Why Yiddish Matters?

Peeps! As part of my participation in the Speakers' Lab 'Now What: The Future of New Jewish Culture' event, I've just published a Panelist Statement.

In the language and culture of Ashkenaz I found everything I had once assumed Judaism simply didn’t have: songs for every occasion, dances other than a zombified hora, and a radical history very much of use for the present. Yiddish presented to me what [early 20th century Jewish educator] Jacob Golub called “cultural autonomy,” something I see little of in American Jewish life. 

For Golub and his peers in the pre-war era, however, the cultural autonomy of American Jews would be lived in modern Hebrew, not the despised tongue of exile. “The Jew must, to a large degree, live vicariously through Palestine,” he wrote in 1937. In 2012, Golub’s statement has the sour tang of half-fulfilled prophecy.

Read more of Why Yiddish Matters, at the Forward's Arty Semite Blog.