that, and she was one of the most skillful acquirers of this way of speaking. She also was one of the highest scorers on an experiment that I did about speech, where I played speech samples, and she was most aware of these things because she was particularly good at language and trained. So that's one element of it, but that same woman was also adamantly opposed to the use of by, saying staying by them, and she was also strongly opposed to Ashkenazi pronunciation, although she did, herself, use Ashkenazi pronunciation in certain words. So elements of it are language skill and desire to integrate into the community, desire to maintain a sense of distinctiveness. Some people who did not pick-up certain distinctive ways of pronouncing things and were very proud of their ba' alei teshuva identity. In fact, one man said that he wanted to start a magazine for ba' alei teshuva, maybe now he changed the plan to a website or a blog or something like that, but he was so proud of his ba' alei teshuva identity he told everybody that he was ba' alei teshuva. I found other people who wanted to pass as FFB, and some who did. There were some who interviewed with me and said don't tell anybody that I'm a ba' alei teshuva because they all think I'm FFB. So I did find some people like that. I also found some people who managed to pass as FFB, but were uncomfortable with that fact. So like one woman described a situation where she was with a number of FFB women and they all assumed that she was FFB, and they were saying bad things about ba' alei teshuva, and she felt uncomfortable, but she didn't say anything, and then later she regretted not saying anything. So you do have these kind of conflicting emotions, but you also have different types of people who are more and less proud of their non-Orthodox past. Okay. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.