YidLife Crisis, an award-winning online comedy series featuring fast-talking Montreal funnymen Jaime Elman and Eli Batalion has 20,000 loyal subscribers on YouTube and 17,000 followers on Facebook. The bilingual struggles of the pious, often flawed, but always loving family in Shtisel has become an international media phenomenon. Agit-prop singer Isabel Frey, a 27-year-old representative for the Leopoldstadt district on Vienna’s city council, is helping to mobilize a new, international Jewish left with songs like “Arbetlose Marsch” (“March of the Unemployed”), and “Im Kampf” (“In the Struggle”) on her album Millennial Bundist. The popular language-learning app Duolingo launched its Yiddish course last spring, and users are going meshuge for it.
Yiddish is clearly having a moment. “It’s been a very long moment,” Meena Viswanath, one of the creators of the Duolingo course, wryly observes. Jonah Boyarin, a Yiddish translator and teacher, and the liaison to Jewish communities at the New York City Commission on Human Rights, agrees.
“To my limited knowledge, the Yiddish revival movement has been going on for some time now – decades,” he says. Yet, he notes that the Duolingo course has begun to shine a bright light on the traditional vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, drawing it to the attention of a younger generation. That might be a case of wishful thinking, and even if it is not, the modern history of the Yiddish language is not without its controversies.
The fortunes of the historic language of Ashkenazi Jews have risen and fallen over the years, often paralleling the ebb and flow of Jewish labor politics in the Diaspora on one hand, and Zionism on the other. By the early 1930s, the Yiddish scholars and political activists Israel Knox and Chaim Zhitlowsky were already advocating for a “Yiddish revival.” In 1930, they helped to organize the Yiddish Culture Society, to promote Yiddish as “the language of daily and intellectual expression of the Jews and preserve its use and development in the modern world.”
They held a conference at New York’s Irving Plaza, organized branches in 28 cities in the United States and Canada, mobilized a youth movement… And then ceased operations by 1943. At its 1953 meeting in Geneva, the World Jewish Congress adopted a resolution committing itself to restoring Yiddish “to the position of eminence it enjoyed at the beginning of the last decade” as a means to counteract the “contentions of assimilation” in the Diaspora. Yet, even that symbolic gesture met with stiff resistance from delegates who would have gladly let the language fade into obscurity.
It was not like the fine words helped and 24 years later the New York Jewish Week reported on “new prospects for Yiddish as a living language and for the continuation of Yiddish culture as a dynamic aspect of Jewish life” following the first conference of the National Council for Yiddish and Yiddish Culture at the Jewish Teachers Seminary-Herzliah in New York. To paraphrase the philosopher Simon Rawidowicz’s essay “Israel: The Ever-Dying People,” each generation of Yiddish speakers is the last generation of Yiddish speakers before the next last generation of Yiddish speakers.
That might be why the Duolingo initiative has struck such a chord among Yiddishists, those people who actively promote the language and its culture and work for its survival. The course has stimulated intense interest and, even if Duolingo has not published its user statistics, it is all over the social media Yiddisphere. And that’s good news, since there are only a few hundred-thousand native or fluent Yiddish speakers, the vast majority of them members of Haredi and Hasidic communities living in or near New York City.
It wasn’t always that way; at its peak, Yiddish was the everyday language of 11 million people – mostly, but not exclusively, Jews – in Central and Eastern Europe, and in places as far removed as North America and South Africa. The catastrophe of the Shoah wiped-out half of those people in the Nazi death camps and killing fields. In the postwar United States, the migration of Jewish Americans, along with their neighbors of other cultural backgrounds, out of urban neighborhoods and into the suburbs, broke the social bonds through which Yiddish had long thrived.
The historian Jonathan Sarna has noted the corrosive cultural and linguistic effects of the suburbanization of American Jews that came along with postwar economic enfranchisement. “Outside of the protective womb of the urban Jewish subculture, Judaism could no longer be absorbed, like sunshine, from the surrounding atmosphere.” The sons and daughters born in the suburbs to parents named Yossel, Shulom, Faigie, and Gersha were named Stanley, Robert, Theresa, and Joanie. And, in a postwar environment determined by pop music and television, where most of their social circle were non-Jews, they had little practical use for the language of their grandparents… except maybe for jokes.
“That was the generation that was really pushed to assimilate, and to be Americans, which was very much my father’s generation,” says Madeleine Cohen, Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center. “And it was also so important for my grandfather, who was a Yiddish-speaker, to say that he was ‘an American.’ Maybe he would talk about being Jewish at some point in the conversation, but the point that he would want to make to you was ‘I’m American.’”
To make matters worse for Yiddish, the language has been a lightning rod for controversy within the Jewish community itself since the 19th century. The urbane educated elites of the Jewish community at the time regarded it as a backward, bastardized German best jettisoned in the march to emancipation and assimilation. Jewish writers like Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth might have spoken Yiddish at home and among family, but they wrote in German.
In October 1898, Theodor Herzl, the assimilated scion of an elite Austro-Hungarian family, wrote in his diary of the “depressing impression” left by a Yiddish theater production that he had seen. “Since this pitiful art, such as it is, represents the top achievement of our jargon-speaking masses, their present level must be recognized as a most sadly low one,” he wrote. “I was disgusted.” The “jargon,” of course, was Yiddish.
Herzl’s hostility to Yiddish was common among assimilated European Jews. “I am a German-speaking Jew from Hungary and can never be anything but a German,” he wrote in The Jewish State, the urtext of political Zionism. Nor did he have any affinity for Hebrew, however, a language with which he barely even had passing familiarity. “Who among us knows enough Hebrew to ask for a railroad ticket in this language?” he asked. “I believe that German will be our principal language. I draw this conclusion from our most widespread jargon, ‘Judeo-German’ [ie. Yiddish]. But over there we shall wean ourselves from this ghetto language, too, which used to be the stealthy tongue of prisoners.”
Despite the efflorescence of a rich Yiddish literature cultivated by writers like Isaac Peretz and Sholem Aleichem at the beginning of the 20th century, the burgeoning Zionist movement set its sights early on the utter extinction of the language. The Zionist writer Ahad Ha’Am regarded the question of language as “the acid test of Judaism,” and wrote in 1909 that the continued dominance of Yiddish as the Jewish vernacular was “the most serious threat to Judaism as we understand it.”
The Zionist project sought to reinvent Jews in the State of Israel in terms expressed most explicitly by Vladimir Jabotinsky in the 1930s when he drew a stark contrast between what he regarded as the “ugly,” debased “Yid” of the Disapora, and the noble “Hebrew” of the yet-to-be-founded state. “Only after removing the dust accumulated through two thousand years of exile, of galut, will the true, authentic Hebrew character reveal its glorious head,” he said. “Only then shall we be able to say: This is a typical Hebrew, in every sense of the word.”
Yiddish was anathema to the Zionist movement, a vestige of diaspora life to be swept away by Modern Hebrew, a language custom-made for the new Jewish State. Israeli and Zionist political leaders and activists dropped their Ashkenazi Yiddish names for Hebrew: Golda Meyerson became Golda Meir, Levi Shkolnik became Levi Eshkol, and Shneur Zalman Rubashov became Zalman Shazar. The State of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion (born David Grühn), demanded that all government and military officials abandon their Yiddish names, and so his foreign minister Moshe Shertok became Moshe Sharett overnight.
Nor did it stop there; the government of the new state actively suppressed Yiddish language and culture. Until the late-1980s, only one school in the State of Israel – out of 6,000 – offered Yiddish classes, and this only because it was a Haredi academy exempt from government curriculum restrictions. Yiddish culture was officially discouraged and often explicitly prohibited. In the early years of the State of Israel, productions of Yiddish theater, the crown jewel of Yiddish culture, could be performed only in Hebrew translation.
In August 1949, the Israeli Interior Ministry’s Council for the Control of Films and Plays introduced strict limits on Yiddish cultural production. The new policies prohibited the establishment of local Yiddish theater companies, and restricted visas for touring Yiddish performers and troupes from the Diaspora. The Council arbitrarily denied the Tel Aviv’s Goldfaden Theater a permit to perform the Yiddish play Tsvey kuni leml in 1950.
“Towards the end of June, a few days before the premiere finally took place, the Tel Aviv District police commander summoned [theater director] David Hart to his office and notified him of the absolute prohibition of theatre performances in Yiddish issued by the Council,” writes the historian Rachel Rojanski. “Furthermore, a police sergeant, accompanied by two policemen, came to the theatre hall on 28 June, notified David Hart and Israel Segal that they were strictly forbidden from performing in Yiddish, and warned them against presenting the play planned for the next evening.”
The Goldfaden Theater successfully sued to have the restrictions lifted, but by then it had closed its doors, and there was no permanent Yiddish theater company in the State of Israel until the Yiddishspiel opened in Tel Aviv in 1987. In the wake of the Council’s heavy-handed policies, many Yiddish actors, dramatists, and directors reversed course and headed back to the Diaspora to pursue their art. And Yiddish, as a living language, continued its slow, tortuous decline.
The political fault line between Yiddish and Hebrew remains, and that might help to explain its growing interest among younger Jews who find themselves identifying more with the life in the Diaspora than in the State of Israel and Zionism. This is a heated issue in the Jewish community today, and it’s something that many of us would rather keep in סאטא וואטשע, as it were, but Boyarin acknowledges that Yiddish’s political associations are a big part of its appeal to a new generation of learners and speakers.
“Many Jews like me look to Jewish diasporic histories for examples of Jews who lived with a sense of responsibility toward the world and each other, and a sense of belonging that was cooperative rather than dominating,” he says. “Those lives were lived in Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, and other diasporic languages.”
Viswanath notes that “the Yiddish world itself had the full array of political opinions: pro-Zionist/anti-Zionist, left/right; if you’re looking pre-1948, Yiddish had all of it.” Indeed, Ruth Wisse, who held the Martin Peretz Chair of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University and collaborated with the socialist Yiddishist Irving Howe on The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, is an antediluvian conservative racist who once called feminism a form of “neo-Marxism.”
Yet, reactionaries like Wisse were historically a small, parochial minority in the Yiddisphere. More characteristic was what Viswanath calls the “strong Yiddish tradition in the leftist world. You have the Bund, you have the Yiddish Communists, you have the Kinderland and Kinder Ring, and all this stuff on the left.”
Yiddish has roots as deep in the Jewish left as Hebrew has in Zionism. “It wasn’t just that Zionism rejected Yiddish because it was a symbol of diaspora,” Cohen says. “Jewish socialists rejected Hebrew. The reason why we have a Soviet orthography for Yiddish is because Communist Yiddish activists wanted to purge Yiddish of its religious affiliations; they wanted to remove Hebrew.”
The Labor Bund, a socialist movement originating in the Russian Empire in the 1890s, and Der Arbeter Ring (the Workers Circle) founded in New York in 1900, regarded Yiddish as the means to organize Jewish workers and agitate for political change. The Bund published dozens of Yiddish newspapers in Europe and America over its century-long history, and the Der Arbeter Ring founded Forverts (today, The Forward), a leading American Jewish newspaper which still publishes a Yiddish edition, and Jewish Currents magazine.
Although no longer the vast organization that it once was, Der Arbeter Ring still operates branches in New York, Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere which offer, among other things, lessons in Yiddish and Yiddish-language cultural activities. The language’s connections to the political left run so deep that, as averse to controversy as they might have been, the creators of the Duolingo course included a variation of the old anti-Zionist Bundist slogan “wherever we live, there is our homeland” as a translation phrase.
With Millennials and GenZers drifting to the political left in increasing numbers and in the process resurrecting its ideas, symbols, and rhetoric, it was only a matter of time before they latched on to Yiddish. Frey, who, as a Jewish teenager in Vienna, participated in the Hashomer Hatzair Labor Zionist youth movement, and spent a year kibbutzniking in the State of Israel, came to Yiddish through left politics, and particularly through her involvement with diasporic Jewish radical group Jewdas.
“A Jewish-anarchist collective? That exists? That’s awesome!” she recalled to Jewish Telegraph Agency’s Joe Baur. “That was also the time when I first heard Yiddish worker songs.”
Frey is hardly unique in her generation. For many Millennial and GenZ Jews, the corollary of their growing commitment to social justice and left-wing and progressive politics has been a stronger identification with diaspora life, often at the expense of an emotional connection to the State of Israel. There is even a Yiddish word for it: doikayt, the sense of “hereness” that suffuses the old Bund slogan “wherever we live, there is our homeland.” And doikayt has inevitably led some – perhaps many – to Yiddish itself.
Doikayt, politics, and Yiddish converged during last summer’s mass demonstrations against racist police brutality when Boyarin, Arun Viswanath, and Mordechai Tzvi Russell worked together to coin a Yiddish racial justice slogan that is as poetic as it is powerful. “Black lives matter” does not translate well in Yiddish, and the trio finally settled on Afroamerikaner blut iz nisht keyn vaser, “African American blood is not water,” a slogan that insists on the value of Black lives while simultaneously evoking a shared humanity with blut is nisht keyn vaser, the Yiddish version of “blood is thicker than water.”
If that were all there was to the politics of Yiddish, then dayenu! But as with all things Yiddish, the language itself, or at least how it is spoken, is a knot of contention. Yiddish emerged initially in the Jewish communities of Western Europe (Ashkenaz) in the Middle Ages and spread to Eastern Europe by the 15th century, along with Jewish migrants fleeing persecution and seeking a better life.*
These migrants encountered other Jewish populations, including refugees from the Expulsion from Spain (Sefarad) who had migrated north from Greece, Turkey, and the Levant. Over a half a millennium a language that had begun as a western German dialect conveniently written in the Hebrew aleph-bet, soon evolved into a unique language enriched with Slavic and Turkish loan-words and more than a bisl loshn koydesh (a little Hebrew) for religious vocabulary and those words that just couldn’t be rendered in any other language.
The European Jewish community – at its peak, maybe 12 million people – was, however, spread across a vast territory stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Urals, and from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic. Some Jews lived in thriving cities like Vilna, Warsaw, and Minsk, and more often in towns like Harlau in Romanian Moldavia (like some of my ancestors) or even smaller shtetls scattered across Eastern Europe.
After centuries of relative isolation, Yiddish inevitably evolved at least three dialects, probably five and, depending on who you ask – and in which dialect – as many as ten. In the 19th century, however (in the short version of a very long and complicated story), with the great renaissance of Yiddish literature led by writers like Peretz and Sholem Aleichem, the Yiddish theater boom that came in the wake of Eastern European industrialization and urbanization, and the explosion of secular publishing inspired by political movements like the Bund, linguists and lexicologists set about the process of standardizing what had become a somewhat anarchic and chaotic shprakh (language).
It was through this process, in fact, that Yiddish claimed the status of a real language – promoted by linguists like Alexander Harkavy, who compiled the first Yiddish dictionary in 1891 – rather than just a zhargon or bastardized German. On the other hand, like most efforts at standardization, klal-shprakh (the standardized language), treated all the shmuesshpakhn (vernarcular dialects) as poor cousins, best elevated through education.
To make matters worse, klal Yiddish was created and promoted primarily by urban writers and intellectuals in the big northern cities of Warsaw and, above all, Vilna and is based on the northern, Lituanian dialect Litvish. That never sat well with the speakers of Poylish Yiddish, like the Galitsianer dialect in Galicia, or Ukraynish and Besaraber Yiddish to the south and east. To them, the standardization of the language, carried southward by books, newspapers, and touring theater companies performing plays like S. Ansky’s masterpiece The Dybbuk, would have seemed like northern, urban, secularizing colonialism.
The irony is that the Yiddish theater was founded by Avrum Goldfaden, a Ukraynish-speaking director and impresario in Besaraber-speaking Romania, a generation before The Dybbuk hit the stage.
The tensions between the urban inteligenzia in places like Vilna and Warsaw and fellow Jews in the more rural Ukraine, Moldavia, and Galicia were real, and sometimes unbridgeable. Simon Dubnow, the great historian of Polish and Russian Jewry, and himself a klal-speaking intellectual from Vilna, noted that Yiddish publications and cultural production frequently fell on deaf ears in rural shtetls. The inteligenzia were often too-closely identified with the Russian oppressor whose universities they attended and with whose intellectuals they mingled.
The Yiddish periodicals “which addressed themselves to the masses and preached Haskalah [enlightenment] in the narrower sense” of secularism and “modernizing” rationality came off as contemptuous and patronizing to Jews whose lives were often circumscribed by the traditions of Hasidism. “Some of these intellectuals, having become part and parcel of Russian cultural life, were no longer able to find their way back to Judaism,” Dubnow wrote. “Others stood at the crossroads, wavering between assimilation and Jewish nationalism.”
The horror of the Shoah put paid to the existential cultural quandary of Yiddish as it wiped out Europe’s Jews regardless of their dialect. Upon occupying Vilna, the Nazis looted the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute), the principal agent of linguistic standardization, and packed away its library and collections for Adolf Eichmann’s planned museum of the Jews. They took Dubnow himself from the Riga ghetto and murdered him in a nearby forest together with 25,000 fellow Jews in 1941.
The center of Yiddish life and culture abruptly shifted to North America, where the daily Forverts newspaper had set up shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1897 and the Yiddish theater thrived in New York, Montreal, and Chicago, helping to give birth to Vaudeville and the Broadway musical. YIVO survived the Holocaust and initially relocated to Hunter College on New York’s Upper East Side. There was a thriving community of Yiddishkeit, but it was an urban, and resolutely secular culture, often spoken in the cadences of klal-shprakh.
This American Jewish population was soon augmented by the arrival of thousands of Yiddish-speaking Jewish refugees after 1945. Many of the newcomers were members of insular Hasidic communities from Hungary, Poland, and the Ukraine – Satmars, Belzers, Lubavitchers, Bobovers, among others – speaking their regional dialects and, as they used Yiddish mostly to communicate among themselves, they felt no pressing need to adopt the klal Yiddish of YIVO.
As the daily use of Yiddish waned among the many North American Jews who departed the urban neighborhoods that had cultivated American Yiddishkeit, you could nevertheless still hear the mame-loshn spoken every day on the streets of communities like Brooklyn and Montreal’s Mile End. By the time Duolingo began to develop its course, Yiddish continued to exist as a living vernacular, not merely as a literary language, an object of academic study, or a political statement, in Hasidic daily life. You can still buy a Yiddish daily newspaper on the streets of New York today, but it will be in the central dialect of the Satmars, and not klal-shprakh.
For this reason, the Duolingo development team based its course on the Yiddish spoken in Borough Park, rather than on the urbane dialect of Peretz, Sholem Aleichem and YIVO. “At the moment, it is the most representative of Yiddish as a living, breathing vernacular,” Viswanath says. The development team coalesced around Israel and Isac Polasak, two college students who had grown up in the Satmar community, and were soon joined by others, each with their own dialects.
“We had speakers of the three main dialects on our team; we had three ex-Satmar people, we had me, who speaks southeastern Yiddish, and we had a guy from Chabad as well, who speaks the Litvish,” Viswanath recalls. “We could think of arguments for and against all three, but we had to pick one Yiddish… the argument for teaching some form of central Yiddish – some form of Polish or Hungarian Yiddish – is that nobody knows how exactly many native Yiddish speakers there, but the majority of them, if not now then pretty soon, are likely to speak a dialect that is Central.”
All things being Yiddish, even that eminently practical decision did not come without controversy, revealing some of the tensions that remain along the fault lines of the Yiddisphere and the wider Jewish community. Yet Boyarin, whose Yiddish background is distinctly bookish, sees both the excitement and controversy that has accompanied the Duolingo course as a net positive that “is garnering more attention” for the language. “And I think it is important to note that there are, kinehore, hundreds of thousands of Hasidic Millennials and GenZers who are native, fluent Yiddish speakers – something the course soundly recognized in its choice to use Hasidic pronunciation.”
It is not without its jarring moments, however. For example, in the dialect taught by Duolingo “nu,” that most Yiddish of all interjections, is pronounced as “ni” (not unlike what the knights say in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) and that will likely cause some controversy among some learners. We produce identity in language, after all, and our personal variations are central to who we are. Social media is already replete with questions and complaints about Duolingo’s preference for blimen and ni over blumen and nu.
So, nu? (Or ni?) As Viswanath notes, “we all speak our own idiolects.” Any standard language is, at best, an approximation, a useful tool for literature and mutual comprehension, and at worst, a cudgel to assert supremacy and domination. One of the things that makes Yiddish so compelling, and that the Duolingo course emphasizes, Cohen says, is its “its wonderful diversity.”
“There are native-speaking communities, and there’s a rich academic field,” Cohen says. “It’s not that it doesn’t take a lot of work on the part of a lot of people, but the survival of Yiddish is not in question the way it is for many endangered languages. But how many more people now have the opportunity to interact in some way with Yiddish? The barrier to that is so much lower when you have a tool like Duolingo.”
Whether it’s Galitsianer, Litvish, Beseraber, or klal-shprakh, the Yiddish language has always expressed the vast, colorful, often fractious diversity of Ashkenazi Jewish culture, politics, and life. We don’t have to agree – on anything, really – and that might explain why Yiddish is spoken as much with the hands as with verbal grammar and syntax. In fact, the emergence of yet another dialect along all the others, call it Duosprakh, is probably a good indication of the prospects for our language’s long-term health and life. In all of the myriad forms, pronunciations, and dialects of Yiddish, es zol lebn biz hundert un tsvantsik – at the very least.
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* As with all things related to Yiddish, this narrative is not without some controversy. Some linguists argue for a Slavic origin for Yiddish, and in 2017 a group of researchers argued for a Turkic origin for both Yiddish and Ashkenazi Jews. The German origin is generally-accepted, however. At least for now.