Nearly lost Yiddish language increasingly popular among Jewish college students
This article from the JNS says that college students are getting in touch with their Ashkenazi heritage through the academic study of Yiddish. (No word on those Yiddish students whose heritage is outside the pale of Ashkenaz.)
On the bright side, the author had the wisdom to get quotes from serious Yiddish teachers like Agi Legutko and Gennady Estraikh. (Agi and Gennady also happen to be friends of mine. And wonderful teachers.)
Anyway, once again, Yiddish is on the brink of extinction, young people are Columbusing it, and the Jewish institutional world continues to ignore Eastern European culture and history as an obvious point of spiritual renewal.
Spunky old people meeting at a Yiddish shmooze club, speaking from the heart and without grammar:
Friends of Yiddish has no agenda. No textbooks. No Yiddish grammar rules.
Its members gather every month at the B’nai Tikvoh-Sholom synagogue to speak a language stamped in their hearts and memories. They savor their past through Yiddish words and phrases spoken by their parents and grandparents. In the process, they are keeping a dying language alive.
in a purely nostalgic mode:
“It’s a nostalgic get-together with mostly old people coming to renew their memories from when they were kids,” said Cohen, whose parents immigrated to the United States from Lithuania.
BUT! Small numbers of young people are discovering Yiddish and a revival is, or is not, imminent :
But while many older Americans gather to reminisce about parents and grandparents who spoke the Germanic-Hebrew language of Eastern and Central European Jews, a renewed interest in Yiddish is blooming among a younger generation of people who have no such memories.
Via academic and summer intensive courses:
Much of the renewed interest grows out of university programs in Jewish studies that now offer Yiddish language and literature courses. This summer also saw a flourishing of intensive language courses and camps...
Then there's the historical trajectory of Yiddish: assimilation in America, suppression in Israel:
For centuries, Yiddish was widely spoken by an estimated 11 to 13 million Jews throughout Europe. But the number of Yiddish speakers began dwindling with the Holocaust and the Soviet persecution. A Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet, Yiddish was also the victim of the assimilation of Jews who immigrated to new countries and left their old language behind.
When Israel rejected the language over Hebrew many believed it had been dealt its final blow. Today, an estimated 1 million speak the language, many within the Orthodox community.
And now comes Revival, but not too much (obligatory dour straw man):
Professor Victor Bers of Yale University grew up speaking Yiddish and organizes the Yale-New Haven Yiddish Reading Circle. He believes Yiddish will survive on college campuses.
“My feeling is that Yiddish is going to be an academic subject,” he said.
BONUS! Head scratching error
But others say the ranks of Orthodox Jews, and particularly Hasidic groups such as the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which has embraced Yiddish and is growing worldwide, will keep the language alive.
The bottom line is that languages require support and political will. Yiddish will continue to thrive in places like Kiryas Yoel and Williamsburg as long as it has utility as a method of social control. And the "revival" among young American Jews will continue to be limited by the resources available to those who are interested, (college students have access to high quality Yiddish language courses. Most of us do not.)
Seeing that the majority of American Jews are invested (for many complex reasons) in the morbidity of the language (and thus loathe to actually put much money or support into it), right now there's little chance this so-called revival will go much further than where it is today. And articles like this one only reinforce our narrow, ahistorical vision of American Jewish life.
I could list twenty articles like these to make my point: there is no revival. There is only a Jewish populace deeply confused about its identity and conflicted about the sacrifices it's made in the name of assimilation, Americanization, Zionism and the myth of a unified Jewish monoculture. The revival meme is a way of neutralizing those who would question the value of all those things; it frames their connection to Yiddish as cute, unthreatening, and incapable of maturing. To talk about Yiddish in terms other than its 'revival' is to tread on politically dangerous ground.
If my round-up of articles doesn't make my point, perhaps you'll be more impressed by the beloved pixie diva of Yiddish theater, Molly Picon.
In 1980 Molly Picon appeared on Israeli TV. There's a lot to unpack about her appearance (in which the show's host interviews her in English and she answers in Yiddish) but right now I'll just skip to the part where Molly herself proclaims a Yiddish revival. In 1980.
Around 3 minutes in Molly says that her Israeli hosts, including the Yiddish actor Shmulik Atzmon, are excited about the current Yiddish revival. All over the world, she says, there is a growing interest in Yiddish, especially among young people. They want to know 'Who are we?' and 'What have we lost?'
At Queens College, she says, six hundred students (!) study Yiddish and now in Europe and Israel, too, students want to learn Yiddish.
To which I have to ask, politely, what the hell? What in bloody hell happened between 1980 and today?
Well, for one, there has been an incredibly burst of creativity around traditional Eastern European music. Some call that the 'klezmer revival.'
And what about Yiddish language? The National Yiddish Book Center, established in the early 1980s, has obviously changed the face of Yiddish between then and now, systematically preserving Yiddish materials for future readers. But what about the classes where those readers will be educated? What about the learning? What about providing professional pedagogical resources for the next generations of Yiddish speakers? What about training the next generation of Yiddish teachers?
While there are some (too few) high quality resources for learning (and teaching) Yiddish today, it's nowhere near what you might think it would be for a language whose 'revival' was heralded over 30 years ago on Israeli TV.
More and more, real Yiddish literacy in the United States is in the hands of either academics (and quasi-academics) or the Hasidim who use it as a vernacular. These are the people who either have the resources to learn and use it or have a politico-theological reason for them to retain it as the language of everyday life.
As much as I love Molly Picon, even 600 students do not make a revival, or a revolution. A revival takes political will and institutional power. The day I see a Federation leader get up at the General Assembly and declare the importance of language transmission, the day I see a session devoted to planning for Yiddish language pedagogy at an educational conference, that's the day I will doff my Yiddish revival cap and herald a new age of Akvarious. Without these things- communal prioritization, resources, a gigantic shift in our cultural conversation around Yiddish- the much bally-hooed Yiddish revival is nokh vayt (still far off.)
In this episode, Yiddish is brought in to make a sad analogy; Nova Scotia Gaelic is said to be having its "Yiddish moment." What is a Yiddish moment? Once flourishing minority language squashed in its place of birth, chugs along for a while in the New World, now on life support along with its few elderly speakers. Tosh and poppycock. Ahistorical poppycock. The author sees Nova Scotia Gaelic at a crossroads as a minority language in Canada. It can go one way and be like Romansh, one of the four national languages of Switzerland, or it can go the way of Yiddish, and be the language of... well, no one, really, according to this article. In Switzerland you can get your phone bill in Romansh and the Romansh speaking population is aggressive about maintaining it as a civic language. Yiddish, on the other hand, has already passed over into the 'post-vernacular' of nostalgia and sentiment and is the civic language of no place and no government. If Nova Scotians aren't more aggressive, the author warns, Gaelic will go the way of Yiddish, rakhmone litslon. There's a lot to unpack here. Though I don't know much (ok, anything) about the politics around Romansh and linguistic hegemony in Switzerland, I'm sure it's a lot more complex than what's sketched out here. In any case, I'll just focus one what concerns me, the use and abuse of Yiddish as a signifier, and one piece of the Atlantean meme:
Both [Yiddish and Gaelic] have some fluent speakers left, but with Yiddish as with Gaelic, most are elderly. Younger people who consider either language part of their identity rarely (not never, but rarely) know enough to hold down a conversation. It’s more typical for them to know snatches: songs, little sayings, a few words and phrases. Nobody who spends any time getting to know either Gaelic or Yiddish can avoid seeing that reality.
Fact is, those who study contemporary Yiddish agree that there are almost a million Yiddish speakers alive today. The majority of them are some flavor of ultra-Orthodox, mostly Hasidim. And, due to exploding birth rates, the population of contemporary Yiddish speakers skews heavily younger. So, no. Sorry. Wrong. Maybe you don't like Hasidim, but you can't deny that they're Jews, there's a lot of them, and that they speak Yiddish every damn day.
Gaelic is at a crossroads. It can continue to go the way of Yiddish, a language whose fluent speakers are mostly elderly and which is basically nonexistent as a language of government. Or it can go the way of Romansh and other small languages, and gradually but aggressively claim its right to be part of the modern world.
In fact, if you want to go all Dubnovian, Yiddish is a language of civic life and governance. Of course, it's a totally internal, self-governing of the Hasidic kehiles, but nonetheless, go into any Hasidic community (In America, in Canada, in Belgium, in Israel) and you'll see a great deal of public life being conducted in Yiddish. Point being that those who had a political will, and a theological imperative, to maintain Yiddish as a vernacular have done so for themselves, without waiting for a Yiddish phone bill from the government. (Though you can buy a Metrocard in Yiddish in New York City.) Faced with the grinding machinery of American assimilation, the majority of American Jews had no such collective will to maintain Yiddish. If the Jews of 1910, let's say, had been dealing with the same kind of linguistic discourse available to Canadians of 2012, perhaps then, things might have turned out somewhat differently. But obviously the two situations are completely different. Analogy fail. Let's hope Nova Scotia Gaelic fares a little bit better.
