So one of the things about our community is Once you get it Once you're enlightened You have your aha moment of however you like to put it your epiphany about what this is all about The way we grow this community is by helping each other. It's a grassroots community. So we go out And we tell other people about it. Maybe family members, maybe friends However, you know, wherever you see a need You sort of step up and say, hey, I've got an idea for you here Go to bogleheads.org or go to bogelcenter.net Get you know get one of Jack Bogle's books when we become ambassadors for this philosophy of investing and saving and financial well-being that we have and With that we need to have an understanding When we do that What works and maybe what doesn't work, right? We all have approached people and Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't work. So we thought that today We would have a little bit of Insight into Training the trainer so you are if you consider yourself teachers you are all once you get enlightened to become Bogle heads and call yourself Bogle heads. You are actually crossed over to become ambassadors and teachers and so You know, how do we do that? So today?  He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1989 with a bachelor degree in commerce and received his MBA In 1996 from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He then became a Consultant for Bain and Company and later became a successful entrepreneur he co-founded several companies and Decided to begin giving back so he started a teaching a class in 2014 in Palo Alto, California and Eventually now has morphed into a program a non-profit organization that teaches teachers how to teach this And so I'll let Tim talk about the program and But here he is Tim Ranzetta See how this mic works. I'm Italian so I like to use my hands mics don't work What an amazing community so I fit in the category of Long-time lurker on the Bogle heads forum Long-time Vanguard investor But first-time attendee and I think I've been on the ground about 24 hours now coming in from California And I feel like I found my tribe Just what an amazing amazing conversations at lunch just an amazing group So I want to ask you a question before we get started because we're talking about financial education here I want you to move a little bit too Stand up if you think personal finance should be taught in every high school in America Please stay standing Okay, you just made the headline Bogle heads stand for financial education So I want to introduce some folks here some really special folks here who are delivering Financial education in local high schools in Virginia in Maryland So I'm gonna ask them to stand don't get embarrassed now. So we have Angela. We have Starlene Julius Alice Loretta Nicole and Laurie is somewhere. I believe hey These are the folks who are These are please stay standing. I got to finish This is just an amazing community of educators that make a difference in their communities in their schools during the pandemic We did a lot of zoom professional development And I got to tell you I smiled every time I saw them on zoom because the energy Enthusiasm that they bring to this There's a movement happening across the US folks and it's happening in classrooms because of educators like yours So thank you But I also know there's other teachers in the room if you have ever taught anybody personal finance Family member maybe in the school community. Maybe a nonprofit. I ran into somebody earlier from Kansas who teaches med school students stand up Educators Thank you. So I really shouldn't be teaching this you all should be so I talked about the teachers Next thing I want to do is have you hear from the students.  What is the impact of this course to them? With personal finance you take everything that happens in the real world and you bring it into the classroom It's important to learn about it while you're in high school instead of graduating out of college and having no idea You don't want to leave college and then be in debt and sometimes that debt can fall you for the rest of your adult Life when my mom was in high school. She didn't have a class like this I couldn't just ask my parents questions about like banking or finances because my parents hadn't gone through any of that Since my family didn't talk much about money. I actually didn't know anything at all. I didn't know investing with a thing I didn't even know financial literacy was a thing at all either This is really the only class that were given that's this applicable to real life I've learned how to calculate a mortgage. I've learned what ways credit card companies try to trap you These little skills right now that don't seem like they're so fundamental in the long one will really help you out and Allow you to live your life the way that you you want to live it I 100% think that all high school students should take this course I don't know how someone could be successful without knowing how to manage their money if you want kids who know How to not be in debt what a credit score is What kind of credit card options there are out there if you want them to be more knowledgeable Safer with their money as well as be better spenders than personal finance is a must So I travel a lot around the country when people find out what I do They usually say one or sometimes always say one thing sometimes two the first thing they say it's the class I wish I had The second question the second thing they say is can you teach my kids? So that's kind of what is my passion now? How do we ensure that every high school student? So gets a personal finance course. I just want you to blurt out a guess What percent of kids today? Do you think take a personal find or required? It's part of the graduation requirements What percent of kids in America currently are required to take a personal finance course? five percent 20 60 Zero okay, so here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna. I'm gonna give you a number You're gonna stand up if you think it's over this number 15% Stand up if you think more than 15% of a high school America high schoolers Okay, I'm not gonna tell you the answer till later. Thank you. Most of you think it's less than 15% I'm gonna keep that keep that in mind. So here's what we're gonna go over today. I'm gonna give you a quick Background on me who I am what motivates me gonna give you a high-level view of what's happening in America when it comes to financial education and Then I want to spend a lot of time thinking about this group How do we mobilize bogal heads who are so passionate and want to give back? So I'm gonna give you a broad range of options in terms of how you can help and then obviously there'll be resources available for you This slide looks different than it was originally. Oh, here we go starts lower left-hand corner I'm seven years old. I'm the fifth child of six our neighbor. Mrs. Baddison breaks her hips. You need somebody to walk her dog I'm the second youngest but my younger brother can't walk Because he's only two or he's only one. So I get to walk Mrs. Baddison's dog. I walk three times a day I'm in New Jersey. So we get the change of seasons took a year for her hip to To recover but every Friday After I dropped her Jack Russell tear her off She would hand me a crisp $5 bill And I would walk a third of a mile to the United Jersey Bank on Hardenburg Avenue I would deposit that $5 they'd stamp my passbook and At the dinner table my dad would ask to see my passbook We talked about money a lot and you'll find out why very shortly, but that's a savings habit and Thank God. I got it at the age of seven because I had four older brothers and sisters and I Saw very early on if I wanted to go to college. I was gonna have to basically pay my way because we're middle class six kids too many to pay for us to go to school but not enough to get financial aid So it was very early on. So when I hear people say save 10% save 20% I'm convinced my savings rate was about 98% the reason being my friends Really started to wonder How come Tim always forgets his wallet? I'm paying them back now. So don't worry So that was the dog walking job you there's picture of my parents up there. It couldn't have been better role models My father gave me work ethic No college degree grew up in London during the Blitz got sent to the countryside very self-sufficient depression era kid Rose up from bank teller to senior vice president Barclays Bank in New York He also taught me how to ladder CDs Because I was I had newspaper routes. I was a golf caddy Five-year CDs. I still remember thinking it was illegal 15% interest double your money in five years It's like crazy, but again all the adults are dealing with inflation. I'm dealing with great interest rates So that really helped me get through college too My mom she taught me to give back Six kids weren't enough for her. She was the Girl Scout troop leader She wrote the newsletter for the parish. She visited soup kitchens and she taught Must have had a 30 to 40 year career doing story hour When she passed We went through her desk and we saw stacks of those, you know this marble composition My mom did lesson plans for story hour And she put and it was it was kind of funny to read because it would be like little Johnny's acting up I don't know how to exactly get Johnny's attention But this emphasis on like what went well what didn't go well And so I think I got I think she gave me the the teaching gene because that was something that really really mattered to her The idea of giving back so I had an opportunity to give back East Side College prep is an East Palo Alto And it's a school serving first in their family kids who want to be first in the family to go to college first-gen kids So I visit the campus Totally inspired by the founder because they send a hundred percent of their kids to college These are kids first in their family to go primarily lower income primarily black and brown students And I was so inspired. How can I help you said well? You know something about finance or I was like, yeah, sure. I'll do it. I didn't know I was signing up for 25 hours of Lessons with three sections of students, and I didn't have a curriculum a lot of passion But no curriculum. Well that experience I saw two things I saw the eagerness that kids wanted to learn this Just incredible and then I think the secondary effect and anybody who's taught young people know this They went home and told their parents So I you know went to a Schwab office to help open an IRA for one of the parents I got calls from they wanted to discuss their budget I had a parent who called me like five years after I taught her son To say how proud she was that she knew what a target date fund was on a 401k list So I'm hooked. I'm like I did that for eight summers about halfway through teaching that I said I got to do something about this and that's when I started next-gen personal finance So, you know every startup has to have a B-hag a big hairy audacious goal. So in 2021 We got together as a team and frankly the teachers Were the ones you know We were just at lunch talk or earlier today talking about how we're gonna get Maryland to require a personal finance coach when we hear enough teachers say We love this course. The students are benefiting but not enough of them are so we set mission 2030 My thinking behind this is every high school student by the time they cross that graduation stage in 2030 We'll have a one semester personal finance course. We did it in 2021 So I did a little bit of research from the time Kennedy said let's go to the moon to the time We did was about eight years We did in 2021. I'm thinking nine years folks This isn't rocket science This isn't rocket science, right? We know the curriculum. We know teachers are eager to teach it. Let's let's kind of make it happen Quickly what we do Three legs of the stool I Wanted to be the one-stop shop for teachers So if you need a lesson, it's there if you want activities, it's there if you want games, it's there if you I Wanted it to be kind of that one stop where teachers would go We have an arcade Games really matter, but games have to teach also. So every one of those games has a reflection sheet They were played 10 million times last year The thing I'm most proud of is that is the teacher professional development So on the curriculum side 90,000 teachers have signed up on our website I would say two-thirds of them come from word of mouth And something works in the classroom teachers tell others the teacher professional development last three four years 17,000 teachers have spent on average 24 hours with us And so we have certification courses if you want to go deep and talk about investing or you want to go Banking and budgeting or I teach a course in psychology of money We offer 12 of those courses and we also have on-demands for people who want To be able to do things on their own time their own pace And I'm going to spend more time talking about advocacy So you see the bottom there free and always will be so I created an endowment to fund our operation because frankly I Can't imagine a better investment to make Than in the next generation and giving them the financial skills that they need So you all are welcome to go to the website to the extent that you're looking for resources to go out and teach It's there So funny story. I'm in Salt Lake City Probably a second year of our company. So we're still trying to figure things out. How should we teach investing? Should we go and the whole I think Teachers will tell you investing is the most challenging subject for them to teach So gosh if you could mentor teachers in your community to help them understand investing better that would be awesome So anyway, I'm in a room full of teachers. I'm doing a presentation about investing a hundred teachers and I start by asking how many of you Teach your students about index funds If you look closely, there's one hand raised. I think there were two others in the room There were about three out of a hundred And I said, okay, this is my mission is every student because guess what the most popular game in high schools is when it comes to investing The stock market game go ahead and Google how to win the stock market game and tell me that has anything to do with sound investing principles Right high beta stocks right around earnings biotechs better And it's a short time frame, right? And so If you go to our curriculum, you'll see we spend a lot of time talking about index funds We talk about target date funds and really because even if they're playing the stock market game I want educators to feel like okay, I can also teach a different approach because Kids are naturally interested in stocks. So you do have to spend a little bit of time talking about it but Clearly because they'll often that will be the first thing they know a company, right No, know what you're investing in which probably Can be a dangerous strategy. My son loved roblox So okay, how much do you love it? Why don't we put $50 in and buy some roblox? Yeah, he got he now understands volatility Which kind of gets to the point here those of you who have Children or grandchildren like how do I talk about investing with young people? And so, you know the strategy I've used with my son is basically the 50-50 method You know what? Pick companies you're interested in so let him because he's going to be naturally He's going to care about that right and then I'm going to take the other half And we're going to put it in an index fund and we're going to look at it every quarter To get him understand and the good news is I got him hooked on stocks In 2021 Great timing you learned a great lesson about how Those high flying pandemic driven stocks that did really well Didn't perform so well, so I think he's an index fund now guy too So here's the progress That's been happening. This is what you're seeing here is the number of states That either through their legislature or through their state department of education require Every high school student in the state to take a personal finance course So the shorthand here is in a little over two and a half three years. We've gone from eight to 23 states So tripling the next state Which is just waiting for the wisconsin governor's signature will put us over 50 mark So more than one out of every two students will take a personal finance course Just with the states on the board now it takes time for them to implement usually three four-year implementation period We're working with them on curriculum professional development but Yeah, the world has changed pretty rapidly How many people not many people thought it was 15 percent or higher? Now you're hearing it's 50 percent. I think there's It's happened so quickly So you're probably interested what's happening in my state? What's happening in your state? So the dark blue Our states those are like the original eight. They've had it in place the longest the lighter Shade our states where they're in the process of implementing And so again if you're in any of those states that are in the process of implementing They're probably very interested in talking to people who might be able to assist Kind of at the at the school level and then I'll talk about ways to get engaged for the states That don't have any boxes around them So maybe you're curious not about your state, but you're curious about your school community Every year we hire montana state university. They go through 12 000 high school course catalogs to identify what is happening in the school around personal finance if it's gold because This happens at the grassroots level great story out of massachusetts soup comparado who teaches at swamp scott high school 16 year odyssey Got personal finance to be a graduation requirement. That's the passion that educators have to make this happen So if you want to go figure out what's happening in your school If you google got finance How many of you remember the got milk campaign? I gotta tell i'm the oldest person at our company and I said got finance and nobody really Got it So that's just google got finance question mark and it'll take you to that map So let's talk about The role that you can play And i've kind of given you a continuum Of options here from on the left hand side Go in and teach a lesson Just and i'll tell you the best network is the school your child goes to Because that's gonna A school where you know who the economics teacher is or even the personal finance You're gonna know what's being taught in your school. Obviously if you have a student there But if you're going into a school cold You'll have the information from the website on the far end I'd say the most dramatic role i've seen in individual play. This was a financial planner out of minnesota Steve lear He said i really want this to happen in minnesota, so i'm going to go out and pay for a lobbyist to make it happen And you know what it happened in minnesota this year So that's on the far end on the advocacy front so Really important point for those of you who haven't been into a classroom Attention spans are short so 10 years ago i'm in front of it was probably 12 years ago i'm in front of these ninth graders and i'm like I cannot wait to tell them everything in my brain and just distill it to them and share all my wisdom with them And about five minutes in i'm like i lost them It's over you got to come with an activity you got to come with something to do and i'm happy to share These resources with you and i've given you both no tech options as well as tech options So just real quickly the bean game Really simple game you have 20 beans or they can be pennies or any manipulative and you got Two sheets of paper with things That you would expect to see in a budget and you got to allocate the 20 beans needs versus wants resource constraints And then you throw the wild card in that oh guess what? Your pay got cut From 20 to 13 Go pull seven beans off the then you really understand wants versus needs the bean game extremely popular another one let's Make a mutual fund hits do not understand what a mutual fund is It's not kind of this natural Thing that they've ever experienced so we have a get out of the seat game every student is given a ticker symbol And then we ask them to form Special groups go find somebody else with a similar ticket and we have the returns on the on the flip side Pair up there's two of them go find two other pairs now There's six of them and then it ends up it works well with a group of 30 Because guess what happens when they all get together What index are they? The dow Jones now we obviously make the point that very few people invest in the dow jones index But it gives them idea of what diversification looks like so that's Let's make a mutual fund on the tech side one of my favorite interactives Because index funds I think mutual funds are hard index funds are pretty difficult too. So website called fin Vis comm fin viz.com. It's a market map Of the s and p 500 And so I think a lot of teachers will put it up on the board when they're teaching investing And you see how how did those 500 stocks perform the size of the box is the market cap of the company Gives you red versus blue or a red versus green. What's up? What's down? And then it has a toggle on the left hand side So this was a terrible day in the market But when we look three six 12 months out It's a very different picture very easy to talk about short versus long term. So that's fin viz.com We also have a game called stacks We needed to do the impossible we needed to create an exciting game about index funds It's like watching paint dry, right?  So that's our game stacks our most popular game in the arcade The next thing you do Is you could start an investment club? So i'm going to ask actually One of our educators julius presowski and he's going to talk about an investment club He runs at his high school in baltimore So so uh, I teach personal finance in a private high school in baltimore started about um eight years ago We started with an elective Within two years we had seven sections and then at that point they were like well We just should make it mandatory because almost everybody takes it. So we are mandatory. It's a one semester course Mr. Ted said we teach investing but In a one semester course, you don't have a lot of time to teach, you know about stocks So I decided that I would do it an investment club. So we have an activity period And once a week we meet and we have about 65 boys in in the group And we come in and I've used market watch for the investment game And I just set the criteria at about a hundred thousand dollars that each kid could invest Um, and then we just make them go long. I don't let them do shorts or anything like that We don't let them buy on margin or anything like that And then I try to just teach them with just different short power points Why do you invest in certain stocks? You know, when would you sell those stocks because what we find is that like as tim said Mutual funds could be very boring obviously and you know, uh An index fund is not exciting, but tim you gave me a good idea I let the boys go for three months and then We have the winners get some free lunches But now i'm going to make them pick an index fund on the other side of it And then kind of go well, can we beat the index fund in a set period of time? But the kids I think need to learn that You know investing short term Is a little bit like gambling right because a lot of our kids today have The gambling accounts with sports and I see that on their phone all the time and I'm like, okay Well, we need to learn the good and the bad and I think sometimes Losing is a great way to learn about investing and I tell them. Hey guys, I've lost money in investing I've made money in investing, but now I don't pick singleton stocks anymore. I'm a bogelhead, right? I'm in vanguard So I kind of think that's the best way to go about it is to get them involved and do it with fictitious money But show them that most these kids don't make money at the end of the three to four month period and they're like, yeah This is a lot harder than I thought Thanks, Julius All right, if you want to go a little bit further You teach a course and you know, I would recommend And we have free I told you everything we do is free come come to our professional development and collaborate with other educators and figure out What's what's working in the class? but we have You know scope and sequence which means we lay out our lessons and how to teach them and they're very interactive I think a lot of people get intimidated because like, oh, I got to be the sage on stage what if they start asking me all these questions and The thing I learned very early on As an educator, which I think was the most powerful thing I learned Was when they asked a question. I didn't know I'd say Let's figure this out together Right, because we've never had we've never had better tools to go out and find information to me because they need to understand also that I guess the other thing I would I would say which I should have mentioned earlier is there's a heavy emphasis our first Unit In our course Is behavioral economics Let's let students grapple with their relationship with money before we dive into the all of the details Let's talk about all the cognitive biases we have which make it difficult for us to do the thing we should do Let's also develop a level of empathy Because you might decide You want to buy lottery tickets and if I come in as the educator and say that's dumb Let's Why don't you invest that in an index fund? I think it's morgan hausel's book which I can't recommend enough psychology of money I think it's his first or second chapter He says put yourself in somebody else's shoes. I'm working three jobs Minimum wage That two dollar ticket I buy is called hope So be careful about judging not a lot of shoulds I don't think a lot of should should be part of personal finance because you're going to turn I think this was mentioned earlier if you're too sanctimonious you're going to turn people off Right so understand somebody somebody said this I forget who but I think it rings really true Every decision every decision makes sense right when you look at somebody else's decision say, how could you make that every decision makes sense With enough information I had a conversation with a teacher. She said I always lease cars. What do you do?  She says oh, I was traveling Five six years ago and Car broke down. We had to get a tow truck to bring us back to where we mean She had a traumatic experience with an older car So she vowed in her head Three to four years is all I want to run a car for And I could say well, but the economics say this and so I think this Empathy is incredibly important when you're teaching this class Don't reinvent the wheel. There's a lot of high quality curricula out there. Ours is customizable, too So we do it in google docs. You file make a copy. You can change it as you like expect the unexpected and I think any long-term educator will tell you embrace continuous improvement. It doesn't always go well But I always thought I was teaching three sections in a row and I was a lot better with the third section than I was with the first Those reps just thinking okay, how do I make this a little bit better a little bit better? You do that over a career and you're a rock star teacher right continuous improvement just like my mom taking notes in about 100 different marble notebooks Men are a teacher They tell us investing is the most challenging subject for them to teach right And maybe like maybe we can help facilitate that Again, this is the problem with an entrepreneur. They just immediately like what if we created a list Of bogelheads who want to mentor a teacher we match with our 90 000 teacher teacher account base And try and make some of those matches because it could be difficult if you're not You know if your kids aren't in the school system or you're further away, so maybe that's an idea We'll explore But I know I know they would I'll turn to my teachers. What do you think? All right, you know where they're sitting And the last is advocacy So I remember in 2021 thinking this was the craziest thing I've I just got tired of people saying everybody should be taught personal finance, but Nobody was really had figured out a strategy as to how to go ahead and do it And I love this Margaret me quote Because it really is a small group of committed people that are in this community This personal finance education community and there's a small group of people on a relative basis That are bogelheads, but together The power is is just intense So i'll give you two two choices here Anybody ever attend anybody school board members here? All right Thank you for your service so It often starts at the school board level You want it? You got to build a coalition though folks. You can't just show up and and will something to happen Find the teacher in the school who's really passionate about it find students do a student survey One of the reasons this thing is happening at such a rapid pace Is when you survey it's 80 percent approval 80 percent approval tell me another subject in this polarized world we live in that 80 percent of people agree on It's not it's not bipartisan. It's non-partisan and it's common sense So we've got resources available in terms of the research that says it works the power points Make the convincing points and also how do you overcome objections? Because they There are a lot of them And then on the state legislature front Again, you're kind of upping your game even more. We track every year legislation I think in the past year there were about 30 states that had 70 or 80 bills around financial literacy some of them are window dressing Because the politicians know this is popular They'll get a press release out that they introduced this bill but some of them are are serious and You know if the legislators you've got state senators and you got state representatives the action here is at the state Not at the federal level, but smaller states. You probably know your representative really well We've got model legislation. We have kind of best practices in terms of how you think about and I think the power of us You know next-gen personal finance advocating is not only Are we looking for legislative solutions? But we're there to support them For implementation because that's always the hang up New graduation requirements don't come along very often So they're looking for a partner who can do it at no cost Which we which we offer so Get to know your legislator Let them know this is uh important And then you have opportunities usually the first stop in the legislature is the education committee They'll hold a hearing and that's when parents teachers and students steal the show Because these students have so much gravitas and they're so passionate about making this happen I can point to you know, Wisconsin um Florida no it wasn't Florida or three or four states where Kids just lined up two hours of kids talking about why this is so important. It leaves an impression on politicians and then the last Is you can be like steve in higher lobbyists so To get from eight to 23 what we realized we had a grassroots effort We gave su comparado a grant because she made it a requirement in her school And we probably gave 150 of those grants, but we discovered two and a half years ago when companies want To affect policy. What do they do? They hire lobbyists so in the last two years we hired 25 lobbyists and about half have gotten over the finish line Because we realized this is how you create change and it's the lobbyists and the combination of The educators and the students who make a difference Uh, so we have some questions for you. Sure. You ready? Yep. Okay okay so A lot of the material it seems that is used in financial education in schools is sponsored product driven Propaganda Yeah No, that's um, can you tell me first of all is that true and if so How do how do you stop that? Yeah, I would just say we're winning that battle So we hired an independent third party to go out and ask teachers what curriculum they use And the good news is I think our share was over 80 85 percent. So our best I guess our Our best weapon against that is providing great curriculum. That's not sponsored again We're fully endowed. So we're not raising money from financial institutions either because frankly, that's one of the challenges in the space And I think if you give teachers a non-commercial option That doesn't have You know big bank embrace emblazoned on it. I think they'll choose ours Another question about investing so you you're talking about investing today generally, but um How about budgeting? Emergency fund is all that part of the curriculum also. So we have 12 uh 10 units in our semester course So it's all the you know managing credit types of credit budgeting um psychology of money Consumer skills like there's this thing called dark patterns, right like websites that gets you to do things that you really shouldn't do but you know, so There's the full full gamut. The other thing is we do we supplement with current events so when gamestop took off we created a you know, we've got a Phenomenal teammate who you saw in the video very short very briefly. Yeneli Espinall She creates a weekly current events video with a quiz So we can also fill in the gaps when the world changes which it whether it's silicon valley bank imploding or all banks You know at risk to gamestop to crypto So the other thing we're really attuned to you got to be current And again, we have this great feedback loop here of these educators coming in and telling us Here's what kids are talking about and it would it would blow your mind For x trading. Are you kidding me? Well, guess what 76 of kids are getting financial advice from social media So that's the other reason I think we have a lot of momentum behind this is if we don't provide a foundation Of course, they're being fed to the wolves, right get rich quick So there's something called just in time Education and there are studies that show just in time education works better Than teaching them in a class if you comment on that. Yeah, I think When you stop and think about High school and actually it's on my last slide When you think about the decisions young persons making in high school There is a lot of just in time your parents hand you the keys to the car better understand auto insurance You may have gotten your first part-time job Got to learn how to read a pay stub. Why didn't I get 325 per hour? That was my first job I remember the sense of revulsion I had like what do you mean? I'm not getting 325 an hour So that's part of it paying taxes another probably the most important decision kids are going to make is staring them right in the face What am I going to do after high school? And so we've got an entire unit on paying for college but also alternatives to college To provide the full view so I would argue I agree with just in time And I think you got to create a curriculum our high school curriculum is Just in time in terms of all these decisions. Okay, last question. We have time for and this is a good one What if you're not in one of those 23 states? And you have a student or know someone who would like to take This class can you do it online even though you're not in one of the states? Yeah, so I think it's it's we really focus on teacher led And so find a teacher in the high school and again when you come to them and say hey There's a curriculum and there's folks who will help train you around professional development That's available because that's kind of our focus. So this isn't student facing per se It's our distribution channel is really educators because You know the scale that you get every educator teachers on average 100 kids And so that was kind of the path we chose how many californians in the room Okay, you're going to have a chance in november of 2024. We're working to get a Personal finance education requirement on the ballot because the california legislature has spent two decades Dithering and there's a 450,000 kids who graduate every year from california high schools that deserve this So the states that aren't up up there. There's about 10 of them We're we're lobbying in for the next year and so you can expect You know look for the bill tracker that'll tell you when the bill gets introduced And then reach out to me tim at ngpf.org and we'll get you involved Tim we're grateful for you to come in today and tell us what you're doing. Think you're a fantastic job And so glad we the bogelhead community can thanks can be part of this. So thank you very much


Hello everyone, welcome to this video of knowledge representation techniques. I am Amrita Chaturvedi from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur. The knowledge representation techniques that will be described today are object attribute value triplets, semantic networks, uncertain facts and rules. Object attribute value triplets are used to represent facts about objects and their attributes. They represent an attribute value of an object. They can also be represented graphically in this way. Object attribute value. For example, if I wish to say that the category of mango is fruit, I can write it as mango has attribute category that has value fruit. So mango category fruit. If I wish to say that the taste of a mango is sweet, I may write it as mango has attribute taste that has value sweet. So mango tastes sweet. It can also be represented in tabular form. Semantic networks or concept maps reflect cognition. They model knowledge in the same way as human beings visualize it. The visual model of concept of some specific domain connected by some type of relationship in the form of link or arc. They can be easily extended by adding some more concepts and relationships and are also easy to learn. This is an example of a semantic network or a concept map. The rectangles here denote the concepts and the arrows denote the relationships. For example, the sherry is a kind of mango. Alphonso is a kind of mango. Mango is a kind of fruit. Grape is a kind of fruit. Apple is a kind of fruit. Fruit has attribute taste. Fruit has attribute shape. Fruit has attribute color and fruit has attribute variety. Now it is easy to see that concept maps can be visualized as a collection of object attribute value triplets. For example, the sherry has attribute a kind of that has value mango. Alphonso has attribute a kind of that has value mango. Mango has attribute a kind of that has value fruit. Grape has attribute a kind of that has value fruit. Apple has attribute a kind of that has value fruit and same goes with other relationships as well. Now let us see how to draw a concept map knowledge that is represented in natural language. It is a three step process. First of all we need to identify the concepts and then we identify the relationships between the concepts and then finally we plot the concepts and relationships into the concept map. For example, plant pathology is also known as phytopathology is a branch of agricultural science. Now here the concepts are plant pathology phytopathology and agricultural science. We draw these concepts in the form of rectangles in concept map and finally join them with the help of the relationships between them. Plant pathology is connected to phytopathology by the also known as relationship. Similarly, plant pathology is connected to agricultural science concept by the is branch of relationship. Then it deals with plant diseases and their management. The concepts here are plant diseases and plant disease management. So we plot them as concepts in the concept map and link them with the plant pathology concept by means of deals with relationship. Plant diseases are caused by pathogens. Here the concepts are plant diseases and pathogens. So we plot the pathogen as concept and link it with the plant disease concept by means of is caused by relationship. Pathogens may be biotic or abiotic. So here the concepts are biotic pathogen and abiotic pathogen. So we plot them as concepts in the concept map and link them with the pathogen concept by means of a kind of relationship. Biotic pathogens include fungi, bacteria and nematodes. Here the concepts are fungi, bacteria and nematodes. So we plot them as concepts in the concept map and link them with the biotic pathogen by means of a kind of relationship. Abiotic pathogens include frost, air pollutants and toxicants.


I wanna welcome, first of all, I really wanna welcome all of you to our first Bennett Center lecture of the semester. Our speaker this evening is Dr. Glenn Diner, Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies and Chair of Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College. Dr. Diner's book, Yonkels Tavern, Jews, Liquor and Life in the Kingdom of Poland, published by Oxford University Press in 2014. And he's gonna be basing most, if not all of his talk, I think, on his findings in this book. I wanna just begin by saying that his book really is honestly one of the most eye-opening books on Jews in modern Poland that I have read in some time. It is also one of the most accessible. I leave it to Dr. Diner to share with us this evening the fruits of his painstaking research, which, as we'll hear this evening, was rooted in a great variety of historical and literary texts, including case studies, petitions, poems, and Polish romantic short stories. Much of his archival research was available to historians, but apparently nobody bothered to take notice. Moment Magazine described Yonkels Tavern as a landmark volume. And his book sheds light not only on Jews and tavern keeping in 19th century Poland, but also on myths and counter myths concerning Jews, Jewish acculturation in Eastern Europe, the persistence of religious traditionalism, and 19th century governmental attempts to quote, normalize Polish Jews. Let me add here that Yonkels Tavern may be Dr. Diner's most recent book, but it's not his first. His other works include Men of Silk, the Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society, published in 2006, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He also wrote Jews in the Kingdom of Poland, 1815 to 1914, which was Volume 27 in Poland, Studies in Polish Jewry, published in 2014, and he is editor of a book entitled Holy Descent, Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe, published in 2011. Dr. Diner received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brandeis University, his Master of Arts degree from McGill University in Montreal, and his PhD from Brandeis. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Award, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies, housed at Princeton University from 2010 to 2011, and he is currently a senior NEH fellow at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. Tonight's lecture is being made possible through the great generosity of the Benet-Briff, Abraham Lodge, number 89 of Bridgeport, and I really wanna take this opportunity to formally recognize these wonderful men. I was just, I can't even tell you how honored I was when I was invited to, it's kind of a brunch. It was advertised as a lunch, but we had pancakes, so for me that's a brunch here in Fairfield and they presented the Benet Center for the work that we do here at the university with a check that really made tonight's lecture possible. My thanks as well to Meg McCaffrey, wherever she may be, I don't know, where is, oh, Meg's right back there in the green, the program manager of the Benet Center for all the work that she did in making this evening a reality, and my thanks as well to Corinna, where's Corinna? She's somewhere, there's Corinna in the back, I can't see her, she's somewhere in the room. She'll be selling Dr. Diner's books later after tonight's event, and Dr. Diner will be happy to sign books for you. I'm usually a much more eloquent than I am tonight, and again, I apologize for my voice. Really it's my enthusiasm for Dr. Diner's research and my really wanting to meet him this evening that led me to drive up here from White Plains even though I know I should be home resting my voice. But I wanna thank all of you for being with us and now please join me in formally introducing and welcoming to Fairfield University, Dr. Glenn Diner. I actually thought it was pretty eloquent, so. So this is an unfamiliar part of the world, even those of us who think we know it probably don't know it that well. The result of the iron curtain, the results of the destruction of the Jewish civilization there, so if you have questions while I'm talking, something to be clarified, please by all means, I'm happy to be interrupted. I encourage you to interrupt me. But what I began with, what you see up here, is an image that should for many people be a challenging image. It's a painting by a Polish artist by the name of Józef Chalmoński. And I don't know how well you can see it, but what it depicts here is a common everyday scene in front of a tavern consisting of Catholic peasants dancing. And you'll see over on that side there are Jewish peddlers and traders off to the side. It seems like it's a Jewish holiday being celebrated, but it's a real scene of coexistence. This kind of image is challenging because we're used to something very different. Let's all admit that our image of Jewish life in Eastern Europe is formed in great part by the wonderful play and movie Fiddler on the Roof. And you'll recall that Jews and Christians lived very isolated existences according to that depiction. Even the tavern scene in Fiddler on the Roof, if you recall, it's all Jews drinking in the tavern. And even that aspect is problematic for reasons I'm going to get to as we go on. Here, instead of complete isolation, we see a kind of coexistence, but Chalmerski was interesting in the way he depicted them because they're together and yet they're apart. You'll see the two cohorts, it's almost like they're acknowledging each other without acknowledging each other. If you looked inside, you would most likely see a Jewish tavern keeper as well for reasons I'm going to get to. So this challenge is one image that is of separation of isolation. But the other perhaps even more powerful image that we have of Jewish life in Eastern Europe is, of course, pogroms, the Holocaust, destruction and violence. And once again, we don't see that here. Now Chalmerski did lots of these, he would go through the countryside and depict what he saw. It was the mundane, but he kind of made the mundane lively and vibrant. And he didn't seem to really have an agenda. He's somebody I really trust as an observer. It seems that not all Polish Jewish life was violence and anti-Semitism. Now, of course, there were terrible episodes of violence and they were on the increase as we come into the 20th century. This is from the 1870s. But in a way that almost proves the point, the reason why so many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust is because that's where so many of the world's Jews lived. It was about three fourths of the world's Jewish population by the end of the 18th century, beginning the 19th century. Three fourths of the world's Jewish population resided in Eastern Europe, Russia, Poland and other proximate areas. The reason there were so many Jews living there is because of this. For many centuries, after their arrival in the Middle Ages, fleeing violence further westward, for many centuries, they had managed to carve out a relatively prosperous and secure existence. And really the symbol of that coexistence was the Jewish-run tavern. For reasons I'm going to get into now. But first, we have to deal with the maps. What is Poland? It's an impossible question to answer because Poland keeps changing throughout the ages. At its high point, at its largest geographic area, it was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, hyphenated because it was a commonwealth of two kingdoms that had once been separate, but were now under the rule of a single monarch by 1569. The Jews had become a very important part of this economy and the society as they'd been invited in. They weren't invited in because they were so loved, they weren't even liked that much. But the nobility really owned the vast majority of this land. They needed somebody to run the enterprises, the mills, the tolls, the fishponds, and the taverns and distilleries. And so as Jews are coming to these areas, the nobility is deciding that only Jews can be trusted to run these various enterprises. They're not, however, managing their agricultural holdings, their actual estates. Poland is the breadbasket of Europe. It's a very rural agriculture, agrarian environment. But it's too much for most nobles to allow Jews to actually run the agricultural landed estates. That would make them the lords over the Christians, many who have become peasants, have become serfs at this point. And Jews certainly aren't allowed to own land for fear that they'll buy up all of Poland with their legendary wealth. That's one major reason. But they will allow them to lease their non-agricultural enterprises and that provides a really important economic niche. We can talk really about two overlapping systems of economic symbiosis, mainly between the Jews and the nobles in these centuries. The first you saw in the very first painting is mercantile, trade. Jews seem to form increasingly the vast majority of merchants. Every one from a small-time peddler who would go through the countryside with his knapsack or sack on his back to the large-scale international merchant. The Jews are bringing in goods to areas that lack them. For the nobles, they're useful because they bring in luxuries. For the country folk, they bring in necessities. Jews are constantly on the move and they're distributing goods throughout the countryside. And also services. And many will be agents of the nobility and so on. So that's one system of symbiosis is the Jews are tolerated, even protected because they're the ones who have access to these trade networks. And sometimes, as I mentioned, it could be international. You have a cousin in Istanbul. You have a brother, sister in Western Europe. And so the advantage of being the diaspora group, you create these trade networks. Kinship networks. And networks with your co-religionists. The other major system that I really like to emphasize today is more unique to this area, to Eastern Europe. And that's the leaseholding system. That's the one I just described where the nobility will lease its estates, enterprises, really almost only to Jews if they're non-agricultural ones.  And they would travel thanks to all these Jewish-run taverns throughout the countryside and throughout the cities and towns. And it was like a hospitality system. And of course, the Jewish tavern keepers benefited from all the Jewish customers. But their main customers were really locals. The peasantry now serves. The Jewish tavern keeper becomes more and more important because the number one export, really the linchpin of the entire Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth economy is grain, the grain export trade. They were exporting trade throughout Western and Central Europe. That's why they were known as the bread basket of Europe. And anything they couldn't sell or export, they would turn it into vodka. This was rye, so they called it vodka. And you'll notice, if you look at this chart, that the exports aren't steep decline with improvements in transportation, communication. It's gonna be absolutely devastated by the 19th century because of the steamship, which is bringing in lots of cheap grain from here, from the United States. So that grain trade is going to be declining steeply, which means the nobility needs to do something with all that grain. And what they do is they turn more and more of it into vodka. They sell it to their serfs on monopolistic terms in their Jewish-run taverns. It's produced in the Jewish-run distilleries. And that's that whole system that develops. You can see that it's profitable.  But you can also see how it's not very good for productivity on estates because your entire workforce becomes addicted alcohol. As we call it today, alcoholism. So there's an unstable aspect of this, but really the Jewish-run tavern had become so deeply ingrained in the Polish landscape that the great works of Polish literature inevitably will describe the Jewish-run tavern. The most famous being Adam Mickiewicz's work, Pantadeusz. It's not known to us, but every Polish school child will memorize portions of this epic poem. It means Lord Thaddeus in English. And Pantadeusz has a Jewish-run tavern and a Jewish tavernkeeper named Janko. To quote Mickiewicz from a distance, the rickety old tavern looked like a Jew rocking in prayer, the roof like a hat, the thatch spinning down like a beard, the sooty walls like a gabardine, and wooden carvings emanating like tzitzit down his body. And they don't bother to translate tzitzit either in the original Polish. You can see how for Mickiewicz, the Jewish-run tavern is just etched into the landscape. And I paired it rather arbitrarily with this painting, which doesn't look very Jewish, but you can imagine from the description what Mickiewicz was trying to convey. And then as the heroes enter the tavern, they're met by the Jewish tavernkeeper. It was Sunday, and from church after morning mass, they came to Janko to drink and relax. In everyone's gray cup, sorry, in everyone's cup, gray vodka switched. Round with a bottle, the bar made rushed, Janko the tavernkeeper stood in the midst. And I paired this with a lithograph from the 1870s by somebody named Gustav Pilati, but it gives you the same sense of the Jewish tavernkeeper as really a central figure for local life. We can't describe this as integration, at most it's economic integration, but we do have a symbiotic relationship. Once again, we have a Christian holiday, they're dancing, and the Jewish tavernkeeper is pouring the vodka, and there's a Jewish musician as well who's applying the music. They're reliant on each other, and it turns out really that the tavernkeeper, the Jew, there was one in every town of village, became a kind of mediator, a central figure in local life.  And these taverns themselves, they were much more than taverns. They were hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, places of business, country stores. Distilleries were always attached to them too, that's where the stuff was produced, and I could go on and on. They were really kind of a little urban island in these rural environments, and they depended on their Jewish tavernkeeper. In fact, it goes so far that I came to see the Jewish tavernkeeper almost as a kind of a local priest, maybe an antipriest, because every church service, every mass, every wedding, every funeral, began in the church, but then involved a migration en masse to the tavern, where there'd be, if it was a wedding, especially a big celebration, the newlyweds having just been blessed by the priest would now be met by the Jewish tavernkeeper. He'd propose a toast to the young couple. Everyone would drink, and then they'd start dancing, and of course everybody gets inebriated, except, according to these accounts, the Jew who remained suspiciously sober. So you can see he's very much ingrained and yet very much apart, and I think that's the way everyone kind of wanted it in these days. They didn't want too much closeness, but they relied on one another. And as we're gonna see later on, the Jews also relied on the Christians for their own religious observations, observances, sorry. They were very mutually reliant, imbricated. Poland was partitioned at the end of the 18th century, wiped off the map of Europe. Most of it, the green portions, went to the Tsarist Empire, and a lot of it is gonna become famously the pale of settlement. The yellow gold portions, down in the southwest, are going to be taken by the Habsburg Empire, Austria. It's gonna be known as Galicia. The blue portions, a much smaller Jewish population, are going to go to Prussia. So Russia, Prussia, and Austria devour their Polish neighbor, because this was the age of absolutism. And these absolutist monarchs centralized everything, they could raise enormous armies. And the individual Polish nobles who guarded their liberties so ferociously couldn't compete. They were easily bought off, and if they couldn't be bought off, they were invaded, and suddenly Poland is no more. Now this changes everything, but it also changes nothing. Because at the local level, the absolutist monarchs, they don't have extensive bureaucracies, they don't have the ability to really govern, so they have to keep the nobility happy. Number one way they keep them happy, they get to keep their liquor monopoly. It's now the most lucrative commodity in the entire geopolitical region. The entire economy practically is liquor. They're kept happy by keeping their liquor monopoly, and guess who else gets kept in place? They're Jewish tavern keepers. They're lessees. The nobles also run things at the local level. Not only can the absolutist monarchs bureaucracy not be everywhere at once, it seems like they can be nowhere at once, to judge by the archival documents I've seen. Really it's the nobles who are running things. Now I mentioned this danger to the whole economy, this symbiotic relationship, and that is you're placing Jews in a very powerful position as this local arbiter, and they're selling this highly addictive intoxicating substance, which is causing drunkenness. So it's going to, there's always gonna be this underlying tension there, and a lot of resentment too. The technology only complicates things, because the grain trade has been killed by the partitions. There are now borders with enormous tariffs, and it costs more to export, to transport the grain than anything you could ever make back by selling it. So they're turning more and more and more grain into vodka, and with technology, it's getting stronger and it's getting cheaper. Now with the new technology arriving from Western Europe, and the social reformers take note. They describe coming into villages and towns, and seeing peasants just passed out on the roadside, draped over fences in the middle of the day, mothers feeding vodka to their babies to make them stop crying, just terrible scenes of widespread drunkenness and complete lack of productivity, and it's bad, it's really bad. And it doesn't take long for the Jewish tavern keeper to be blamed. Quintessential outgroup is actually making and selling the stuff. It doesn't look good. So here we have just one depiction in a reformist slash anti-Semitic publication, which has a rather satanic looking tavern keeper in the corner, and the peasants are passed out, this one peasant's passed out on the floor. The Jew only cares about his profit. He's remaining sober so as to exploit the peasant, maybe drive up his debts, and so on. And so there emerges a widespread effort to drive Jews out of the liquor trade based on, I suppose, the very logical and yet illogical at the same time, belief that if you get rid of the Jews who are selling the stuff, you'll get rid of the drunkenness problem. Now it's not as if nobody noticed that places in the interior of Russia where there are no Jews, the peasants are getting just as drunk. There were bureaucrats I found who spoke out against this and said, look, you can't, for one thing, you can't blame Jews for drunkenness if there's drunkenness all over the region where Jews don't even live, but number two, this really astonished me. You cannot expect an entire people who is not given the right to own land to be barred from a major area of trade, like the liquor trade. So you see some progressive bureaucrats in these documents, but they're never listened to. That's the problem. No one wants to hear it. It's much easier to blame the Jews because if you don't blame the Jews, you have to blame the nobles who are making the stuff and ultimately profiting from it. They get a lump sum from the Jewish lessee and so they're insured the steady income. Then the Jew gets to keep anything he makes over that amount. That's the way the system worked. Well, Jews are blamed for the alcoholism and they begin to expel Jews from the countryside. In Tsarist Russia in the Pale Settlement, it's about 21,000 Jews are expelled. And it causes real chaos. And the nobles start saying, we have nobody to run our taverns. Our liquor profits have declined. They start clamoring to allow Jews to come back into it. And the expulsion seems to be eventually reversed. It's never taken off the law books. It's still illegal for Jews to sell liquor in the Pale Settlement proper, but everybody now just looks the other way. The boulds on the Western portion is what the Tsarist Empire takes from Napoleon. Napoleon's brief reign over these areas between 1807 and 1814 created something called the Duchy of Warsaw, which was sort of independent Poland. He gave the Poles a certain amount of autonomy. They could at least feel like they had Poland back again. The Tsar takes it over from Napoleon. Remember, Napoleon tries to invade and is defeated and retreats after the burning of Moscow and then Russia takes over these lands. And that bulge on the side, here's another image of it, if you can make out the outline, comes to be known as the Kingdom of Poland. The Tsar is the king of Poland here. So it has its own laws, its own semi-autonomy and it's sort of an awkward arrangement between the Tsarist Empire proper and the Kingdom of Poland where the Tsar is only king. Either way, it's the Tsarist Empire. But the policies are different. Here, they inherit the Napoleonic way of driving Jews out of the liquor trade, which is much smarter.  Sure, very important question actually. The reason why this area is so important is it contains Warsaw, Lodz, Lublin, other major cities. This is gonna be the heart of the Eastern European Industrial Revolution in this so-called Kingdom of Poland. Okay, so very important. Płock is a mid-sized city and those are pretty much the major ones. If you ever heard of Radom, that's another major city. But in any case, it's a smallish portion of land but it's the most industrialized, the most Western and the most densely Jewish. So to drive Jews out of the liquor trade here, Napoleon creates a Jewish specific concession fee.  And then they double it and they triple it and they quadruple it and in this way, they enrich the coffers of the states and get rid of their Jewish tavern keeper problem all at the same time. It's pretty ingenious, at least it seems that way. Now historians, I'm not the first one to discover this document, but historians have looked at this chart that government officials in the new Kingdom of Poland compiled in order to prove just how well the system of driving Jews out worked and it looks impressive. Over 17,000 families are in the liquor trade officially and I emphasize officially at the beginning of the period and by 1830, it's all the way down to 2000. Historians simply assumed it dwindled to nothing. But I found something interesting. Number one, Pantayush, which describes Yonkel the Tavern Keeper is written in 1834, so after it had practically dwindled to nothing. So that's one problem. Another problem with this count is the complaints. The complaints start rolling in. Jews, despite the law, are continuing to sell liquor in taverns everywhere, on the main roads, on the side roads, in the country, in the city, and so on and so forth. They're completely flagrantly violating the law. And as I saw more and more of these, and I'm gonna go through a case study as well, to show this, it became evident to me that several major powers were behind this drive to get Jews out of the liquor trade, reform minded nobles, absolutist monarchs, clergy didn't want Jews selling the stuff, even rabbis didn't want Jews selling the stuff because they had to keep their taverns running on Shabbat, on the Jewish Sabbath. Every major practical, practically every major power group wanted Jews out of it. So how did they survive underground? Well, there was one group that was still invested in Jews as tavern keepers and distillers, and that was the very Christians they were supposedly exploiting. The local Christians protected and concealed their Jewish tavern keepers. Now this is extraordinary because we're used to thinking of Jewish-Christian relations in Poland as being very hostile, but here I find case after case of Christians actually protecting and concealing their Jewish tavern keepers. Why? We're gonna go into it. But what seems to have happened is the entire Jewish liquor trade is just driven underground. It's, I suppose, an open secret. Everybody seems to know that it's going on still, except for the uppermost officials who don't seem to have any clue. And become enraged when they find out. What seemed to be happening in tavern after tavern after tavern was probably at the instruction of the nobleman. The Jewish tavern keeper would remain in this capacity. Remember, he's much more than a tavern keeper. And simply they prop up a Christian who would sell the stuff directly to, they have a Christian bartender, and he becomes the name, he becomes the front of the enterprise. And that seemed to be business as usual. The division is that Jews would deal with the liquor supplies, continue to work as the nobleman's banker, as his clerk, and he'd continue to help the locals in every way they needed. But the Christian officially was running the tavern. Now, how did this whole system come about so naturally, so successfully? And how is it sustained so well, so easily? For that, we need to go into the rabbinic literature. Because those of you who have a familiarity with rabbinic literature will know that this is not the first time that Jews have found a loophole by means of their Christian neighbors. You ever heard of the Shabbos Goi? It was actually the title of a book by Jacob Katz. You'll know that in order to light the stove, or in a semi-emergency, or even non-emergency, there are ways you could have a Christian neighbor help you and do work that was forbidden on the Sabbath. The taverns had to keep running on the Sabbath to be viable economically. But it was also a little bit of a matter of life and death, not to be too dramatic, but if a nobleman or an upper clergyman arrives in town and wants his drink, are you really gonna tell him, I'm sorry we're closed, it's Saturday? So there developed a system much earlier than the period that I'm talking about. Way back, seemingly as early as the 15th century, in the 1400s, as Jews had first gotten into this business of leasing, really forming a fictitious partnership with a local Christian. So that your tavern was still kept running on Sabbath and major Jewish holidays where you couldn't do any work, because you would have a Christian who owned one seventh of the business. And that one seventh, of course, covers Sabbath day, profits. So anytime, and he had to be, if you read the Shulchanaruch, he has to be an actual partner. He has to buy into the partnership, but they get around it, you're allowed to lend him the money at pennies on interest and so on. The whole thing is a legal fiction. They used to get around it, very clever, but it was natural, it was normal. So this is why, when the state suddenly declares Jewish tavern keeping illegal, it's the most natural thing in the world to use local Christians the same way to circumvent state law. And this seems to be what happened, on a very widespread level, except when they got caught. Now, in this case is particularly interesting because it defies all of the normal ethnic alliances we would assume there is. The blue names are Jews, they're Jewish tavern keepers, the red names are Christians. And you'll look at the very top, there's a court case, that Slomo Wolfowitz Blumrozen versus Zelka Vigdorovic and Lord Frantziszek Kishelnitsky, whom I'll call Lord Kay, for the sake of simplicity. What happened was Slomo Blumrozen was the lessy of the tavern, he was the tavern keeper. But to find other stereotypes, he was disorderly, he seemed to have been drunken, he didn't run a good tavern, and Lord Kay decided to terminate his lease. He brought on Zelka, another Jew to run the tavern, and Blumrozen is really angry and he turns to the state officials in the kingdom, and he turns them in. And he accuses this Lord Kay of having Jews run his taverns in all three of the villages that he owns. So he's turned in former, and the state investigates, and they start a whole interrogation, and they interrogate everybody. And the most impressive thing of all is these Christians in the red, all vouch for these Jews who are running the taverns, swearing that this Jew never actually sold liquor. He didn't live in the tavern and so on and so forth. But one of them lets it slip that actually Zelka would deal with the liquor suppliers and do everything but literally sell the liquor. So one by one, these Jews are expelled from the villages, and they have to go to an entirely different area and start all over again. Now we can imagine the future, which is that Lord Kay simply finds more Jews to run his taverns. Questions why? Why? Does he love Jews? Does he even like Jews? Probably not. We have an answer because we have his interrogation. As an owner of a roadside village who must always consider the convenience of travelers, I could not neglect to hire Jews who would continually provide for the needs of traveling Jews, meaning Jewish merchants. And I saw this in many documents. By the way, these are Polish archival documents, mainly in the Polish language, very accessible, very easy to find. It was like skimming the cream off the top. Because the archives just opened since 1989. In any case, it seems that we have the whole mercantile system dependent on these Jewish merchants and the nobles are claiming that it's economic death if you don't have Jewish run taverns because the traveling merchants have nowhere to go. So they're going to avoid your village. They're going to avoid your estates if you don't have hospitality. They need a place to stay on the Sabbath. They need a place to get kosher food, et cetera. So that's the first reason. And the second one, even more important, most importantly, people of this faith, Jews show themselves to be sober. And this work requires sober and suitable people. And for this reason as well, I hired Jews. I tried with all my might to fulfill the will of the regime by not having Jews live there or actually sell liquor. It's interesting. We have a widespread belief in Jewish sobriety. They're not going to drink up all the profits. That's the belief. Jews don't drink. You knew that, right?  But we'll get to that too. But first, I want to show you a couple of other things that absolutely blew me away. First of all, we have a petition signed by all the local Christians protesting the expulsion of this local Jew, Zelka, and swearing that he never sold liquor and promising to give a donation to the court. The regional court as a sort of testament to the fidelity of their oath, in other words, a bribe. A lot of coexistence going on here may be a little bit shady, but still, you know, they're protecting each other, they're getting along. This is only, this is less than 10 miles away from the infamous town of Jedwabne, which almost exactly 100 years later is a scene of a terrible lethal pogrom against local Jews by their Polish Christian neighbors. Now the Nazis are in control at this point. They've just invaded the Soviet Union and taken control of the Jedwabne. But their role is very much in the background. It seems most of the pogrom and the Polish government has now apologized for this and tried to really come to terms with it and Poland as a nation has really tried. But this was the scene of the death of 300 Jewish neighbors at the hands of local Poles. They pushed most of them into a barn and set it on fire, as you can see here. It's caught a photograph. Look how much it changed in 100 years. So we're really looking at a whole system that eventually broke down by the 20th century. And we wanna understand why. How do we get from all this coexistence? Maybe it's mistrustful. Maybe they don't socialize, but they rely on each other. How do we get from there to this? But first, happier times, the myth of Jewish sobriety. Now, as you heard, as Professor Manski mentioned, my first book is a history of Hasidism in Poland and how it became a mass movement. And one of the things I noticed is a really good way of becoming a mass movement is being very permissive towards alcohol consumption. In fact, Hasidism is very interesting in this regard because they work it into the theology. It's what's called an immanentist belief of God where God can be found in anything. God can be worshiped through nontraditional means. Everything becomes a potential mode of worship, including dancing and drinking. As long as you do it with the proper intention under the auspices of a miracle worker known as the Tzadik in Hebrew or Revi in Yiddish. The official term for this is worshiped through corporeality. The material world also contains divinity. God permeates everything and therefore we can use everything in the material world including rye, vodka. And this robust drinking culture is unprecedented in Jewish history. It's developing right at the same time we're talking about early 19th century, mid 19th century, between more and more popular. How on the one hand do you sustain this image of Jewish sobriety? And on the other hand have a movement like this on the rise. Well, in my book I go through a lot of different sources, especially Hasidic sources because a lot of this is prone to caricature and parody. And I don't want to be too trusting but it seems like there was a lot of drinking going on but it would happen in specific times. Usually Jewish holidays, births, deaths, even deaths, divorce and so on and so forth. So it would commemorate certain things. So it wasn't free-drinking the way it was happening in non-Jewish culture and it was happening behind closed doors in the so-called Stiebel, the Hasidic prayer house or at the Hasidic court, the court of the Rebbe. So out of the public eye, imagine the difference in perceptions. You have the tavern which is sort of an open window in which you can see on a daily basis members of the rival faith getting intoxicated, beyond belief. The tavern is like almost like a one-way mirror which you can just see this. And the Jewish tavern keeper seems quite sober to everybody's eye. But then he goes to his Hasidic prayer house and he's doing this. That seems to be the way the whole thing worked. I don't see however drinking being as widespread a societal problem among Jews. You don't see it in the rabbinic sermons. You don't see temperance movements arise the way you do in Christian society. In Christian society, it's a real problem. And it's to the point where I'm not making this up. Priests in their sermons are telling, they're shaming their congregations. Why can't you be more like Jews in this regard? And you gotta realize we're talking about, you know, early modern Poland. It's not a tolerant place, multicultural environment. But they truly believe that Jews have it under control. How great a nation Poland could be, we could rise from the ashes, overthrow the czar. If only we were more like Jews in this regard. This kind of thing is a period in the sermons. Unbelievable. Here's just another depiction of a drunken Hasid. You can see his bottle in his right hand there. Now, as we enter the late 19th century, Jews do begin to acculturate and assimilate. And this has really been the story of the historiography. The image of Jews fighting, volunteering to fight for the Polish cause, risking their lives. The first one is the 1830 uprising. The second one is the 1863 uprising.  They're speaking Polish now. That image is very good for Polish-Jewish relations. It's very nice to know that there were Jews who made the effort to integrate. And the past generation of historians has been really keen to emphasize this. It's been sort of a common ground between Poles and Jews as they examine their very difficult history together. But I have to say, my book, I really had to provide a corrective to this image. This was really a very small percentage, very urbanized elite in larger towns and cities. And really, the way that I refuted this most easily was I discovered this enormous trove that Professor Umanski referred to of petitions, so-called kwitlech, to a miracle worker by the name of Eliyahu Gutmacher from the early 1870s. And each of these petitions is like, it tells a story, it gives you a window into people's lives. And you really see, number one, Jewish tavern keepers are alive and well. There are hundreds of petitions by tavern keepers, but also it's very much that shtetl environment. They still live very cut off from their Christian neighbors very much at odds economically. And yet they're still very reliant on the local noblemen. And some of the petitions are asking Rabbi Gutmacher to intervene with the heavens to change the heart of the noblemen so he'll favor them and so on. So you see that the old system is very much intact. And the evidence of it, just one petition and very crude Yiddish by a very successful tavern keeper, Rebzalman Ben-Gitl, the homeowner, which is a code word for rich, who is known as a great host and philanthropist. I observe the holy Sabbath and the great merit will stand with me when the great Sabbath comes and I will prepare for the Sabbath and festival this Thursday. Although I run a tavern, he's saying, I will observe the Sabbath and the great Sabbath proceeding Passover completely. I have a tavern and take care of things with three Goyim who are my right hand. Hey, these are his Christian fronts for his tavern. They're gonna keep it running on the holidays and the Sabbaths. One who lives there has the name Lepinsky. The other is named Kviatkowski. Usually when people are named, especially if they're non-Jewish, it's meant as a curse. He's implicitly asking the miracle worker to curse. In this case, he seems to be asking for a blessing for his Christian workers. So we still have that old system of mutual reliance of symbiosis very much intact in certain areas, but there are cracks in the system. It's beginning to break down. And the most important pivotal moment, I almost hate to say it, is the emancipation of the peasants. Now, we all want the peasants to be emancipated. We don't want serfdom, it's virtual slavery. It's a good thing, but there's also the law of unintended consequences because what happens when you suddenly emancipate all these serfs, all these peasants? What's the, can anybody predict what the unintended consequence is? Sorry? Sort of, but what do you do to overcome the unemployment? There's still plenty of drinking going on, but what would you do? You're suddenly freed, maybe it takes a generation, the younger generation becomes more enterprising and bold. What would you do? You want to set up your own taverns, right? We suddenly have a collision course. The peasants and Jews are on a collision course. Christians want to set up their own taverns as just one example. Also noblemen, the noblemen are often ruined by emancipation. They've had to give up a land, they've lost their monopolies over the peasants, their free labor, they too sometimes will compete. And so increasing numbers of petitions are like this one. Monaco Moshe Ben Fega is asking for success in the tavern and to repel the Gentile from there, from his town, who arose against Jews and took their livelihood so that the customers will not go to him and that the scent of his drinks will stink so that they can no longer stand his drinks and to cause his downfall for all the Jews and the widows and the orphans need this for he took their livelihood. Inter-ethnic economic competition, the beginning of the end. After this, after the 1870s, you see increased episodes of inter-ethnic tension, the breakdown of the old symbiosis. Anti-Jewish economic boycotts, don't buy from Jews, pogroms begin to snake their way up through Southern Russia, reaching all the way to Warsaw. The first major pogroms are in 1881. The nobility is increasingly impoverished, is migrating to the towns and cities that Jews are deprived of their protectors, the nobles, who would have never let anyone touch their most prized inhabitants. The Jews are their best taxpayers and lessees of their very center prizes. Now there are fewer and fewer nobles to stand in the way and now you have inter-ethnic, inter-religious violence. Really it's one-sided inter-ethnic, inter-religious violence. Pogroms, anti-Jewish boycotts, that's how we get eventually, eventually to Yad Vabna and the scene that I showed. That's how we get really to the kind of tension that you may have heard from your grandparents, the Poland of the 1930s, widespread anti-Jewish economic boycotts, pogroms, hostility and these kinds of things. It's because that old system of economic symbiosis symbolized by the tavern and by the Jewish tavern keeper is now a thing of the past. Thank you very much. And I'm wondering how religious Jews dealt with this. I know from reading your book that also in the taverns were prostitutes. So the taverns that were run by religious Jews, were there prostitutes in those taverns and what was going on there? I would have expected to find more prostitutes honestly. Occasionally I find prostitutes, but it's usually in larger towns and cities. I think that once it's underground and it's technically illegal for Jews to run taverns, there's a disincentive to engage in illegal activity. I'm not trying to claim there wasn't illegal activity. There was. These tavern keepers would help with smuggling it seems. They would serve as fences for stolen goods. They did involve themselves, but it was usually with the complete knowledge and even cooperation of the local nobleman. Now when you get to prostitution, that's a much tougher one. It's just not tolerated in the more rural areas. It's something, if you want that you go to Warsaw and that's really where I see accusations of prostitution. The exception is a couple of cases where one Jewish tavern keeper will turn in another Jewish tavern keeper in order to save his or her skin and the accusation will be well that tavern keeper, I've been so pious and clean and pure and kept run a reputable business, but this tavern keeper has prostitutes and thieves and so I've seen that kind of a thing. I don't know how much to believe it, but that seems to be the case. That semi-legal attitude along with attitudes in the countryside seem to curtail that kind of illegal activity as far as the sources permit me to say. You said something about a boycott, an economic boycott just at the end, I didn't quite get it. Was it an organic boycott or was it an official boycott? And what year was it? Maybe you can elaborate a little bit more about that. Sure, the first boycotts begin in really the 1890s. They are led, it seems, by priests. And the priests are interesting. The priests are notoriously anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish. I mean, this is even built into theology a lot of the time, but they're also against violence. No Christianity preaches nonviolence and depending on how seriously you take it, the clergy would take it very seriously. So they've got a problem. They're against the pogroms, but they're also against Jews supposedly dominating trade and dominating the main venue, the tavern, and causing people to drink. So how do you wage war on this Jewish population? It was really the middle class. They're a virtual middle class. How do you wage war on them without violence? They hit upon the economic boycott. This, we are more civilized than that, so don't engage in pogroms, but don't buy from Jews. They start setting up peasant cooperatives so you can circumvent the Jewish middleman. And they're relatively unsuccessful for a long time, but by the late 1930s, they're devastatingly successful and Jews are practically starving by the 1930s because of these economic boycotts. So that's a short version of this story. Thank you, I'm enjoying this. So aside from the symbiotic relationship that you notice in the economic advantages and the quasi-parody that's there, I'm wondering if in the reviews that you looked at, whether there are opinions that were stated about how the Jews viewed inebriation? Oh, absolutely. So it's funny, so I went into the, I was most interested in the Hasidic attitudes towards inebriation, and I found things like, you're allowed to get buzzed, that's the best translation I could find for it, and still say a blessing. But you cannot say a blessing while you're outright drunk. And so they start to distinguish in a very legalistic, Talmudic way, what is buzzed, what is drunk, when it's appropriate to drink, when it's not, what blessings you say, and so on. But what really came out of all of this was, yes, inebriation is frowned upon, even by Hasidic leaders sometimes, but you still drink, you still drink. You could see this everywhere, just in the questions that the rabbis would ask. What kind of blessing do you say if you're just drinking vodka for medicinal purposes? If you're just drinking vodka before your meal to stimulate the appetite? If you're just drinking vodka after the meal to help with digestion? If you're drinking during the meal, but it's only meant as a toast and not as part of the meal. So they really discussed this stuff. So you can see that vodka had worked its way into all corners of life, and it wasn't just, I suppose, the way we relate to it today, much more so. Extensive literature on vodka. The other thing is the, I don't know if anybody's ever been to a Hasidic and sometimes a non-Hasidic synagogue on Saturdays, on the Sabbath day, where they make the kiddish, the blessing, over vodka rather than wine. So this comes from this time period when wine was simply too expensive. So all kinds, again, all kinds of rabbis discussing, well, can we really say the blessing over vodka is the same thing as wine? And they make the case, several prominent legal authorities make the case that it's so-called Khamer Medina. It's the wine of the land, vodka, because it's considered like wine. It's a luxury, people enjoy it, they even use it as currency. And so it's like wine, yes, you can say, and this is how they develop, yes, you can say the kiddish, the blessing over vodka. But here's the problem. You're talking about a big amount, right? When you say a blessing over wine, it has to be a cup, it has to be an entire cup, you're gonna drink that much vodka? So then they start discussing, which would cause you to be inebriated. Some say, yeah, you have to drink the whole thing, and can you imagine on Saturday morning? So very interesting discussions around this issue. Okay, that's another interesting story. There's so many, potatoes come in, but poor Poland, they're always the latecomers. Potatoes enter in the, really in force in the 1930s, 1830s, sorry. And potatoes are really important for the liquor trade, because the same plot of land can produce a lot more vodka with potatoes. So it's very popular, it catches on. Anybody know what happens in 1847? The Irish, the Black 47, it didn't only happen in Ireland. So the whole potato blight, just as the potatoes are making their way across Polish estates, maybe it was a good thing in the sense that not everyone had adopted the potato yet. But the blight absolutely destroys potatoes, and they revert right back to grain, and no one gets involved with potatoes, again for many, many years. So that's that story. Maybe you could say a little bit about it in your book, you talk about how not all of the Jewish tavern keepers were men, that some of them were women. And I'm wondering if you could share some of that as well. Yeah, absolutely, now usually the setup, I don't know if you've heard about the stereotype the man studies Talmud all day, while the woman schleps in the marketplace. That's a bit of a myth. It happened in the very thinnest stratum of the elite, but usually, most commonly, men and women, that is to say, husbands and wives worked, both of them worked. So they were both breadwinners. And the most typical situation, well there's, I wouldn't say most, atypical situation was in the tavern. Let me preface this by saying, I estimated about 40% of the Jewish population was involved in the liquor trade around the 19th century, 40%, and that may be a conservative estimate, because there's all kinds of stuff that doesn't get recorded. In any case, the typical arrangement is, the husband will deal with the liquor suppliers, the noblemen, he'll often kind of run a taxi service with his horse and cart during the daytime. The wife and the children will deal with the customers. Mainly the wife, she's sort of a junior partner in the enterprise, and you can imagine what that entails, you're dealing with drunken peasants and a lot of these women, really tough, brawny women, grabbing the peasant by the scruff of his neck and tossing him out because he's being unruly. It really became a extraordinary normalcy. But Jewish women worked, and that's what's so fascinating. By the time I got to the kvitlaka, the petitions to Gudmacher, I'm seeing hundreds upon hundreds of petitions either by or about women, and the women are working. They're working in tavern keeping and in virtually every other corner of the economy. It's just, it never gets recorded by census takers, never gets recorded in the archives. So they're a statistically invisible workforce, and that's another thing I tried to correct, because nothing like seeing the messiness of everyday life to correct the myth that the statistics produce. But also, not all of the women who were tavern keepers were married. Right, so the most common petitions, but this is the tricky thing, is when they were married, they didn't tend to author their own petitions, or they would do it along with their husband, and they wouldn't state their occupation. It's the divorces and the widows who are authoring their own petitions, and so an enormous number of tavern keepers are women widows, and divorces, single-handedly running their taverns, which is another thing. Or they'll marry somebody that's often, for economic reasons too, they would marry somebody to help out in the tavern, and it turns out to be a bum, and so she's asking the rabbi Gudmacher to help her divorce the guy, and there's an economic drag, and so on. You see great stories in here. It really changes our perception of women, and it's hard to view women as straightforward victims and marginalized and submissive when you see just how important they are to their family's economies, breadwinners across the board. So that was an eye-opener for me. Did your research cover what the process was and how they handled the product during the Passover period? A little bit, Passover is a time where you cannot consume leaven, and the products like rye and beer products and so on were considered leaven, and so they would do several things. Sometimes they'd just close down the tavern altogether, but you couldn't do that if it's the only game in town. So this is one explanation for the rise of slivovitz. You ever heard of slivovitz? It's plum brandy. You can drink it on Passover. There are vodkas that are called Pesachovic, which are other kinds of vodkas that don't contain this leaven, so you're allowed to drink them. And there are rules for how you sell, sometimes you have to sell off your products completely, sometimes you have other arrangements. The biggest problem when tavern keepers would convert Christianity, and this is something I covered as well in the book, is not that they betrayed their faith or anything like that. Jews stop going to these converts taverns because they're assumed to no longer be abiding by these rules of Passover and so on. And so it's probably the worst thing you could do for business. Now you're paying these heavy concession fees, so the temptation to convert to Christianity is very strong, especially in the countryside where your interactions with non-Jews are much closer and more common. But those who converted to Christianity, I think really regretted it from an economic standpoint because the Jewish patrons just disappeared. And it seems like the better solution for getting around concession fees was simply to prop up a Christian bartender and call him the tavern keeper, which seemed to be a much more common solution to high concession fees. I am curious as to whatever made you go into this particular subject material. Okay, I can't exaggerate this too much, but there was a point after the Hasidism book, I wanted to get away from the topic so as not to be typecast as a scholar. And I just went to the archives, I had the file numbers of pre-war, let's say pre-Holocaust historians, and it turned out the numbers were good still. So much more had survived than we ever dreamed. And so I just start flipping through. These files, I kind of knew what they were about, but as I read, the words vodka, Jews, drunkenness, we're just leaping off the page, practically every page I'm turning, and you have to realize when you're reading the pioneering historical accounts of Poland, Lithuania, Russia, and so on, the narrative is the Jews were driven out of the liquor trade. So I'm thinking, how can we have so much vodka in Jews if they've already been driven out? I have a book now.  It lets us get around the statistics and see what's really happening. And it shows that modernity happens very slowly, especially in agrarian countries. Modernization, urbanization, that's the story that we're accustomed to. If we read East European Jewish history, it happened much more slowly. That older system, even you saw by the 1870s, was very much intact. And that's how I got into it. Plus, it's fun investigating vodka, you know? Gives you an excuse, yeah. Were you reading these documents in Polish? And if so, how long did it take you to become fluent in Polish? So the main languages for studying this are Hebrew, Yiddish, and a Slavic language. I was told when I was crazy enough to want to get a PhD in this field, I was told, well, do you know Polish? You better learn it. And so I started going, it was after 1989, so communism had fallen, Poland was opening up to the West, and I started going every summer to crack out to Jagiellonian University. And with a few other crazy grad students started learning Polish. But you also need Hebrew and Yiddish, and helps to have Russian as well. And I learned it. Whether there's a will, there's a way. You can study from med school, you can do this. Maybe you can share with everyone what your current research is about. Oh boy, we have time for that. Well, a short version, let's make it easier. Short version. Consumed with alcohol. I've decided to go into the 20th century. I've decided to return to Hasidism a little bit. I find that these are the generations who really perished in the Holocaust, and our image of them is very secular. Historians have told us a lot about Zionists and about Bundists, the heroic types who secularize, as well as those who assimilated became colonized. I'm finding that the more religious Jews whom we call traditionalist, Hasidic, other Orthodox Jews have been very neglected by historians. And when I began to investigate this, I found it was extraordinary the vitality of these religious groups, these religious Jews in Poland. Now, I believe I have no ideological reason for doing this. I just wanna figure out what was going on. And what I found was instead of the decline of religion, you know, the rise of secularization, which is the story we always get, these traditionalists rebounded.  Well, a lot of these Yeshiva students and teachers and their families began sneaking over the border into Poland. And sometimes entire Yeshivas, like Mir, the most famous one, they just came over the border and beat Yosef and so on. And they reestablished themselves in Poland. And as religious Jews are coming over the border, they're adding to the numbers of religious elites. Now, who's supporting all these? Is anyone want to take a guess? Who's supporting all these religious refugees, I call them? Any guess? The US. The US, American Jews. They may not be two religious themselves, the American Jews, but they want these European Jews to be religious. So there's kind of a proxy, a religious proxy. So I'm seeing millions, I'm not exaggerating, millions of dollars pouring into these Yeshivas and to individual religious functionaries to support both the religious refugees and the native Poles who are studying in them. And so you have almost a rebirth of religious life. It's a little bit artificial because of these external influxes. But whatever you want to call it, it's a real resurgence. So that's going to be the story, but I'd like to take it through the Holocaust because the rescue efforts, believe it or not, that nostalgia that a lot of Americans feel carries on into the Holocaust. And I'm starting to, don't quote me on this yet, but I'm starting to see an actual preference when it comes to rescue for Yeshiva students. And many, many Yeshiva students from Mir, from Lubavitch, Yeshiva and so on are able to get out via Shanghai and other places as a result of these American rescue efforts through the Holocaust. The feeling is, and I've seen this in writing, that they represent the wellspring of Judaism throughout the world. That's the attitude. So we have to save them. And even Rabbi Wayne House's own father who's here in the audience, his own father was one of these Shanghai Jews who's studying the Mir Yeshiva. So that's also part of the story. The lesson here, I think, is that traditionalism, we saw the traditional economic way of life in this talk, but traditional religious observance too is much more resilient, I think, than we realize. And a lot of these orthodox organizations are very well organized, very assertive. They're willing to devote a lot of funds and resources for the survival of their elite. And that's why a more accurate depiction of modernity is heterogeneous. You have, yes, you have these secular Jewish groups emerging, but you also have these vibrant religious groups emerging and they're clashing, but they're also influenced by each other, and that's the story that I'm gonna be telling next. Well, do you mean here in the United States? You're still talking about Brooklyn. No, there are other places, Curious Joel, which is an upstate New York, and I'm sure LA is growing as well. You know, I don't know a lot about the Midwest, so I can't say for sure, but I don't get the sense, it's very, very large. That's a different story. Well, there's Hobot everywhere. The Hobot is always the exception. Yeah, Muncie as well. Well, I wanna thank you so much for being with us this evening. Thank you very much. And thank everyone for coming. Okay. Thank you. And we'll be, Karina in the back will be selling copies of Dr. Diner's book, Yonkel's Tavern. He's gonna sign some copies. And do join us for our next...