A Yiddish Revival, With New York Leading the Way

The question was bound to come up at some point: Vifl fun aykh do redn yidish? (How many of you here speak Yiddish?) About half of the audience raised their hands – some after a moment’s hesitation.

The audience had gathered Tuesday evening in the basement auditorium at the Museum of the City of New York for a panel discussion, “Yiddish Is Alive and Well and Living in New York,” that traced the language’s rich history and future prospects.

In the 20th century alone, Yiddish, once a thriving language spoken by millions of Eastern European Jews, became something of an endangered tongue, its legacy maintained by scattered communities in North America and the Soviet Union. Now Yiddish is undergoing what many see as a revival.

Jeffrey Shandler, associate professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University and author of “Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture” (University of California Press, 2005), moderated the panel, which was presented as part of an exhibition, “The Jewish Daily Forward: Embracing an Immigrant Community.”

Acknowledging Yiddish’s “very long and often very fraught past,” Dr. Shandler began by saying, “We often measure the state of a language and culture against the past, especially the period immediately before World War II, when Yiddish is the most widely spoken of any Jewish language in history and is the center of a vernacular culture of unprecedented scope in the Jewish experience.”

He encouraged the speakers to “focus on what contemporary culture is more so than what it isn’t.”

The first was Adrienne Cooper, a Yiddish singer who directs external affairs at the Workmen’s Circle, a mutual-aid society that promotes Jewish culture.

Ms. Cooper, a mezzo-soprano, comes from a family of performers. “I was literate and understood my mother’s songs well before I spoke Yiddish, which is when I was in graduate school,” she said.

The Workmen’s Circle, whose mission is secular, invests heavily in Yiddish teaching resources, like college textbooks and songbooks. “There are family learning communities that are primarily organized to teach children, but also to teach and engage the parents using the family heritage of Ashkenazi Jews — this personal, received history, rooted in the language, as the emotional hook to their using Yiddish for their Jewish literacy,” she said.

Ms. Cooper also noted that the American Jewish World Service ran a program to help revive Yiddish language and culture in Russia, acknowledging that there were Russian Jews who had no intention of ever moving to Israel, the United States or elsewhere.

“The way to support them is not to make them into Lubavitcher Hasidim, is not to make them Zionists, but to look at the culture that was indigenous there and help repair that thread of Yiddish culture,” she said.

Over the last decade, Americans with an interest in Yiddish -– many of them descendants of Russian immigrants –- have traveled to Russia to “repair that break” in culture, she said. “People became fluent in Yiddish very quickly, new Yiddish creators began to write songs,” she said. “There was a cultural courage and ownership that actually took a lot longer to develop among klezmer revivalists in the States. This was a super-heated kiln, and it happened much faster in R than it did here.”

Ms. Cooper, who recorded “Ghetto Tango,” an album of wartime cabaret music, with the pianist Zalmen Mlotek, described her love of Yiddish eloquently:

I’ve heard the language since birth. It’s a language that bites back. It’s tender and folksy and intelligent and ironic and rooted historically in a territory. That resonates with me because of family history and experience, but I also am a big believer that Jewishness flourishes in books, in exile, in the tradition of not being — I don’t know exactly how to describe it –- but in the condition of being unsettled.

Next to speak was Itzik Nakhmen Gottesman, a scholar and editor at The Yiddish Forward, a weekly that has experienced a revival in recent years. (Its English-language counterpart, The Jewish Daily Forward, is also published weekly.)

Dr. Gottesman, who holds a doctorate in Yiddish folklore from the University of Pennsylvania, runs a record label, Yiddishland Records, and is the host of a Saturday night radio show on WMCA-AM (570).

“It’s a Christian station that turns Jewish Saturday night,” he explained, eliciting some laughs.

“Reaction to the radio show is much larger in terms of feedback –- a lot of people obviously can understand Yiddish and enjoy Yiddish music, which is part of the show, than can actually read it,” he said.

Dr. Gottesman described the special work environment at The Forward. “We speak Yiddish the whole day,” he said, “We don’t speak English. Which is one of the reasons I work there, because I’m actually able to make a living speaking Yiddish all day.”

His colleagues include the newspaper’s editor, Boris Sandler, a Russian-born essayist and journalist. Dr. Gottesman’s cousin Rukhl Schaechter, who grew up near him (their families both lived in Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx), is the news editor. Other employees include a Russian Jew who became Hasidic and the occasional graduate student from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

“We realize people are not going to read Yiddish Forward for the news, although we try to find Jewish news that people won’t read in The New York Times,” Dr. Gottesman said. “But when we do news articles, you can often hear us arguing about, How do you say “global warming” in Yiddish, or any technical terms? We just throw them out in the air and see what finds a consensus.”

(By all accounts, globale onvaremung is the best translation of global warming.)

Dr. Gottesman, the author of “Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish Folklorists of Poland” (Wayne State University Press, 2003), said he left academia because he wanted to be “one of the people actually contributing to Yiddish culture from the inside.”

The final speaker was Michael Wex, author of “Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods” (2005) and “Just Say Nu: Yiddish for Every Occasion (When English Just Won’t Do),” published this month. (See William Grimes’s review today of the new book.)

“I think I’m actually the comic relief for this kind of thing,” Mr. Wex said, explaining that grew up in the small town of Lethbridge, Alberta, in western Canada -– a town, he noted, with a sizable Mormon population and “also the only area of Canada that featured the Ku Klux Klan.”

The peak of Jewish migration to Canada occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, about 30 to 40 years later than the height of Jewish settlement in the United States. That fact, combined with the postwar immigration of Holocaust survivors, meant that Lethbridge was a town “where every adult Jew was a fluent Yiddish speaker.”

Mr. Wex said his own family was very religious, “which was atypical for the place and the time.” Most of the Jews in the community were yidn fun a gants yor (Jews from a whole year) –- an idiom for regular, ordinary people, not particularly religious or political.

Mr. Wex recalled the Yiddish he heard as a young child in the ’50s and ’60s, when his grandfather’s friends would occasionally depart from the “fairly respectable” Yiddish of interwar Warsaw for coarser local dialects.

“So I got this exposure to a kind of Yiddish that was even then not necessarily the norm,” said Mr. Wex, who lives in Toronto. “And also to this very odd, rather skewed old-man humor, where these men were not just old, but knew they could get away with damn near anything and would basically do it with the drop of a yarmulke. These were the things that nobody liked –- the kind of stuff we were supposed to be, if not ashamed of -– this was what the high culture was supposed to have displaced.”

Mr. Wex, who was trained in Old English philology before he devoted himself to writing about Yiddish, added:

When I began to get seriously interested in Yiddish, I found there were many people who were doing first-rate work on the sort of high culture or officially recognized folk culture, particularly with respect to music –- which has always been strongly represented in Yiddish. One of the things I found wasn’t getting the attention it deserved was the sort of demotic aspect of Yiddish.

Mr. Wex said he became fascinated by the common or ordinary (the Yiddish word is prost) language used in bantering.

“A lot of stuff that looks like plain jokes or bad language is actually very, very deeply rooted in Ashkenazi Jewish history and religious practice,” he said, adding that his goal was to “go way, way back in folklore and shine a light not just on what you’re actually saying, but the process, the vicissitudes, through which the language and culture have developed.”

In a noteworthy moment, Mr. Wex mentioned, by way of example, a Yiddish admonition that translates loosely as “Go defecate on the sea.” (The precise verb is not printable here –- in Yiddish or English.) Mr. Wex explained:

When you stop to think about what this expression is really saying — and then you remember that Yiddish-speaking Jews lived, for years always surrounded by another population which believed that the main guy in their religion actually was able to balance on water while walking –- you get a whole new way of looking at this.

Mr. Wex said he questioned the notion of revitalizing Yiddish because “it didn’t need revitalization.”

“What it needed,” he continued, “was simply people willing to put themselves forward and assume the burden of doing something about it.”

Dr. Shandler began the question-and-answer session by asking what was being lost with the gradual passing of the generation that spoke Yiddish in prewar Eastern Europe.

“All of us sometimes are stymied by certain words or phrases,” Dr. Gottesman replied. “We’re lacking sometimes.”

Ms. Cooper said: “For me it’s an absolutely terrifying moment. The passing of the older generation gives new meaning to the idea of golus –- exile, or more generally insecurity. “There is no home to go back to,” she said. “There is no secular native environment in which to hear the culture continuously. It’s a challenging and quite frightening moment.”

Mr. Wex said that with the death in February of Mordkhe Schaechter, a noted Yiddish linguist (and Dr. Gottesman’s uncle), “we lost the last significant Yiddish linguist who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking world.”

Mr. Wex raised a broader challenge. Yiddish is alive and well in insular, ultra-Orthodox Hasidic communities, but the challenge is — “in the absence of the kind of exclusionary antisemitism that prevailed in Europe and became particularly virulent between the two world wars –- to give people who aren’t faced with that a reason to speak this language. To try and give them a sense that they have something to express, for which English is simply insufficient.”

Dr. Gottesman suggested that there was any number of reasons modern secular Jews might learn Yiddish: an identification with an oppressed people, political idealism or a desire to learn more about the world described by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

The panelists also noted a remarkable surge in interest in Yiddish among gentiles.

Ms. Cooper recalled going to the apartment of a Protestant minister in Chemnitz, Germany, for a Yiddish festival, and encountering young Germans -– fluent in Yiddish -– who questioned her about the subtle distinction between nisht and nit, two words for “not.”

The audience members asked some questions of their own. One woman complained that more Yiddish was not spoken during the panel.

Mr. Wex, whose books have done much to popularize Yiddish, emphasized its cultural and humorous dimensions. “Yiddish is a fantastic way to say no to everything around you, and in a culture where saying no is ever more difficult and fraught with consequences, Yiddish is often there as a great big finger to absolutely everything,” he said. The contributions of Yiddish to music, movies and popular culture have galvanized an awareness that Yiddish may yet be able to fill gaps in mainstream culture, he said.

Mr. Wex was asked in Yiddish whether he was Lithuanian or Galician, a reference to a historic rivalry between Jews from different regions of czarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (areas that are part of modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine). Mr. Wex replied, without skipping a beat, “Yakh bin a poylisher, nisht ken litvak un nisht, got zol ophitn, ken galitsyaner.” (“I am a Polish Jew, not a Lithuanian or, God forbid, a Galician.”)

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First we’re giving Ms. Almontaser (fired principal of the Khalil Gibran International) a hard time and now a biiiiig story about “A Yiddish Revival, With New York Leading the Way” story. Something aint clicking.

Very interesting Article. I recently spent time with Brooklyn’s Crown Hts. friends and was very taken with the fact the Yiddish is a living language. Young people as well as old were raised with Yiddish and seem to be completely bi-lingual, probably tri-lingual. They gain much perspective with this ability to communicate in several languages. English is and will remain the most important language worldwide, but there is great value to broadening our horizons.

genug shoyn, i grew up a ’50’s bronx irish-catholic, learning yiddish at the neighbor’s dinner tables, while noshing on geshmak kugl loving made by david’s bubba; i dearly miss those days

I respect the people who speak Yiddish and feel that this language is a part of their being. I know there are many people throughout the world who speak Yiddish, and there are some famous songs, writings and plays written in Yiddish.

But, having said that, I associate Yiddish with the language of the people who were the victims of the Holocaust, the people who were oppressed and treated as second or third class citizens across the world, the people who lived in the ghettos and the isolated Jewish communities of Europe, the people who faced pograms, attacks by Kossacks, etc. Some Christians find Yiddish cute and funny, and will tell you they support Yiddish and Yiddish language performing arts. But I think they like perpetuating Jews as these funny, quirky little different minority people.

So regarding spreading Yiddish to Jews in the former Soviet Union and other places where they are not already speaking Yiddish I have some issues. Hebrew is the original and historic language of the Jewish people. Hebrew is the official language of Israel. Hebrew was the language of the various historic kingdoms of Israel. Hebrew was the language of the slave population known as the Hebrews, who after long servitude achieved freedom and dignity as the escaped Egyptian slavery and journeyed to the promised land, the Land of Israel.

The rise of ancient Israel, and the various Hebrew kingdoms, their warrior defenses against all manner of aggressors and invaders, including the Roman Empire, even when they were eventually defeated in battle against overwhelming odds, was a testament to a people who fought back, and in the case of the Hebrews of Masada, would rather die than be taken captive as slaves. The modern state of Israel is a triumph of the original spirit of those ancient Hebrews to live again in their land in freedom and dignity, not to live in the shadows as a small minority speaking an arcane tongue of a despised underclass.

I associate Hebrew with all the great achievements and the pride of Israel and its gallant fight for independence, its survival against overwhelming forces in five wars and two intifidas.

My point is, Jews who do not speak Yiddish now, if anything, should be taught Hebrew along with the language of the country and culture they presently live in. I have no problems with their learning some Yiddish and learning about the Jewish culture that used Yiddish historically, and that culture.

But I associate Hebrew with the authentic language of people of Hebrew roots. I associate Hebrew as the pure language of the Jewish people rather than a hodgepodge of German, other European languages and Hebrew. I associate Hebrew with a language of pride, strength, dignity and achievement. I am sorry but I do not have this view of Yiddish. I associate it with weakness, discrimination, victimization, oppressed minority status, defenseless people being marched to their deaths.

I believe building a sense of Jewish pride and a spiritual and historic connection to Israel is in the best interest of Jews around the world. I don’t see how teaching non-Yiddish speakers helps. Rather I see it as rekindling the kind of separatism that between Yiddish speaking Jews in Europe that existed centuries before and up to the Holocaust. I am serious when I say that when non-Jews outside of Israel hear people speaking Yiddish it can convey the impression that these folks are trying to exclude you from their conversation.

“And also to this very odd, rather skewed old-man humor, where these men were not just old, but knew they could get away with damn near anything and would basically do it with the drop of a yarmulke. These were the things that nobody liked –- the kind of stuff we were supposed to be, if not ashamed of -– this was what the high culture was supposed to have displaced.”

Soon they’ll be no more us leaving what passes for originality and truth for vetting for political correctness by the Manchurian Globals which own and operate today’s professional political class, academia, and the media.

The expression “Go defecate on the sea” or “I defecate on the sea” (with unprintable verb) exists also in Spanish. I really disagree with the interpretation of its origin given in your text.

Regards,

Santiago

My mother and her grandmother spoke Yiddish all the time – my brother and I never learned it because with us it was only English. I regret never having learned it. I do not consider it the language of weakness – my greatgrandmother was the strongest woman I’ve ever known. It was the common language (much as Ladino is the common language of Sephardi Jews). Hebrew was reserved for the synagogue – it was the holy language. Not until the Zionist movement in the early 1900’s was Hebrew spoken routinely.

Road2Peace- I get what you’re saying, and I agree with you on issues of Jewish pride, but isn’t it a true sign of how much pride Jews have and how far we’ve come to not worry about what non-Jews will say if they hear Jews speaking a different language (or doing anything they feel like doing)?

Perley J. Thibodeau October 17, 2007 · 11:55 am

Would you believe I just got done eating Matzo Ball soup for breakfast? I froze the left overs after the recently celebrated High Holy Days.
No, I’m not Jewish but I always cook in celebration of the High Holy Days in fall and spring in remembrance of the wonderful Jewish friends I worked with at Warner Brothers Pictures-Music Publishers Holding Corp back in the early 60’s.
Besides, I love chopped liver, Matzo Ball Soup, and the other recipes.
However, the love I put into my cooking doesn’t mean as much to me as the love my Jewish friends put into theirs. Love for oneself is never as equally good as the love that comes from others.
God Bless their souls, they used to love to teach me words in Yiddish. They’re gone now but,I’m still learning.
As I told my very young male heart doctor the other day: ” Words seem to carry even more weight when they are said in Yiddish!”

To Road2Peace:

My grandparents and parents, who grew up in Soviet Ukraine, survived the Holocaust and came to america. They all know Yiddish. When I hear them speaking Yiddish, I do not hear what you hear. I associate Yiddish with a refusal to give up their heritage, a refusal to give up a part of them, in the face of the pogroms and the Nazis. And my Yiddish-speaking grandparents both fought for the Red Army against the Germans in World War II. They were not weak. They were not defenseless.

I am surprised that no mention was made of the National Yiddish Book Center at Amherst, Massachusetts.

#9 I’m glad your family made it through. I’m not saying Yiddish speakers are weak. I’m glad that you had relatives fighting the Nazis. So I did I. For the US. Some in B17s rearranging the German landscape. They all came back. A very close relative of mine fighting with the US Army against them didn’t. A marksman. I hope he took a lot of them with him. But he died fighting for freedom–not like a sheep going to slaughter.

I’m saying around 6 million Yiddish speakers in the 1930s-40s are dead and they were preyed upon because they were viewed as a weak and separatist group, the “not of us” people in whatever countries they lived in Europe.

People think twice about messing with Israelis and with Israel. They know Israel has the best Airforce on Earth on a per capita basis, they know Israel has the best army on earth on a per capita basis, they know Israel is the world leader in counterterrorism techniques including civilian air transport, and they know Israelis have developed very formidable hand to hand combat skills as in Krav Maga–whose instructors do training for security forces around the world from the US to Singapore. A rabbi in New Jersey was nearly bludgeoned to death by an attacker, I believe using a baseball bat. He was singled out as Juden. The attacker would have not dared to attack someone wearing an IDF Beret walking tall.

The sign for Israel today is like that of the great American patriot John Paul Jones and the US Navy, “Don’t tread on me!” The image of the traditional Yiddish speaking Jew or the Jew of Eastern Europe is, “I’m sorry. Let me be on my way.”

Can a goy participate in this discussion w/o being accused of something nefarious? My naive background: I had the absolute ignorant gall several years ago to say to Mr. Singer that I was also Polish. Never mind that my family was Catholic. What did I know at the time? Well, recently in my research for a book Im writing on a Jewish artist, I’ve become awakened to a history that never before was a part of my experience. I hesitate to say much more, lest I repeat my Singer mistake, but may I say at least that the Yiddish “phenomenon” (sorry, I’m being PC) is of great import. (God, I hate it when I get into this academic mode.) The fact is, Yiddish is REAL LIFE STUFF.

There’s a lot more to Yiddish than what Road2Peace is willing to accept. I would think that most people who hear Yiddish spoken don’t make those negative connections. Even in Israel there has been somewhat of a revival of interest in Yiddish, partly as a backlash against the destructive attitude that some proponents of Hebrew held toward anything related to the Diaspora. Many people are starting to realize just how much is in danger of being lost as a result of that attitude, and how much has already been lost. The reason Yiddish is a hodgepodge of other languages is because it picked up words as a result of interaction with speakers of those languages, so in that respect Yiddish traces much of the history of European Jewry. Yiddish speakers have a key to understanding many aspects of Jewish life that would otherwise go undiscovered. Jewish day schools in Los Angeles and Boston have begun offering Yiddish language classes, and I hope these are just the beginning. We need to know where we came from, as well as where we stand today. To throw away Yiddish is to throw away hundreds of years of our heritage. Hebrew is important to the Jewish people, but so is Yiddish.

As my son-in-law of Libyan-Jewisd descent’s mama lashon (native tongue) is Arabic, urged my daughter living in Israel to add it my grandchildren’s fluency in Hebrew and English. Since they’ll attend ultraorthodox haredi schools, they will eventually learn Yiddish.

Actually, many of the posters are sniffing pretty close to the reality of Yiddish and the purpose it once served. Which is: it was almost like a secret “jive-talk” so the oppressors couldn’t understand what was being said. Fahrsteis? and, if you don’t accept this reasoning, well, gey kock un drerdt, as granny would say.

Ich hob lieb mi sprach, Mame Loschen.

Yiddish the language of the Jewish Exile, (Galut), and of Jewish degradation and humiliation.

As stated by “road2peace” above, Hebrew is the true Jewish Language which united Mizrahi, ephardi, Askenazi, etc. and should be the only language spoken by Jews.

@ Road2Peace

Aren’t most Americans these days suspicious when they hear a stranger speaking a foreign language in front of them? How many would even be able to identify it as Yiddish, or Hebrew, Portuguese, Russian, or Esperanto for that matter?

Some of the best memories of my life are from the first summer I knew Yiddish, walking around New York City with haverim, speaking only auf Yidish, un voinen dort in undzer Yidishland.

Oh, sorry, did you think I was talking about you?

I find myself strangely agreeing with Mr. Katzwer. Yiddish is the language of the Jewish Goles (diaspora or exile.)
Just as it was the language of every other Eastern European Jewish experience for a few hundred years. Unlike you, Mr. Katzwer, I’m not unrealistic enough to say that it is the de facto Jewish language. But it certainly is my Jewish language, a language rich with history and guts. You can try speaking Hebrew, but at the end of the day, you come from Eastern Europe and that has certain experiences associated with it. Many of them very happy experiences, by the way. I don’t live in Israel and I have no affiliation with Zionism and my connection to the Canaan in the torah is tenuous. But I do know one thing and that is Yiddish, the language of my family and my culture.

Even though I studied yiddish many years ago in the Bronx at Shule 1 in the COOPS I have not used it much and I am quite rusty.
Thus I need some help with a reply to road2peace (I love the name by the way) and Richard Katzwer…Lighten up a bit chaverim!

Hi,

“Yiddish” is not the language of oppressed people.

It is spoken today by many tens of thousands of Jews in North America, Europe and E-Israel, and every single day more and more people learn it from their dear parents.

So why all the opressed doom and gloom?

Hebrew was always sacred, used since creation only in synagogue or holy-book studies, untill the zionist movement “modernized” and “street-language’d” the holy tongue of Hebrew.

Thanks NYTimes for enabling us to voice free opinions.

You would never know from the article that a 21st Century English-based (as opposed to German-based) patois has developed. It’s generally called “Yeshivish”, having developed in the Orthodox day schools. It has elements of Biblical Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish proper, smooshed onto American English. Pretty soon, someone will decide to write it with Hebrew characters and an official new language will be recognized.

Robert M. Siegfried October 17, 2007 · 1:32 pm

While it is easy to associate Yiddish with the ghetto and the Holocaust, I grew up hearing it from my grandmother and father and from the older men in synagogue. I had little interest in learning, preferring to learn Hebrew, the language of Israel and Zion. But as I have gotten older, I appreciate the limited ability I have to understand it. It is a heritage to precious to be lost.

I have a bone to pick with Mr. Chan – Galicianers (or Galicians) did not live within Czarist Russia – they lived within the part of Poland annexed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

As far as the feuding, it was between Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews) and Galicianers. Poylisher (as called Paylishers) were neutral. In either case, I have roots in all 3 communities.

Seems to me that we should be celebrating the amazing diversity of Judaism. The Talmud was written in Aramaic, and that was fine. The Aramaic language certainly lent something wonderful to the culture of the Talmud and its writers. Maimonides wrote his magnum opus in Arabic, and in countless ways reflected the culture of the Arab renaissance of which he was a part. Yiddish has its own beauty. As does Hebrew. The idea that “we should all speak this” or “no one should speak that” unfortunately to reflect a deep fear of diversity and pluralism, and a denial of the true richness of Jewish history and experience.