I know that less than a century ago there were Yiddish newspapers, theaters, movie houses (where the silent films had Yiddish dialogue cards), singers, etc… Molly Picon (the actress who personifies “elderly sweet Jewish grandmother” in the minds of anybody who watched TV or movies in the last half century) and Fyvush Finkel (bka the attorney on Picket Fences) both got their starts in Yiddish plays and theatrical companies, and the Jewish GI from Boston that my aunt was engaged to in WW2 (who’d have born around 1920) was fluent in the language (along with English, German, Russian, Polish and other languages from his all immigrant/1st generation neighborhood), but I was curious- is it a dying language today or is it still taught? Do any significant number of people under 50 speak it (in America or anywhere)? Is it used in Israel at all?
There are Yiddish classes that one can still take and there is a bit of effort to revive it but it’s pretty much a goner. My great grand partents spoke it exclusively. My grand parents were fluent. My parents know enough to communicate a little. I just know the funny words. I’d say that my experience is very typical.
My personal experience pretty much identical. But, there is a Hasidic community not a mile away from where I am sitting that use Yiddish exclusively at home and are certainly keeping it alive. Since they seem to average about 10 children per family and retain a good proportion in their community, they are growing repidly. Most of them also speak English and French and I don’t the extent to which they are borrowing words from those sources. One day while walking through the community I saw a panel truck with Yiddish lettering on it (yes, the letters are Hebrew, but there is no double yud in any Hebrew word) that I was able to puzzle out as Heymishes Kleeners. The first word is good Yiddish, meaning roughly, home-like (cf. German heimisch), but the second is just plain English.
My personal experience pretty much identical. But, there is a Hasidic community not a mile away from where I am sitting that use Yiddish exclusively at home and are certainly keeping it alive. Since they seem to average about 10 children per family and retain a good proportion in their community, they are growing repidly. Most of them also speak English and French and I don’t the extent to which they are borrowing words from those sources. One day while walking through the community I saw a panel truck with Yiddish lettering on it (yes, the letters are Hebrew, but there is no double yud in any Hebrew word) that I was able to puzzle out as Heymishes Kleeners. The first word is good Yiddish, meaning roughly, home-like (cf. German heimisch), but the second is just plain English.
New York city has a similar community and they are in close contact, since they run their own private bus service between Montreal and New York.
A couple of my cousins went to a Jewish school for elementary school, where they did learn Yiddish, along with Hebrew, French and English. I doubt they remember much. I personally don’t know anyone fluent in Yiddish - even my mother only knows a few words, and my father’s side of the family spoke Hebrew at home, not Yiddish.
I just recently read a very interesting book – Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescvued a Million Yiddish Books by Aaaron Lansky
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1565125134/qid=1136496885/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-6766840-3675321?n=507846&s=books&v=glance
Lansky founded the National Yidish Book Center in Amherst, MA to rescue all the Yiddish literature that was being thrown out as the older immigrant generation was dying off, and many of their children and heirs didn’t keep up with Yiddish. Many of the books have been stored digitally (thanks to a donation from Stephen Spielberg), and they act not merely as a repository for Yiddish books, but also a source and an outreach center. He describes a lot of the young people he worked with studying Yiddish on their own. I suspect the center gives courses:
A friend of mine (who was a few years older than me, but still significantly under 50) grew up in a religious community in Brooklyn; Yiddish is his first language. So…there you go. Although, FWIW, I was absolutely astonished when I learned this, he’s certainly the only younger person I’ve ever met who speaks Yiddish fluently, AFAIK. I occasionally saw signs in and heard people speaking Yiddish in Meah Shearim and Geula, two very Orthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem, but (much to my dad’s amazement, since his vision of Israel is a country populated by clones of his grandparents), Hebrew is far more likely to be seen and heard.
My school in Israel offered Yiddish courses. My roommate took it for a semester, and had a faltering conversation with my bubbe over the phone once.
I like the idea of being able to speak Yiddish, but realistically, there are a lot of other languages I’d study first because they’re so much more useful. I expect a lot of younger Jews feel the same way.
Yes, there are yeshivos (even non-Chassidic) which teach Yiddish. I personally don’t speak it (although I can follow along a conversation somewhat) and my kids’ schools don’t teach it either.
Though Jews constitute a minority of the population, Yiddish is still the official language of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia. Yiddish is still taught in school and there is a Yiddish-language newspaper, the Birobidzhaner Shtern.
If I recall correctly, there was some actual prejudice against Yiddish in Israel in its early days – maybe because it was perceived as the language of the ghetto, and because Hebrew was felt to be more appropriate. Anyone know about the status of Yiddish there now? And how about other countries? I have seen books published in Yiddish from Argentina and Mexico – admittedly from half a century ago. Any communities there still speaking Yiddish?
See Lansky’s book, cited in my post above. One of the roadblocks he and his group ran into was a widely held belief even in the US that Yissish was a ghetto tongue used for family conversations and not great literature. “Does anyone talk in Yiddish besides bubbes?” one potential contributor asked him. It was frustrating that so many of the people who didn’t care at all about Yiddish literature – or even wanted to help it along toward its demise as a living language – were influential Jews who supported classical Hebrew and using the tongues of the region where people were living.
Lansky says that there still are enclaves of Yiddish speakers in places like South America. He’s rescued troves of Yiddish books from there, nonetheless.