I’ve read a lot of books on the history of entertainment in the US in the late 19th and early 20th century and I’ve noticed many references to a vibrant Yiddisher culture - Yiddish theatre, Yiddish comedians, Yiddish music, etc.
Does any of this still exist? Is Yiddish still a live language in America? Or did the language and culture fade as European Jews assimilated (making the huge contribution they did to mainstream American film, music and comedy)?
Mods, I wasn’t sure whether this was GQ or CS material. Please move if you think appropriate.
I believe that the big reason that Yiddish faded isn’t assimilation but that the state of Israel chose Hebrew over Yiddish as the language of choice. (So that the Jewish kids with whom I went to public school in Connecticut went to a special school on the weekends to study Hebrew.) As I remember from articles in the New York Times about Aaron Lansky, Yiddish was a living language at the time, while Hebrew was primarily used by scholars and in prayers (but otherwise was a dead language).
I wonder how much Yiddish is spoken in Jewish homes today, especially the Ultra-Orthodox. My parents, both Reform Jews, spoke Yiddish if they didn’t want us kids to know what they were saying. Of course it didn’t take long for us to learn what they were saying, though we never let them know. My WAG is that it’s spoken in high-concentration Orthodox areas like Brooklyn.
But as far as actual Yiddish “culture” is concerned, there’s no way it can be sustained like it was 100 years ago.
I believe the Chasidic Jews still use Yiddish as their primary language. Other than them, I don’t think many new speakers are being raised. My dad is a native Yiddish speaker - I have a lot of passive vocabulary but I don’t speak it. When his generation is gone, I think there will be very few Yiddish speakers left outside the Chasidic community.
I live in a neighborhood with many ultra-orthodox (non-Chasid) Jews but they are primarily Bukhari (they are from Uzbekistan) and they speak either Bukhari (Persian dialect) or more commonly, Russian, as their native language.
This makes a lot of sense when you consider that Yiddish is basically a dialect of German. It’s not exactly surprising that the Jews would want to sever ties with German culture after World War II. Yiddish was the language of the “Galut” (exile) - it was the mark of subservience and oppression. Hebrew was a way for Jews to reclaim their own cultural identity.
Not to mention that they wanted to make Israel the home of the whole Jewish people, not only the Ashkenazim. Plenty of Jews, and apparently slightly more than half of Israeli Jews, are not Ashkenazim, and therefore presumably not from Yiddish-speaking cultures.
the Hebrew language spoken in Israel had no real effect on the demise of Yiddish among Americans.
Yiddish died out in America because it was spoken by immigrants who arrived through Ellis Island over a century ago, and are now ,well,… dead.
Their children, born in America in the 1920’s, learned only English…but continued to fondly remember jokes and colorful expressions in Yiddish for another generation.(Enough to keep the comedians in the Catskill resorts employed through the 1960’s. )Their grandchildren (born in the 1960’s-70’s) knew only a few isolated words, and their great-grandchildren know none at all.
The one big exception is among some, but not all ,of the ultra-religious Chasidic groups in N.York.These groups live separately from American socety, like the Amish, and they continue to use Yiddish in their insular world. But it is not the “Yiddish culture” refered to in the OP–which back in the 1920’s included a wide variety: popular singers; high-brow,cultured theater; low-brow vaudeville; and widely-read daily newspapers–all in Yiddish.
Begging everyone’s pardon if I’m saying the obvious, but it appears to me that a fair summary of what’s been said is that Yiddish culture is in rapid decline in America, owing to the assimilation of the old immigrant communities, but surviving in the Hasidic communities. Their relative insularity, though, means that it will not continue to have the effect on general American culture that it did during the 20th century, when Yiddish-ancestry writers, actors, comedians, etc., were a significant part of the entertainment community.
That can’t be right. My parents made a conscious decision that we kids woud not earn Yiddish (I was born in 1937) so they could have a private language for themselves.
In a sense it doesn’t matter how many speakers there are. The OP asked about active Yiddish theater, comedy, and the like and I don’t think that exists any more. The only people growing up with Yiddish today are in the various fundamentalists sects and their Yiddish culture is doubtless vital and active but aso separate from the rest of the culture. Here in Montrea, there is a substantial Hassidic community that, as it happens, I frequently walk through and there is no doubt they are speaking Yiddish with their kids (of which there are many).
Back in the 5os my father went to a meeting of the Men’s club at the synagogue because the Phillies announcer (named “Gene Kelly”) was giving a talk there. He started by telling jokes in Yiddish. That wouldn’t happen today; no on would understand (and he wouldn’t know it anyway).
No, it was killed in the larger community by a couple million decisions of the sort my parents made.
Well, I think it’s more that most of the world’s Yiddish speakers were in Eastern Europe and died in the Holocaust. It largely died out in the US, because the children of Yiddish speakers assimilated and started speaking English as their primary language.
Forvarts had a circulation of 275,000 in the 30s, down to just around 5000 today.