Creating Identity: Yiddish Across a Spectrum of Jewish Communities Today

Summary

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research recently held its annual Noemi Prawer Kadar Memorial Lecture, focusing on the evolving role of Yiddish across varied Jewish communities. The event featured experts Paul Glasser, Isabel Berry, Ross Perlin, and Sarah Bunin Benor, who explored Yiddish's identity within orthodox and secular contexts, its linguistic transmission among Hasidic groups, and its vibrant resurgence in modern secular spaces. The discussions also touched on Yiddish's interaction with other languages and its cultural significance beyond religious boundaries.

Highlights

• Yiddish remains a vital part of Jewish cultural identity, especially in Hasidic communities who maintain its vernacular use 💬.
• Secular communities are reviving Yiddish through cultural activities, highlighting its versatile role in Jewish identity 🎭.
• Linguistic studies show Yiddish evolving with influences from English and other languages, demonstrating its adaptive nature 🔤.
• Modern Yiddish spaces provide a sense of continuity for secular Jews seeking cultural connection 💫.
• Young Jews are increasingly engaging with Yiddish as a choice, reflecting a conscious cultural and identity exploration 🚀.

Key Takeaways

• Yiddish is thriving in diverse communities, with a strong presence in both orthodox and secular environments 🌍.
• Hasidic communities play a crucial role in the transmission and evolution of Yiddish language and culture 🔄.
• Secular and non-orthodox groups are experiencing a Yiddish resurgence, marked by cultural events and educational programs 🎉.
• Yiddish's integration into mainstream culture has spread its influence beyond Jewish circles, making it part of the broader linguistic tapestry 🗣️.
• The future of Yiddish involves complex identity dynamics and the blending of tradition with modern cultural practices 🔀.

Overview

The annual Noemi Prawer Kadar Memorial Lecture showcased the dynamic role of Yiddish in contemporary Jewish life, illustrating a vibrant tapestry of cultural and linguistic engagement. From orthodox to secular realms, Yiddish persists as a crucial marker of identity and tradition, adapting uniquely to the modern world.

Speakers highlighted how Hasidic communities are preserving and transforming Yiddish as a living language. These groups are critical in Yiddish's continuity, as they integrate the language into day-to-day life and religious practice, ensuring its transmission to future generations.

The lecture also emphasized the role of secular Jews who are rekindling their connection to Yiddish. Through festivals, educational initiatives, and cultural expressions, they are bridging the gap between past and present, creating a multifaceted Yiddish landscape rich with historical resonance and contemporary innovation.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction and Welcoming Remarks The chapter titled 'Introduction and Welcoming Remarks' is initiated by Helene Gandi, the Public Program Director at Evo, as she warmly welcomes the attendees to the annual 'Know Me Prayer Kedar Memorial Lecture'. The lecture, themed 'Creating Identity: Yiddish Across a Spectrum of Jewish Communities Today', features speakers such as Paul Glasser, Isabel Berry, Sera Bynoon, Andrew Spurlins. Helene also extends gratitude to the Kadar family for their support in making the event possible.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Overview of Evo Programs and Announcements The chapter titled 'Overview of Evo Programs and Announcements' starts with the mention of Evo's executive director, Jonathan Brent, who could not attend the event because he is in Vilnius on behalf of Evo. His greetings were read at the event. The chapter highlights two specific inserts from the program: information about upcoming educational opportunities at Evo. These include Yiddish language classes, a winter program focusing on Ashkenazi civilization, and two spring classes. Additionally, the inauguration of the Jakob Crone as a visiting scholar is announced.
• 05:00 - 09:00: Message from Executive Director Jonathan Brent The chapter discusses new academic initiatives by the organization, including the appointment of Professor Steven Zipperstein as the first Jakob Kronos scholar at Stanford University. He will conduct a graduate seminar on Jews and the Russian Revolution in April 2014. Additionally, YIVO is launching a survey to engage with the audience and tailor public programs to their interests. For further information on classes, readers are encouraged to contact Jennifer Young Evos, the Director of Education.
• 09:00 - 15:00: Introduction of Panelists and Purpose of Lecture The chapter introduces the panelists and sets the context for the lecture. An announcement is made regarding a survey that attendees are encouraged to fill out and submit. Words of welcome from the director, Jonathan Brent, are read, conveying his regret for not being present and informing the audience about his current work on a project in Vilnius.
• 15:00 - 37:00: Sociolinguistic Study on Yiddish Acquisition Among Hasidic Toddlers The chapter discusses efforts to create the world's first complete library of Yiddish literature by digitizing Yiddish language materials from Vilnius. These materials represent the legacy of the EVO Institute of Vilna from before World War II. The goal is to digitally unite these materials with collections in New York, recreating the pre-war Strich in library and contributing to the preservation and study of Yiddish culture and language.
• 37:00 - 62:00: Alternative Yiddish Spaces and Post-Vernacular Yiddish The chapter discusses the ongoing efforts to preserve and promote Yiddish language and culture through various initiatives at the Yivo Institute. Despite the challenges, Yiddish continues to thrive, thanks to programs like summer courses, adult language classes, and a variety of lectures, conferences, and other events. This effort is supported by benefactors such as the Nomi Foundation and the Kedar family, highlighting the importance of community support in maintaining cultural heritage.
• 62:00 - 83:00: Yiddish Words in American English and Orthodox Communities The chapter introduces key individuals involved in the organization and execution of a program centered around Yiddish words in American English and Orthodox communities. It acknowledges Helene Gandi Evos, Paul Glasser, and Jennifer Jung Evos for their roles in organizing and directing the event, as well as Alex Brandwine for designing the program's marketing materials. Suzanne Leon is credited as the director of development. The introduction is followed by Paul Glasser, who serves as the moderator, to speak about know me prior Kedar and introduce the panel.
• 83:00 - 95:30: Panel Discussion on Yiddish and Identity In this chapter titled 'Panel Discussion on Yiddish and Identity,' the speaker welcomes Noemi Kedar and acknowledges the support of the Naomi Foundation for the event. There's a mention of a sketch about Naomi in the program and a personal reflection on the speaker's first meeting with Naomi, noting the close-knit nature of the Yiddish community.
• 95:30 - 103:00: Audience Questions and Closing Remarks The chapter is titled 'Audience Questions and Closing Remarks'. The speaker reflects on past missed opportunities to connect with someone named Naomi, whom they greatly respected as a scholar and person. Naomi worked on Yiddish studies, and although their interactions were limited to a few seminars and research encounters, the speaker feels regret over not knowing her better. This chapter captures the intertwining of professional respect and personal regret in academic circles.

Creating Identity: Yiddish Across a Spectrum of Jewish Communities Today Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hello my name is Helene and gandi I'm the public program director here at Evo welcome we are delighted you are here for tonight's annual know me prayer Kedar memorial lecture creating identity yiddish across a spectrum of jewish communities today with paul Glasser Isabel berry our sera by noon burn or andross purlins I'd like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank the kadar family for making this evening
• 00:30 - 01:00 possible Evos executive director Jonathan Brent could not be here tonight unfortunately he's in Vilnius on behalf of Evo and before I read greetings on his behalf I'd like to call attention to two inserts in your program firstly we have information about a few upcoming educational opportunities here at Evo including Yiddish language classes our winter program in Ashkenazi civilization and two spring classes we're also thrilled to announce the inauguration of the Jakob Crone he'll visiting scholar
• 01:00 - 01:30 the first Jakob Kronos scholar will be Professor Steven zipper Steen of Stanford University who'll be offering an intensive graduate level seminar open to everyone on Jews and the Russian Revolution in April 2014 if you're interested in finding out more about any of these classes please see Jennifer Young Evos director of education the second insert is our yivo survey about public programs this fall we're beginning a dialogue with our audiences to learn more about you and the kinds of programs you're most interested in we'd
• 01:30 - 02:00 love to hear from you please fill out the survey and drop it off at the Evo table in the Great Hall after tonight's discussion and now I'd like to read just a few words of welcome from our director Jonathan Brent I wish I were in New York this evening to welcome all of you the family of Noemi Kjar and our excellent speakers to the annual Noemi Prower Kedar Memorial Lecture as these words are read I'm in Vilnius with my colleagues from the archives and library to advance our project to create the
• 02:00 - 02:30 first complete library of Yiddish literature in the world we hope to accomplish accomplish this by digitizing all the Yiddish language material in Vilnius material that represents the legacy of the EVO Institute of Vilna before world war ii and uniting news digitally to our collection in New York in doing so we will also be able to recreate virtually the pre-war Strich in library one of you Vosges most
• 02:30 - 03:00 magnificent collections of rare Hebrew and Yiddish books this is only one way in which Yiddish continues to flourish at Yivo our summer program adult language classes and numerous lectures conferences films and seminars such as the oneness evening continue to bear witness to our commitment to keep alive this precious element of our heritage I am most grateful to the Nomi Foundation and the Kedar family for making this
• 03:00 - 03:30 program possible thanks also goes to Helene gandi evos public program director Paul Glasser former dean of the max vine-ripe Center and Jennifer Jung Evo's education director who were responsible for putting this panel together Alex brand wine who designed the program and publicity materials and Suzanne Leon director of development and now it's with great pleasure that I introduce Paul Glasser our moderator for this evening to say a few words about know me prior Kedar and introduce the panel
• 03:30 - 04:00 thank you I'd like to second everything that Elena said to welcome Noemi Kedar is family and to thank the Naomi foundation for its sponsorship there's a beautiful sketch about Naomi in the program that I'm sure you've seen I just want to add a few words of my own I've been trying to remember when we first met I don't remember it seems like in this very small world of yiddish
• 04:00 - 04:30 studies that we always knew each other unfortunately we never got to know each other all that well and I missed my chance and I regretted very very much we ran into each other constantly while naomi was here evil doing research she lectured once or twice in our Yiddish seminar series about her research she was a great scholar she was a lovely person we also worked together on the
• 04:30 - 05:00 you just summer program and I always like to point out and I don't think she ever told me this I think this is probably mostly Schechter who liked to out people that her Yiddish name was NACA Crandall I think I think he told me that and when I mentioned it to her she said let's keep it a secret so he Schechter without people who who didn't immediately introduce themselves with the Yiddish names but but the
• 05:00 - 05:30 interesting about went about hearing NACA kinda Liz that that immediately gives away where the family was from in the sketch it says that she was born into a Yiddish speaking family but anybody named NACA has got to be from somewhere between let's say Warsaw and Krakow and that's where they were from right most of its yeah and it's just it just has a lot of meaning for me and I'm
• 05:30 - 06:00 very sorry she can't be here tonight I know she would have loved this program in fact if she were here tonight she'd probably be on the panel so yeah it's like we should have a chair for Elia nouvion for a Naomi a few words about the about the panel tonight first of all I just want to say to the audience I know you all worked very hard out there at the reception so yeah the the the panel is your reward for all
• 06:00 - 06:30 that hard work now let me introduce the speakers Isabel Burrell is on the faculty of Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center at CUNY she's director of the research for policy and education at Yale at Vale da Early Childhood Center and she is studying language transmission among among others among sedum in Brooklyn and
• 06:30 - 07:00 we were going to hear today about you just spoke Yiddish being spoken among sedum and how it is transmitted from from parents to children particularly in view of the fact that the see them in Brooklyn and elsewhere are most of the people who actually speak Yiddish with their children today Ross Berlin is the assistant director of the endangered language alliance he has studied it'sh among other places here at Evo and at
• 07:00 - 07:30 the Vilnius program and he reported for the four routes from China was the two years ago and he's probably the only person I know of offhand who knows both he - and Chinese he will be speaking about Irish in contemporary culture Sarah Boone and manure is assisting sociate professor of contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and she is the author most
• 07:30 - 08:00 recently of becoming from-- how newcomers learn the language and culture of Orthodox Judaism which is available in in eBook form by the way for those of you who don't believe in carrying around paper anymore like me and she will be talking about Yiddish among various shades of Orthodoxy so we are attempting in this panel to cover Yiddish use and the it'sh attitude see
• 08:00 - 08:30 it ish in the whole spectrum of Jews as much as we can in the in the in a in a short panel like this one just a few questions I'd like to throw out for people to think about before we start because I think I'm already used up all my time I get emails quite frequently how many people speak Yiddish today and my answer is do you mean people who know you - for people who actually bother to speak it as far as we can tell there are
• 08:30 - 09:00 quite a few people who know Yiddish but don't bother to speak it anymore either people who are Holocaust survivors and of course there are fewer of those every day unfortunately or their children who may have spoken Yiddish with their parents but don't make a habit of it and then there are the people who actually make a habit of it and we're going to be talking more about the people who actually use the addition in their daily lives but it's interesting to think that these two numbers could be so different
• 09:00 - 09:30 which brings up the question of Yiddish as a vernacular versus a poster in ocular I think that was Geoffrey Chandler's term post vernacular a language that used to be spoken but hangs on in different forms either as individual words or because people remember it fondly or because they know that other people speak it it's it's extremely complicated question that we're only going to touch on today then we're not really going to have time to go into this but it's interesting that in New York at least it seems like
• 09:30 - 10:00 everybody knows at least a few words of Yiddish for example the father of Bill Thompson who just lost the race for mayor when he was first elected to office a number of years ago they asked his father who was most decidedly not Jewish what he had to say about his son's election he said today is the day for me to have Navas and the New York Times reported that with a straight face there's no it was only to explain what
• 10:00 - 10:30 knife is meant and there was no need to say that this man isn't Jewish and probably only knows a few words of Yiddish but feels perfectly comfortable using a Yiddish word in this context so that's to an extent that's New York again I don't know if we'll have time for it but I'm curious to know how much that is that's true outside of New York we could also think about another question several people have pointed out that Yiddish is the language of the
• 10:30 - 11:00 ultra-orthodox Yiddish also appeals to some extent to secular leaders who might be said to be the other extreme but people in the middle Jews in the middle not so much now how did this happen how did you - come to be represent extremes we will hear about how each of these various segments of Jewish of the Jewish community looks at Yiddish and as we as I said before whether they transmit Yiddish to their children and if so how do they do it and it would be great
• 11:00 - 11:30 again if we could hear a little bit about well more than a little about how this fits into their identity what role you displays in Jewish identity or even Jewish nationalism if we can talk about that in the 21st century but the most important thing is that our speakers have come armed with facts and not just they do generalizations the way I resorted to now so I with that I will
• 11:30 - 12:00 turn the program over to our speakers and we'll begin with is about our year so thank you for having me here and I will be presenting a talk with a perspective of a development or cycling West and the policymakers studying Hasidic Irish so Fishman in 1952 shared with us view that Yiddish was ideal
• 12:00 - 12:30 ground to examine sociolinguistic which which is a link between a sociology and language during this presentation what I would like to make you appreciate is the fact that the current context of the equation of Hasidic he dish is an ideal kind of ground to answer many questions that we have about language acquisition and language transmission and maybe also variation and change and I would also be talking about where does this work tell us about current and possible optimal
• 12:30 - 13:00 policies for the maintenance of Yiddish I would like to start this presentation by sharing with you the fact that by you know this poem by Jeff about Columbus this is Columbus Day today and for linguist Columbus Day is not a day when we are very happy because it's a beginning of the modern era of the destruction of many languages and you know many years later some varieties of
• 13:00 - 13:30 Yiddish have suffered the fate of many languages that do not exist today and other varieties may be indention and others have resisted so I just wanted us to think about it today not just as a day to celebrate Casa de leche or to study it but also as a day to remember that there are many languages that disappear and maybe we can do something about it and in the course of this presentation I will also mention a personal and dialogical connection to the Naomi
• 13:30 - 14:00 Prabhakar as the reason why we are here today as well so if we look at the field of developmental psycholinguistics which is a study of language acquisition that started back with Chomsky in 1957 with the seminal thesis trying to say that if we good theory of language we need to explain how we develop language going from 57 to today's a shift has been on trying to explain not only how children
• 14:00 - 14:30 acquire one language but how we become multilingual because the multilingual experience is a more common human experience and one of the issues that people in this field kind of study is what kind of context enable children to develop language versus what kind of context doesn't how much is necessary how much is sufficient so that language is developed I wanted to say that before I started the study I am going to talk
• 14:30 - 15:00 about today I had very little connection with Yiddish or Judaism are not being Jewish myself and not being a Yiddish speaker however I discovered as I worked on this project that actually two of my very important mentors in the field a speakers of Yiddish one was Celia Jack you bhavish who left us not that long ago who was one of the person who establish the field in in France she was actually from the same community as Navasky from which parents from
• 15:00 - 15:30 Vilnius and she was born in Argentina and her first language with Yiddish and the second is a person is Ben Seewald who actually went to shul with Naomi and you see Ben see here singing she is current she's from a Yiddish speaking and JLo russian-speaking background and you see her on this picture signing because she's actually currently is a specialist of studies of British slang language and she is a person who trained me not only to study languages but also to study languages in the context of
• 15:30 - 16:00 minority languages minority speakers of minority languages so let's look at you dish today let's look at the context in New York what is this context in which children are developing this language when they do well Yiddish today is the seventh language other than English spoken in New York if you look at the number of speakers so it's a little bit less than French but more than Korean okay so it's looking good you know and then if we
• 16:00 - 16:30 if we look at if we look at the neighborhoods where my study was conducted Brooklyn community district one includes Williamsburg and Brooklyn community district 12 includes Borough Park what you see here is a map of the alleged early childhood centers that spread around Brooklyn but also Staten Island and the areas that have been circled as those areas where you see blue dots sites where the organization has preschools for children between the
• 16:30 - 17:00 minus three months times the mother is pregnant and five years of age okay and let's look at this neighborhood in terms of the number of speakers so if we take Brooklyn Community District one 15 percent of speakers in 2000 were speakers of Yiddish which obviously is the fact that they're all in a neighborhood kind of encourages the fact that they're going to use a language but more impressively it went through very fast increase in terms of number of speakers okay so if you look at this
• 17:00 - 17:30 figure as well as those for Brooklyn Committee district 12 where we have 30% increase we have we do not have a language that is endangered okay so it doesn't fit the criteria of endangered languages and you know if I apply for grant funding to language I am NOT going to obtain some based on this data okay and so I'm going to be talking mostly about Williamsburg and Borough Park and the reason why I'm not going to have time to talk about no Sisseton about
• 17:30 - 18:00 Crown Heights is because the pattern of transmission is a little different there but I'll be happy to answer questions in the question period okay instead of giving you a lot of figures I'll give you some facts that has polarizer access and we're going to take the example of a child Jakov who is a participant in the home-based adhere to that program actually Giada and at the time he was studied in Williamsburg at the time he was studied it was two years and nine months based on a detailed questionnaire
• 18:00 - 18:30 on Yakov we know that he's a fifth child in his family his three older brothers and two sisters one who is older one who is younger both his parents native speakers of Hungarian adesh and Sabo both high school graduates which is a kind of typical level of education for my participants they exclusively use a dish at home you know the only dishes use that on both with their parents and with siblings and also during literacy
• 18:30 - 19:00 related activities and Yaakov he is a little bit of English about 10% of the time from other caregivers okay so the question we can ask is well is this child exceptional so I've conducted this kind of survey on more than 100 children in each led Alda close to 180 now and here are the percentages what you see in blue are children who are basically mostly mainly who he is most of the time you - okay so you see that many of them
• 19:00 - 19:30 here only Yiddish that's up to age three okay so up to three years of age the 30% of the children here on the E - 43 % here 90 % of Yiddish and 10% of English 20% of the children here 75 % of English then the case of what we call in the literature balanced bilingual which is represented in red here is actually it's very it's a very small proportion okay
• 19:30 - 20:00 so this is the kind of textbook bilingual you've heard about if you read about Canadian Studies etc and this is actually a small proportion and then there is a very small proportion as well as children who honey here is about one here about 10% of Yiddish okay so let's learn a little bit more about Yakov as an example so we saw that in order to collect the data is that I'm going to talk about South resources of data that we use one is a very detailed
• 20:00 - 20:30 questionnaire on the linguistic and demographic context in which Yakov is raised then there is a questionnaire in Yiddish that as the parents which words and what combination - child produces it's an adaptation of any clinical tools that we have adapted to Yiddish and also audio recordings and we have mother and child interacting at home in the context of symbolic play so the the Yiddish questionnaires tells
• 20:30 - 21:00 us some information about Yaakov is 2 years 9 months so close to 3 years he produces 450 14 words which is a you know normal typical vocab really for a child of this age and the reason why I have put all these pictures here is because I wanted to I didn't want to forget to mention the fact that the questionnaire in Yiddish is not just a translation from the American English one it's a it's an adaptation that takes into account the culture of the child so
• 21:00 - 21:30 there are words that refer to Torah and challah bread etc you know there are all kind of words that are specific to the culture so that you know the questionnaire is adapted to the cultural community we also learned from these questionnaires that Yakov uses language to talk about things that are removed from the context and not just about the present and also we hear we learn that he produces problems like he has etc our preposition like MIT he started using the very complex system of growth of
• 21:30 - 22:00 Yiddish he started using auxiliaries to mark tense of course it uses the diminutive x' and past participles okay so let's hear now I would like to play and so the recording lasted 13 minutes but I'm only going to play you a minute of this recording the total recording includes almost 500 utterances by the mother and 388 by Yakov and I'll just make you listen to it and then we'll do what go through what we do with this data
• 22:00 - 22:30 grace what's it do inside Oh salt no you sit on the top whoa yes lamb is a must
• 22:30 - 23:00 not yes the trinka was just a good thing yet drinking over today's theme of Aleppo Thank You mr. song I love that okay so you got you see this very the smells were very happy with this child interacting with him in Yiddish so here you have the transcription sorry I don't
• 23:00 - 23:30 know why okay okay I just wanted to say a few things about the transcription so you you have noticed that we're doing it in Roman letters it's not because it wouldn't be interesting to do it in Yiddish it's because these data are going to be made available on a database and it's the database has programs to analyze language and it's it's more as interface with Roman letters is better
• 23:30 - 24:00 so that created a problem I mean an issue he had to sort out in terms of which transliteration to use for Yiddish and after many discussions with research assistants involving this project we decided to go with a bambam transliteration because bambam helps us capture the similarity and differences across the different varieties of Yiddish so what we do is we transcribe this data we have it we check it twice and then we analyze it and what happens
• 24:00 - 24:30 is that so what you can see here different constructions used by the mother and I want you to pay attention to the fact that for instance a long sentence with the word lady yes there is the word in English if you are very conservative about what you call English but nevertheless the actual structure of the sentence that I've maintained with the analysis here is very much Yiddish and the same here you have a sentence
• 24:30 - 25:00 with the word inside but if you look at all the sentences you have you know again you have ye - word order Yiddish construction C dish morphology etc okay so what do we do and what have we learned why what's the use of doing all these works that you can imagine the especially the transcription are very time consuming and effortful that a lot of work when we've learned a few things we've learned like for instance that
• 25:00 - 25:30 there is an effective percentage of exposure how much child spends hearing a language it has a different effect on the vocabulary so if you look at the vocabulary if you are dominant in Yiddish or whatever language you are hearing your vocab really is going to be you know like like that of a monolingual child at the same age however if you hear a list of Yiddish and you're going to slowly your vocab rate inside language is going to decline okay so here you have a break between 75% and
• 25:30 - 26:00 50% in contrast what happens for the grammar is a little bit different that is that even though you may hear Yiddish only half of your of the time and English the other half of the time your grandma is going to develop at the same speed as the grammar of monolingual also you may have have the vocabulary okay so that's a very interesting pattern that the percentage of exposure doesn't have the same effect on all aspects of language development another thing
• 26:00 - 26:30 that's very interesting of course is the fact that if you have a very low percentage of exposure less than 25 percent it's very unlikely that at least at that age that your language is going to take off okay so this tells us something about if you want transmission to happen and to happen in an optimal way there's no point in spending that much money sending your child to listen to a teacher in an expensive school for half a day okay in that language whether
• 26:30 - 27:00 it's Chinese or you dish or whatever my results are very similar to those that have been reported for a Yiddish speaking community the second sets of findings have to do with well you know how much English is in the in the mother's Yiddish so we looked at on all these utterances the mother produced I looked at the total number of words produced by the mother and how many of those were could
• 27:00 - 27:30 be classified as English and I notice that this is actually this can be tricky okay with the name of colors you have words that sound very similar like blue friends and so we in that case we go with the pronunciation but even if you are very conservative about what you call English so there is some a lot of individual variation across different mothers so some mothers mix very little some mother mix a bit more but the 10% threshold that has been documented for
• 27:30 - 28:00 we you know with the contact with other languages like for instance Spanish English etc or Russian Hebrew and by different researchers like France enjoy waters in Israel nobody goes above this so it's a very typical pattern of what happens in situation of lack of language contact with respect to sentence structure I didn't find that there is much effect of English the most common second person transmission a second person construction with you that can with the subjects that can be omitted in
• 28:00 - 28:30 Yiddish is the default and this is very characteristic of Yiddish this is not found in English and also as a word order of verb second and particle verbs having these different orders from English it could be that my results are slightly different from those of my colleague Zelda Kahneman who am very happy in this audience today she works on language change in in the Satmar community from generation to another so
• 28:30 - 29:00 a different look at transmission and change and she reports slightly different findings it is possible that the context in which a mother and the child play is a context that said requires kind of relatively simple sentences so if the mothers were telling discourse that were more complicated maybe I would find something different which is why I think I need to elicit a different kind of discourse as well when I get some funding to do so what about the effects on word structure well the
• 29:00 - 29:30 effect of what structure actually trick ears are less cuts and what happened to syntax and vocabulary for now so you have the cases of verbs being borrowed from English like stop inside case way it's very clear that the speaker is talking about the past and the morphology of English is kept so you have stopped okay just like English morphology on the other hand you have also the more frequent case of borrowing the root from English like match or try here and adding an ending sets Yiddish and I know
• 29:30 - 30:00 that it's so the first match the speaker was talking about the past okay and then trying is not the English infinitive it's a Yiddish infinitive another example has to do with the use of diminutive so we all know that in a dish we you know a lot of diminutive diminutive ZAR used so the officially and the interesting news of the word bunch in these speakers and you have Stickle here but there's also another
• 30:00 - 30:30 diminutive that is used he said fader in 2009 noticed now she thinks that it's a direct result of English of the influence of English I think our problem with this account so if we if we think about the diminutive in English we have doggy we have horsey we don't say catty we say kitten I mean if we say carry it's an adjective it's not a noun being a small cat and it's restricted to a lexical class it's
• 30:30 - 31:00 restricted to noun so in English you don't diminutive eyes verbs what's happening with ye is that the mothers are using in my recordings is that yes I use with nouns like fishy and handy but they also use with verbs like happy and se and fluffy etc okay so they do not behave like the English diminutive okay which cast I mean even if it's a boring from English it's probably a process of reanalysis you know it's not just a simple boring
• 31:00 - 31:30 so first conclusions Yiddish is well and alive among Hasidic toddlers many of them are exposed to Yiddish enough you know enough so that they will be able to develop the language there is a complex set of demographic and linguistic factors that characterized texting which are raised with these languages and we can look at different variables so I've mentioned a percentage of input in relation to pattern of development in vocab and grammar but other variables to look at like for
• 31:30 - 32:00 instance the fact that you know when in language development we know that the agenda and sibling effect so it would be very interesting to look at this in this population haven't talked much about this but sometimes the two parents do not exactly speak the same variety of English so you know a variable kind of variation in input sometimes also it's not the majority of children but it happens we also saw that the contact of English as definitely has an effect on recovery maybe on morphology but not on
• 32:00 - 32:30 syntax and this is similar to the to the findings by Auto key for Spanish published in 2010 looking at spoken English today helps us understand what goes on in terms of language acquisition and change and of course we need to do follow-up so part of the mystery of e we could also look at you know if we had all the recordings we could tell when it started happening and also eliciting more discourse we could check other aspects of the syntax key I now want to
• 32:30 - 33:00 turn to this is Naomi prover Cateye lecture and I understand from my reading about her and talking about her with my colleague and friends Ben Seewald says she was very attached to pedagogy etc so I thought I should say a few words about what does this research tell us in terms of Education and language policies so first of all based on the project I've just talked about we were able to develop assessment for children who are that are culturally and linguistically appropriate and this is not so I mean so
• 33:00 - 33:30 many linguistic minorities in New York do not have this kind of assessment so we need to do a lot of work with this including for Yiddish speaking children it also informs the dual language policies that supply that gelid yadda dual language policy is is a requirement by headstart program today that says that you don't it's not that you have to support the home language but you have to be transparent about what you do in terms of introducing the child to
• 33:30 - 34:00 English and and supporting the home language and so we have you know the work that we have done on the different linguistic communities at chellah giada enabled us to do that and of course the children I introduced to English in the preschool but there is also a way to foster their continuing development for you - I know less about what's going on in schools also I'm aware of the surveys that was that was that was commissioned by the Fishman Foundation and conducted
• 34:00 - 34:30 by otegi and colleague in 2005 and also of the recent chapter by matarese and person clicker in this book bilingual community education and multilingualism where across linguistic communities including it'sh what seems to come out to emerge is that you know lack of resources so it's not the case that all languages is receive an adequate amount of resources in order to be taught optimally in schools and most matarese
• 34:30 - 35:00 and pelson kleeger and so take a report makes this point finally in higher education I just wanted to mention the fact that it's very difficult to find researchers who have the level of Yiddish today that is required to do the kind of analysis I was talking about and also I come from Department said trying speech and language pathology there is a shortage of therapists who speak a service and educators trained in Yiddish
• 35:00 - 35:30 but it's also an issue with the current bilingual certifications the current bilingual certification for Yiddish requires for instance has speakers of cassadee kiddush to learn a leader that they don't speak and their clients do not speak because it doesn't match the variety of their client and it's not unique to you - this is the same for if you look at Spanish the certification is for Mexican Spanish not the American in
• 35:30 - 36:00 the Dominican Puerto Rican etc but this is a this is a real issue in term of the profession finally I wanted to say that studying this community also has implication for a better understanding of language maintenance and I hope I have shown as well that you know this the Hasidic community doesn't go for standardization of the language but this has and doesn't means that they haven't been able to keep the language so I think it's an interesting question for people interested in endangered languages I wanted to thank my sponsors PSD CUNY for
• 36:00 - 36:30 the study and soon NSF for study more focused on comprehension there are many students and colleagues who contributed to the development of the questionnaires and for the transcription and analysis of the audio recordings many people in this audience who contributed to this and the names are here Yakov liza Enomoto hi and Ricky I also wanted to thank very very much my colleagues at Chile da da I don't collect the data
• 36:30 - 37:00 myself the data is that you heard was collected by home visitor so that means that you know person the child is familiar with and all the departments at la da de we've been so incredibly supportive of this research and last but not least I would like to thank the CEO of yellow Giada's solomon eagle for an incredible vision in terms of letting me study the language of the community and helping develop assessment and the policies thank you very much
• 37:00 - 37:30 so malarum tired a friend a good Normand welcome let's say you've been in New York for the past several months that you know some Yiddish or are interested in Yiddish but you don't belong to the kind of community that Isabel just told us about where you - is still the vernacular the language of the home the language of the streets but you still just in these past several months could have belted out Yiddish folk songs at a zing a tie a sing-along at a Bronx
• 37:30 - 38:00 sukkah gotten down at tongs Hoyas a Yiddish dance party heard Yiddish songs interspersed with Indian Bhangra music in Brooklyn which was amazing by the way studied Torah off mama lotion editing Galit Aryan yeshiva harvested garlic on a Yiddish speaking farm good fab rocked had a good time hanging out at you - shows an apartment in Brooklyn the owners of which are renters of which are here with us tonight where you can always hear you - word savored yudish
• 38:00 - 38:30 poetry at sicko a Yiddish bookstore in Queens with somewhat irregular hours but also here on this very stage from the lips of Gann Kissin several months ago who also writes you - poetry of his own you could have spent Rosh Hashanah with a group of young people in Washington Heights all in Yiddish except for the services of course you could have had an existential crisis a very you - left one seeing Vartan off Godot Waiting for Godot which was recently produced you could have joined the land class a reading group probing the stories of
• 38:30 - 39:00 Avram Karpin ovitch wonderful stories of interwar Vilna you could have sung forgotten gems of the american yudish repertoire at the Jewish people's philarmonic chorus which produces a big concert every year this is just New York this is just the past several months New York is admittedly the capital the capital of Yiddish but it provides a good introduction to the kinds of spaces that I'm going to be talking about where you - lives in all kinds of different ways my brief was to talk about sort of alternative ughter spaces alternative is a funny word it's in the sense just sort
• 39:00 - 39:30 of a catch-all in this case for non-orthodox spaces although the kinds of places i'm talking about are sort of don't pattern necessarily by religion or religious affiliation I should say they are spaces where indeed even non-jews are speaking edition enjoying Yiddish now these spaces do have certain things in common though that needs to be kind of underlined and Paul mentioned some of them earlier they're often not always institutional in the sense that there's probably an organization behind them
• 39:30 - 40:00 usually a 501c3 of some kind this is an institutional a good sense they're formal often in the sense that they are you know happening at certain places and times you can find out about them there these things are largely you know just sort of open whoever wants to come they're performative in some sense that people are often speaking English until the moment they get there and of course many people at these events still are speaking English but but they are spaces in which it's understood that you can hear you dish and speak Yiddish if you if you like and if you're able to so
• 40:00 - 40:30 these are the kinds of spaces I'm going to be talking about and I should say just from the get-go on the one hand we need to relish and enjoy and celebrate and extend and support as the the Nomi foundation is doing tonight indeed these kinds of spaces and recognize how rich New York is in them and and other places as well on the other hand we need to be realistic about the limitations of such spaces they are what I'll refer to often as post vernacular spaces and I'll
• 40:30 - 41:00 explain that in a moment and I have to reflect this sort of bittersweet comment that sometimes made that yudish has as many poets as it has speakers or at least cool tour tours people who do culture which i think is a particularly Gish mock lovely Yiddish word which means you know kind of the opposite of a culture vulture who consumes culture but somebody who makes culture and creates culture and in some ways the wonderful situate situation to be and where you know many of the the people who are involved in the in this secular Yiddish
• 41:00 - 41:30 world or non-orthodox Yiddish world if we can bound it that way are you know not just speakers but culture culture creators and are actively involved there's very little passive passive work happening or everybody's actively contributing to these environments that I'm that I'm talking about so it's it's a small world to us to a certain stance Peschel if you compare it with you know the amazing amount of activity that there that there once was but we need to be we need to be appreciative it
• 41:30 - 42:00 and it nonetheless so I want to address kind of three questions in my my remarks I wish I had a fourth so that I could have the youngest person in the room kind of take these on but three is still the magic number in in English you know kind of an English world one what is the current state of what we're calling secular or let's say non-orthodox not already Yiddish where does it live in what forms does it take second question and I think this was first raised in these terms by a cult or to a rock a
• 42:00 - 42:30 frisian in an article in the four words can we start talking about continuity and not just revival there's this trope of Yiddish revival which has been in the air for you know multiple decades now and when can we get beyond that and move to talk of continuity continuing that revival extending it the third question what role for secular non heredia dish when the vast majority of active speakers are indeed already at this point heretic will see them as
• 42:30 - 43:00 we've heard already from from Isabel what what is gonna be the relationship of those communities which is a huge huge question again I'm only gonna build touch briefly on these but I want to just provide kind of an overview of what we can starting with where things currently stand it's probably well known to all of you and this is an audience of a cool tour tour I've noticed I mean we have in the room people who are active in all all spheres of the events that I've just that I just spoke of and all
• 43:00 - 43:30 spheres have kind of you either speaking life so it's it's an honor and it's intimidating to speak in front of such an audience but in terms of where we stand it should be recognized that yudish is not kind of an isolated case there are very specific historical tragedies and and and and and you know specific situations that have led to the current current state of yudish and the massive drop-off in non-credit speakers but we should recognize that this is also part of these broader patterns of language change going on around the world that Jewish languages in general
• 43:30 - 44:00 the languages of the Jewish Diaspora are reflecting for their own reasons but also along with larger global trends language endangerment patterns that are going on all over the world and there are P working on these things and indeed often making use of things from Yiddish the work of people like Joshua fisherman and Oriole vine-ripe has contributed greatly to the larger understanding of global language endangerment and there's a lot that can be gained from that back and forth but we first need to acknowledge
• 44:00 - 44:30 the continued almost miraculous existence of native speakers nock already native speakers but also semi speakers passive speakers semi passive speakers heritage speakers the the the Bissell crowd as I think of them everybody who goes around saying I speak of Bissell of Bissell and you know Paul alluded to this before and you know I think it's difficult to know what to do with this range of this range of competence which is very difficult to measure even the linguists have tried developing batteries of tests to try to understand it but it's very hard to know
• 44:30 - 45:00 what to do that it's very hard to kind of connect connect people and you know who are at all of these different these different levels of course you know first language yudish speakers from you know especially from Eastern Europe have long been a kind of gold standard but obviously we need to be kind of looking looking beyond that at this point I think already the fact that we're talking about already Edition and it's not being sort of dismissed and that you know that we're understanding that the language you know the language is changing and you know speakers of all
• 45:00 - 45:30 kinds have have something to kind of contribute and you know need to be sort of engaged and brought together indeed most of our what we might think of as elders as they would be called in a lot of other language communities we're not born in instead laugh and their fella but in the last you know speaking again about the non Peretti world in the last large scale non parody yiddish-speaking environments places like the Bronx and Brooklyn in the 1930s and even into the 1940s the DP camps certain places in the
• 45:30 - 46:00 Soviet Union certain places in in the Pale of Settlement until a you know surprisingly late time as the the wonderful a Haim project has made clear if you haven't even checked that out so you know there's there's already a kind of a divide just in this small small kind of secular Yiddish speaking world that I mentioned between often what older older people are doing in yudish clubs there's a yudish clubs especially different places around the country older people often
• 46:00 - 46:30 coming together to kind of you know just to kind of hear a Yiddish word to say a Yiddish word it's often not very connected to the kind of very intensive activity and focus on on fluency that you dishes whether or not they they like that term are engaged in so that's there's a gap to be a gap to be bridged there but in terms of the world of the world of yiddishists who may or may not like that term the New York area is obviously you know is very much a center
• 46:30 - 47:00 there is a core of families who are had an outsized you know influence has cooled torture' in in this you know in this in this world where there's been unbroken transmission very very valuable and importantly and it has helped and inspired other families to be as it were linguistic Bal Chavez to kind of you know either skipped a generation in my family or you know two generations but you can sort of come back to it as long
• 47:00 - 47:30 as there are people around that you can go to and you dishes comparatively a very well resourced language we could say because of all of this work that's gone on dictionaries and and websites and and and so much that that many people in this room have have made possible so we're talking about as small sometimes fragile perhaps in the larger and the larger frame still shrinking vernacular speech community but to some extent there is also what we might think of as a meta linguistic community among
• 47:30 - 48:00 the ten million or so Jews of Ashkenazi background around the world probably the majority of them here in the United States there is very you know variable degrees of awareness of Vitas as being kind of in the family background obviously some people there's almost no awareness but to some extent this constitutes a kind of meta linguistic community and a Sarah may touch on some of this where you know where words have come into people's English where there's a connection to to to Yiddish style
• 48:00 - 48:30 humor and and so on and that metalist metalinguistic community is still kind of is there sort of in in the background in some sense and is there's always this kind of idea of how to kind of you know how to engage it and how to sort of draw from it and for the sort of fuller fuller story on this I recommend the dissertation by Ned hinari was just published last year which is called heritage language socialization
• 48:30 - 49:00 practices in secular yiddish educational contexts the creation of a meta linguistic community it's what she's saying there is that a kind of meta linguistic community out of the you know this this large number of people who have yet ich in their family backgrounds as a heritage language there have been people emerging the people that I'm talking about it's not it's not huge numbers but there is a but there's there is a passion there to to constitute a kind of meta linguistic community where people come together in these kinds of situations that that I've mentioned whether it's a zinger I a sing-along or
• 49:00 - 49:30 a reading group or a language program or class fest and I'll mention a few more of those kinds of spaces in a moment Paul mentioned this term post vernacular Eddy I mentioned it briefly highly recommend Geoffrey Chandler's book adventures in Yiddish land where he really kind of goes deep into post vernacular Yiddish culture where people may be wearing t-shirts that have you - on it but they don't actually speak any it'sh or they speak only a little bit and what is the what is the meaning of that and what should we make of that
• 49:30 - 50:00 post vernacular arity is is defined by shandler as a secondary or meta level of signification where the symbolic value invested in the language is apart from the semantic value of any given utterance and in it which is to say that it's just you know whatever you may be saying if you're saying it in yiddish the medium is the is the message the fact that you're speaking yiddish is you know a big part of what you're saying and a very important aspect of it and so post vernacular activities do put a kind of extra emphasis often on reading
• 50:00 - 50:30 performing studying it is it can be for people more like more like a hobby or something that they're enthusiastic about rather than a you know rather than something they're just doing without even without even thinking about it and that you know that brings up a great deal of challenges but i think the title of a recent of a recent book that came out called choosing - collection of essays sort of contemporary fascinating computer studies is very telling it's a choice for these communities or for these
• 50:30 - 51:00 people it's it's it's it's a choice not just at a larger level of I want to learn Yiddish it's a choice every moment in every in every context in each you know each person you talk to am I gonna speak Yiddish now or you know am I not so you know on the one hand that means that it's charged with a certain sense of volition and passion and so on on the other hand it means it doesn't have that kind of reflexive character where it's just ingrained at a deep level briefly just mentioning some of these post
• 51:00 - 51:30 vernacular spheres for you - many of them many of them new leading to some optimism that you dishes in certain ways advancing or going into spaces where it wasn't before the internet notably a rich kind of ecosystem of Yiddish websites the whole range of university and summer courses which you've oh really helped kick off but is now kind of spread globally you know as I've mentioned Yiddish on t-shirts Yiddish mentioned in in hip-hop lyrics Yiddish farm Yiddish Volk which has now been
• 51:30 - 52:00 going on for several decades and you know he's a week-long kind of intensive space where where people can can live in Yiddish I'm sure most of you are familiar with it but there's an astounding range of organizations that are still you know that still exist the Yiddish book center the Jewish people's Philharmonic Chorus newspapers and magazines - theaters here in New York and theaters elsewhere that we're going to kind of see all brought together hopefully at an international yiddish theater festival coming up soon here in
• 52:00 - 52:30 new york a whole range of things that are that are that are going on and the question is just you know can we support them all can we support them and develop them all and also not stretch ourselves too thin i think those of us who are engaged in these in these activities and of course there are more informal efforts as well just just just get together as people just you know without without any kind of institutional backing and it's you know it's it's it's
• 52:30 - 53:00 it's going on i think there's a question about whether you - can be sort of you know remain closed in some sense even when people are not even when people are not learning it that it feels familiar both because of its kinship with with the English both because of its relationship to the sort of Jewish English that that that that Sarah may may mention that is that is developing I think there is always a kind of an ambiguity in in these kinds of spaces that I'm talking
• 53:00 - 53:30 about which as I say are largely but not entirely post vernacular spaces where Yiddish is living but it's kind of performed on the one hand people feel that they're returning to a certain kind of authenticity on the other hand there is a sense that it is an artificial space that is a bounded space so briefly moving on to the second the second question can we talk about continuity and move beyond revival or extend build on the notion of revival I think the trope of Yiddish revival begins sort of
• 53:30 - 54:00 in the 1960s and 70s at least this most recent most recent trope and it was a time of general kind of roots seeking among many minority groups in the United States and then even beyond the United States and the numbers the numbers may not have been that great it was always you know kind of endless media articles about Yiddish Yiddish Yiddish revival but the question it was always still you know how many new speakers are are being produced again in the non the non her
• 54:00 - 54:30 Eddie were and I think it's not yet clear whether the the sort of roots seeking generation the people who kind of created a lot of the institutions and spaces that I've mentioned who are responsible for this for the revival whether that generation is fully reproducing itself among people of my generation as someone who's thirty and I think it's been interesting to watch different aspects of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage be revived kind of at different times into different degrees I think food being one of the most interesting kind of recent ones seeing the sort of
• 54:30 - 55:00 New Dehli movement and new Ashkenazi food movements and we still don't know kind of you know how far these these revivals will go and to what extent they'll really take root and it depends on a whole range of factors over which I think we have little control broader trends in American life the degree of kind of multiculturalism in the society that's acceptable the you know the extent of route seeking and and the search for authenticity which is it's a stomach scent behind it in her
• 55:00 - 55:30 kind of initial call to talk about continuity and not just revival Rahel challenged a Jewish foundation to sponsor a study of young people active in yudish culture and I still don't think it's really been done at least in a kind of comprehensive way all the people and it probably numbers in the thousands now have gone through class fests and language programs and and so on and so forth to really understand where have they gone and what have they done with that experience of course it's never gonna be that a majority of those people
• 55:30 - 56:00 necessarily are going to to stay kind of in the fold people move on to two very to various things and again as I say for some people it will be will be a hobby it will be a kind of community of practice or interest something they they do for a while but I think it's it's something that remains out there to do is to kind of study that you know people who've been through that experience we've now had these these spaces some of them you know for for quite a while and how do you keep people sort of how do you keep people engaged there's often a kind of divide between younger people
• 56:00 - 56:30 who are discovering this stuff for the first time or you know college age or recently out of college then people who are older who are now retired and have the opportunity to kind of look into these things what about that middle group those are the people who would be potentially raising children you know have their careers to you know to to work on and all sorts of things but I feel like there's often a kind of a gap of people kind of in their 30s 40s and 50s in the in the kinds of ughter spaces
• 56:30 - 57:00 that we're talking about so the good news I think is that the the stigma around Yiddish is largely disappearing and that's part of what has kind of driven some of this activity I don't I think there are relatively few people in their 20s who really feel that this is you know the language from their blood you know from the the mud from the from the you know the muck of the old world and you know the the bad news is that maybe that there are no associations at all and if people don't even sort of know what what you dish is is it like Hebrew what what is it
• 57:00 - 57:30 and again the you know the good news is the multiplicity of institutions that that that we have already the bad news is potentially of being split too thin or indeed splitted as sometimes happens with with Irish organizations so there there are kind of questions about ongoing Yiddish cultural literacy even among people who don't speak Yiddish and probably have to mention at least briefly the Pew survey which was recently released and is kind of the talk of the of the American
• 57:30 - 58:00 Jewish Street and you know 27% of Americans of Jewish background consider themselves Americans of Jewish background and and and see very little other connection to to that you know I think that's an indication of Yiddish cultural literacy also kind of to some extent in free fall as well but then there there's the sort of 62% of of respondents and those surveys who said that being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and culture and I think there's
• 58:00 - 58:30 again that that thing which many people in this room and many people in the world have been saying for a long time that you - kite broadly speaking is this kind of missing link that if you could sort of connect people who see this as a matter of ancestry and culture - to some of the some of some of the content that would that would add an essential an essential component and I think some of the newer efforts like tent from leadership book Center like the helix
• 58:30 - 59:00 project from Yiddish kite Los Angeles represents some idea of connecting people to to the sort of broadly defined Yiddish guide so I'm running running low on time so I will skip to the third question very briefly kind of address the the role of the relationship between kind of the world of secular non Caretti Yiddish with the majority the vast
• 59:00 - 59:30 majority of speakers who are now read him I think the you know one of the biggest questions out there at this point is how to build a bridge between these between these communities as I say the the spaces that I'm talking about are not split along lines of religious affiliation but they're largely non non Caretti but there are there are powerful examples of people who are working to build to build those bridges including Yiddish farm including efforts through the internet which are sometimes easier and easier place easier safer spaces for
• 59:30 - 60:00 for secular yiddishists for lack of a better word to meet with her editors speakers and and and have conversations there are things like cholent the the gathering of of Siddim and people who are curious about Hassidim and is it a more curious about not the Siddim and and so there are you know all kinds of questions out there about you know the attitudes of different different groups
• 60:00 - 60:30 within this people who are leaving the Hasidic world but we're raised with you Tish what role will they play as they enter you know non non non Hasidic society ball Chivas who are moving into the more religious world and who may be acquiring some Yiddish or acquiring Yiddish as they do that what role will they play there are many potential kind of bridges bridges here and there's the question that's been raised of a kind of new Hasidic Haskalah maybe most famously
• 60:30 - 61:00 by David Katz and I'll just briefly kind of read his his quote secular literary Yiddish can be saved not as a physical society with streets and squares but as a virtual network of small serious islands of culture and creativity in the Internet age it is live on a Yiddish literature seminar our summer courses conduct is conducted in Yiddish with the original texts with students who write their papers in Yiddish and discuss their work in Yiddish it can be alive in a city apartment or a forest hut when an individual rights and thinks in the language while the next major chapter in
• 61:00 - 61:30 the unfinished history of Yiddish is created by the Hasidim we Islanders the world of secular Yiddish can muster the collective energy needed needed for efforts to write our own much smaller chapter as a Hasidic Grandmaster of old ones put it calls mando's clean shake a little aberrant can men knock - as long as that tiny candle burns it can still all be put right moreover small is beautiful and that's how he ends words of fire the unfinished history of Yiddish the few road
• 61:30 - 62:00 and that's the note on which I will which I will end I think you know there are all kinds of questions that it raises I think Heredia dish is it's an unavoidable subject that a subject that should be embraced by people in the secular you dish world and I think that challenge is ongoing there's very little in terms of you know pedagogical materials very little research relatively besides what Isabel and Selden a few others are doing on the whole question of Heredia dish and there are questions about different Yiddish dialects and and their fate as well but
• 62:00 - 62:30 there needs to be engagement and exchange I think it's the inclusion that many people in the in the secular Yiddish world have have come to the question is how to do it and preserve who who we are and whoever whoever that may be thank you very much thank you very much for inviting me to be here and to share the stage with these excellent researchers and speakers
• 62:30 - 63:00 and it's really an honor to speak to an audience that includes some former teachers of mine including Robert Shapiro and and David Ross Keys who taught a class that know me and I were both students in when she was a grad student and when I was an undergrad at Columbia so I'm really happy to be able to be here now on this stage I think I was on this stage once before when I graduated from the Evo summer program once summer and and I sang are my
• 63:00 - 63:30 Yiddish version of Porgy and Bess which was zoom outside to India the lush fit and it was a fast insight mine rabba it's my left side to ensure his tie to MU subsided minute side it so yeah that was
• 63:30 - 64:00 that's all I remember from that show but today I want to talk about Yiddish words that are used within English especially by Jews so when when you hear that phrase what words come to mind but Yiddish words do you think of that are used within English nachus schlep schmutz schmear pizza meant smooth okay so a lot of the words okay a lot of the
• 64:00 - 64:30 words that you mentioned our words that are used mostly by Jews but some of those words are also used by non-jews have spread throughout throughout our society and my question for you is would you say that these words are increasing in use or decreasing in use increasing I heard a unit unanimous increase in anyone say decreasing a few people okay but most people said increasing okay well I did some research to answer this
• 64:30 - 65:00 question and I'm gonna present research from two sources today one is quantitative data from my survey of American Jewish language and identity which I conducted with Stephen Cohen and qualitative data from my book be coming from so first we have a number of words that are in fact decreasing within American English among Jews so this is from the survey and we had over 30,000 respondents and
• 65:00 - 65:30 and here I'm just reporting the data from Jews who grew up speaking only English okay so we find that novice is decreasing so you see you see that younger people these are the ages on the bottom younger people use it less than older people same with hamish okay Mensch is pretty stable a bit of a decline in the younger generations but most people most of the Jews that we surveyed say they use the
• 65:30 - 66:00 word mensch but then we also get a number of words that are increasing especially in the religious domain so shul is an example of that and I also have historical data from the American Jewish press that shows that this word has really increased especially since the 70s and 80s lane is another example of one that's increasing used more by the younger generations and in addition to words we have the same kind of thing with grammatical constructions so
• 66:00 - 66:30 staying by us instead of staying at our house is increasing in the younger generations so we have some words that are increasing and not only in the religious domain but also phrases like enough already and money shmoney and then and draw good Shabbos Lane and bench some words that are decreasing especially these words that you might associate with older Jews may Wanaka smoker new Bashar taka and Hamish and
• 66:30 - 67:00 then some that are that have little change including klutz and spiel two words that are very common among our non-jewish respondents and mensch and schmutz which are not quite as common but are still known by a lot of a lot of non-jews so the question is why why are some of the words decreasing and some increasing well the decrease is kind of expected we have shifted away from the generation of immigration so you would
• 67:00 - 67:30 expect that the words from Yiddish would gradually diminish the increase is a bit more surprising and it has to do with two things one is the fact that some of these words have spread beyond the Jewish community and so once non-jews pick them up it's it makes sense that Jews in the younger generations will use them too and schmooze is a good example of that but with schmooze it's a word that has changed in its meaning and usage as it has spread beyond the Jewish community
• 67:30 - 68:00 so what does the word schmooze mean to talk but I heard someone say Network so those are kind of different right so to talk and to network I didn't bring a slide about schmooze but in our survey we found we actually tested that those two meanings and found that those who have more Jewish friends are more likely to have the chat meeting and those who have more non-jewish friends are more likely to have the network meeting but even in the five years since I did the survey I think
• 68:00 - 68:30 that has changed and more and more people understand it to mean to network and use it as a transitive verb to schmooze someone right English it's not transitive you just smooths you don't move so you can schmooze with someone but you can't schmooze someone and it's also it's also used in the phrase to schmooze up like he's moved up the vice-president's during the party right that that it comes from to chat up right it's analogous to chat up okay so you have these words that are increasing outside of the Jewish community and
• 68:30 - 69:00 therefore increasing within the Jewish community in the younger generations but then you have this surprising increase in religious words and this is what I want to focus on for the rest of the talk so remember I showed you this slide of staying by us this is among Jews in general but when we look just at Orthodox Jews the age difference is much more striking Orthodox Jews in the younger generations are much much more likely to say staying by us than in the older generations okay so this has to do
• 69:00 - 69:30 with the fact that this phrase and other Yiddish words and grammatical constructions are an important part of Orthodox identity and we see this with a number of phrases so let's look at staying by us by denomination you see how in the Orthodox categories the three on the right it's much more common than among non Orthodox Jews and non-jews same with coming to us some people don't even realize that coming to us is not standard English in standard English II
• 69:30 - 70:00 would say coming to our house but coming to us which is so common among Orthodox Jews and and even among some non-orthodox Jews is an influence from Yiddish same thing with taka Costas Shalom Hebrew origin word from Yiddish to learn out which is a freight voice alone and orally which is a phrase that comes from Yiddish used within Orthodox communities and here we really do see
• 70:00 - 70:30 gradations among the different Orthodox groups and name references I asked about a number of names how likely would you be to give names like these to your children and the Yiddish origin names moistu amanda Basia and fraidy are much more common in the Orthodox circles especially in the black hat community now of course this relates to Yiddish knowledge within these Orthodox communities so this this
• 70:30 - 71:00 slide comes from a study that I did using data from from stir calm which used whist used to be a dating website for Orthodox Jews and when you sign up for from stir you have to say what hash gufa or what orientation you said you subscribed to or how you would categorize yourself and four of the options are Modern Orthodox liberal Modern Orthodox mock me Russia wysz modern and yeshiva Sh black hat and so I looked at how these respondents in the
• 71:00 - 71:30 different categories and separated by gender correlated with various things and this slide shows Yiddish knowledge those who lists Yiddish as one of the languages that they know now we don't know how well they know it or if they even do but the fact that they list it you see correlates very strongly with their selected category especially among men men have greater Yiddish knowledge in all of the categories except for Modern Orthodox liberal okay so it makes sense
• 71:30 - 72:00 that people who have more Yiddish knowledge would be more likely to use certain Yiddish words within their English and I certainly found this to be the case in the community where I did my fieldwork for my book be coming from so just a little bit about my methodology it was an ethnographic study where I spent a year hanging out in the community and I also did some sociolinguistics studies recording people interviewing them asking them about language and doing an experiment about language and this was in an
• 72:00 - 72:30 orthodox community in Philadelphia in 2001 to to of religiosity where we have reformed conservative and modern orthodox in the middle this community is on the blackhat end of the continuum and there are Hassidim and non hosted in this community there right where I did my research is not Hasidic they wouldn't refer to themselves as yeshiva Sh but maybe you Shiva schmatta is the category that they would select if they were gonna be on from stir com so the a
• 72:30 - 73:00 little bit about the language in the community the community is mostly English speakers there were very few people there who were actually able to speak Yiddish one who did study in a yeshiva outside of the community where they where they learned Yiddish but very few who could but most are descended from Yiddish speakers and most are proficient in Hebrew for prayer and study and the men also study Aramaic rabbinic texts so because of these
• 73:00 - 73:30 contacts with Yiddish Hebrew and Aramaic they have some influences in their English from those languages words from those languages Hebrew words pronounced in Ashkenazi ways and with Ashkenazi forms like periphrastic verbs like we do all that stick to be miss Mao the hosan and kala and I so and so free words like that that are also transitive but it doesn't really make sense in English
• 73:30 - 74:00 grammar but it comes from a Yiddish periphrastic construction then we also have distinctive English pronunciation and vowels and consonants we have a number of grammatical influences from Yiddish very distinctive intonation patterns if you've heard it you know what I'm talking about and then we have a number of features that I think come from modern Israeli Hebrew because some of the people in the communities spend time in Israel in yeshiva is there and then come back
• 74:00 - 74:30 having picked up some of the Israeli Hebrew features so one of those is the click we were walking around and whatever it's not important do you hear that click ok so that click is very contagious and I'm sorry if I just passed it on to you but that click is very common in Orthodox communities and is used in told you it's it's it's used even by people who've never been to Israel there's also the so which I think comes from Israeli Hebrew because I
• 74:30 - 75:00 can't find a Yiddish analogue and I have heard it more among people who have spent time in Israel it's something like this if you go there so you'll understand that so is analogous to the Israeli Hebrew AHS and it would make sense that it would come from Yiddish but I can't think of a way that it would because in that position in the sentence Yiddish would have a verb so that's so is a common feature in Orthodox Jewish English let me give you some examples of how this works within English sentences this is a
• 75:00 - 75:30 sentence from a lecture by a rabbi before Pesach he said the mitzvah of the matzo by the Seder should be Wehrmacht mir it's a home run to have small rockets era that the wheat that is harvested for Pesach should be already watched from the time of the harvest ok so you have in addition to all the underlined words from Hebrew and you can see with the Ashkenazi pronunciations we have the bye and we have the wheat where the T is released at the end of a word which I've found to be very common in Orthodox communities and that already
• 75:30 - 76:00 influenced by Yiddish join another quote this is from an interview with mrs. Adler these are all pseudonyms in another community people might if they have a different sort of Yiddish kite so they might not dive in in the same shul they might send their kids to different use shiva's ok so in addition to the Yiddish and Hebrew words there we have the click and we have that so and a bit of distinctive intonation as well now people in the community are aware that they speak in a
• 76:00 - 76:30 distinctive way and there's a dictionary called from speak the first dictionary of yeshiva I recommend that it's a very good book and it has a nice actually scholarly essay at the beginning explaining how this language works and they they there's even a song called yeshiva charade and I'm gonna play a little bit for you right now it it's few sentences from yeshiva style language and talk to you she betrayed me she style speak
• 76:30 - 77:00 to originate a language a no way to talk and speaking is a most imposing challenging monument of duty it takes a special talent is not for the faint of heart and most are doomed to failure before they even start but in the hallowed halls of Beersheva far and wide other young men have discovered a new way to
• 77:00 - 77:30 verbalize with it'sh English Hebrew with some mixture of all three and the - about and a linguistic birdie it's okay so you hear it's the talk of the
• 77:30 - 78:00 town mama snug you knocked so just in that one sentence you hear the Hebrew words the Yiddish words and the New York accent right now this language distinctive way of speaking English in the Orthodox community is so important that many of the newcomers to the community the ballet chuva pick it up so in my study I found a number of people for whom this language was very important an example of this is
• 78:00 - 78:30 rifki Baraka who grew up as Rebekah and then when she became from which means religious she changed her name to Rivka and then eventually rifka Brava because if you're from you have to have two names as your as the not all right but but as one ball chew of a joke to me mimicking Lenny Bruce he said Yaakov Dov's me not from Yaakov to me from so so Rivka bracha else again a pseudonym
• 78:30 - 79:00 really did pick up a lot of the Orthodox language she used many Hebrew and Yiddish words clicks word-final t release distinctive intonation and a number of Yiddish grammatical influences even things that I didn't hear often from people who grew up from like this is not what to record she said to me once I didn't like when she said that but at least I got that one on tape so okay so Rivka Brava was picked up the language so well that an FF B that's from from birth woman cast her that's a
• 79:00 - 79:30 term that's used in the community an FFD woman cast her as the Yiddish of Bubbe from Borough Park in the woman's poram spiel and this was a great source of pride for her she was actually very proud that she was cast in this role she felt that was a sign that she had picked up the language well enough to be able to play a grandmother who's who speaks Yiddish and she said I don't speak the good King's English anymore I speak this Yingling Sheva stuff which is fine by me
• 79:30 - 80:00 okay so well some people do pick up these features some more than others rifka bracha is an extreme example but some actually avoid yiddish isms for example joseph avoids the the oy sound in words like torah because he thinks that it's inauthentic for someone who's not casitas and didn't grow up using it and similarly Shelley doesn't say the by like staying by them because she sees it as bad grammar which is also
• 80:00 - 80:30 a an ideology that I've heard from FFPs from people who themselves grew up from okay so clearly yiddish isms are important in American Orthodox identities important enough that even newcomers to the community often pick them up and we also see differences along the continuum from Modern Orthodox to black hat so how do these yiddish isms spread what allows people who don't speak Yiddish to incorporate new Yiddish words into
• 80:30 - 81:00 their English well it's very hard to track this and I don't know a methodology to really track this and unless someone created a word and then actually tracked it to see how its spread but even that is very hard to do so this is all kind of conjecture my hypothesis about how they spread I think they spread when Yiddish speaking black hat Orthodox Jews interact with English speaking black hat Orthodox Jews bilinguals in in at least one of those categories who interact with Modern Orthodox Jews who interact
• 81:00 - 81:30 with non-orthodox Jews and then and words like bench and staying by us transfer along throughout these communities until even Reform Reform Jews use the word bench sometimes and they don't have any contact with the black hat yiddish speakers but it must have must have been conveyed throughout the communities through overlapping networks and you see the same kind of spread through overlapping networks when
• 81:30 - 82:00 words spread from Yiddish speaking immigrants to the general American population from yiddish-speaking immigrants to english-speaking Jews who are children our friends of immigrants to non-jews and so words like klutz and spiel and maven get transferred this way with with some input from the borscht belt and from the media and from things like Seinfeld and and the the Jews in Hollywood who write scripts that include a lot of Yiddish words so to sum it all
• 82:00 - 82:30 up some Yiddish isms are decreasing among American Jews some are increasing in American English and in religious Jewish circles and some Yiddish isms are important in American Orthodox identities and finally yiddish isms spread from group to group so now you can get a sense of why I chose those three words for the title of this talk mensch bench and Posten aside from the fact that they kind of sound cool together because mensch is one of these
• 82:30 - 83:00 words that has become kind of common in American English but it's still associated with Jews bench is one of these words that is used by non-orthodox Jews and by Orthodox Jews and Posten which means to give a religious ruling is used very almost solely among Orthodox Jews so a number of Yiddish words that just show how diverse our community is with respect to post vernacular Yiddish use thank you very much
• 83:00 - 83:30 where to start we're actually running a little late so we're going to have to cut the discussion in the short so do you three feel up to discussing without my throwing questions at you or I mean actually me throw something out actually never got never mind that we haven't we haven't talked that much about identity
• 83:30 - 84:00 we've only touched on briefly so can you discuss from your points of view how important it is to Jewish identity today in no particular order okay so I'll start with talking a little bit about the community I'm studying I think it's actually a very difficult question because the first thing about Hasidic groups is that there are you know there are different groups and they relate
• 84:00 - 84:30 differently to Yiddish and it's definitely important to their identity in terms of it's a tie between nitish and the culture and part of raising the child with Yiddish rather than English has to do with making sure that the culture is transmitted on the other hand Yiddish is not that important that when people are matched in terms of marriages it I mean they I mean an interesting
• 84:30 - 85:00 thing that I wish we had time to touch upon but with the Hasidic community days it's at the same time a very local culture and a very global culture because there are a lot of marriages you know between people from England or Israel Australia to people here etc so there is some kind of global culture going on but having a language in common is what's important for the bride and the groom it doesn't have to be Irish okay but that having said this at some
• 85:00 - 85:30 level given the number of children that there are in the communities the fact that maybe I mean if you have six or ten children between six and ten children if only half your children are going to transmit Yiddish to the next generation you're still okay so I think it's it's a very you know maybe that's a recipe for an ancient languages I don't know but so it's a very tricky issue
• 85:30 - 86:00 because I think it's it's very tied to the culture but it's not what makes you the person of that has it because that other Hasidic group they certainly they certainly don't consider it an end in itself it's a means to an end for them but but it's an important means to them I think broadly speaking in the in the secular secular Jewish world reform conservative you could say the importance of yudish to people's identities in some sense latent or it's
• 86:00 - 86:30 you know could be could be activated there is a connection to as I said ancestry and culture is kind of continually brought forward among American Jews as you know crucial crucial component of identity and there will be associations with you know pastrami and Seinfeld and you know as somebody choked with right after the Pew survey you know ninety-eight percent of Jews asked the question you know where can I get a good bagel in this town and it's I mean there's this cultural connection without necessarily an awareness that it connects to an actual
• 86:30 - 87:00 language or what the content of that language is except for maybe a few a few words so I think you know in general the whole sort of cultural complex that that you dish is sort of the engine of or is behind is very much a part of identity for those those Jews who you know are our secular reform conservative and you know and identify with that but Yiddish the language the specifics of it they say remains often a very kind of latent
• 87:00 - 87:30 or hidden thing yeah and I would add to that that Yiddish is used for identity purposes for many people not just Jews I mean we haven't really talked about non Jews who are interested in Yiddish but there are certainly many and in America but also in Germany and Eastern Europe and I think for many of them it is an important part of their identity as Germans or as poles to to learn the language of a group that
• 87:30 - 88:00 no longer exists in your in your society so but then I think also within American society Yiddish words play an important role in American Jewish identity and I don't think it's always associated with Ashkenazim for example in my survey I found that people who do not have yesh ancestor ancestors are just as likely to use some of the Yiddish words it the ones in the religious domain like shul
• 88:00 - 88:30 for example or Dobbin and you do hear those kinds of words in Safari and Mizrahi communities so at this point Yiddish influences and Ashkenazi Hebrew are to some extent markers of religiosity more than they are of Ashkenazi heritage and yiddishists identity however of course there are many people for whom yudish is very important as a marker of their connection to their ancestors whether it
• 88:30 - 89:00 was transmitted from generation to generation or whether as Ross said they are ballet chuhwa to Yiddish the question of how where people are of addition fluence and their English has come up already you just mentioned that some of the from people whether they're ballet chuhwa or FF bees know very specifically that's something like staying by us is either like it or don't
• 89:00 - 89:30 like it as a result but is that is that general do the people that aware of it some some people are aware of it and for some features they're more aware than others people I I mentioned that experiment that I did it was an experiment where I played speech samples for people and asked them to say if the person who said this sentence was likely to be Orthodox and if they were likely to have grown up Orthodox and I found that coming to us is not very salient people don't see that as a distinctively
• 89:30 - 90:00 Orthodox feature the the buy is very salient but then also other things are more or less salient and but the question of whether they associate them with Yiddish I'm not sure I think some people say oh the Yiddish buy but other people just think it's bad grammar they don't realize that it comes from you too bad grammar that they associate with people who are from or yeah okay so then even if it's not Irish they they're aware of some of that
• 90:00 - 90:30 something that it's Jewish in any case okay so it's not that it comes out of completely out of left field does that come up at all on your work I mean there are many yudish words that people use in the English just like the English words they use in there but I mean I would say that most of the most of the Yiddish words used in English have to do with religious topics as you
• 90:30 - 91:00 would expect but I haven't done you know a thorough study on this with respect to the other round English words used in Yiddish I think for Hasidic person you geege doesn't sound Hamish if it doesn't have some English words today you know so you know so I mean what I mean it's it's a very I mean what I find interesting is that it's I mean I don't know like what to
• 91:00 - 91:30 make of this but the issue is that at any point in its history Yiddish has been a contact language okay so it has been and it's not unique in that position it's just that what may be unique is that the number of languages with which it has been in contact so what I know is that from the perspective of somebody you know working like developing assessment when we develop a vocabulary test for instance we sometime I have five different versions of the same concept you know depending on whether
• 91:30 - 92:00 these are speakers from Polish it is an Englishman or system Yiddish or somebody will have borrowed an English word so I mean definitely but yeah the issue is that you don't sound like you speak Hasidic you - unless you put some English I heard a talk by Netta abou gov who's a researcher of Hasidic Yiddish and she did a study in Antwerp and found that the same kind of thing they and actually there everyone used the Dutch word for hat which I think was hit or something
• 92:00 - 92:30 like that and no I don't know I can't marry what where does but but that was the Yiddish word for hat and so I think it's important this is something that some purists feel uncomfortable with some non Haredi Yiddish enthusiasts are uncomfortable with her ad Yiddish because it is so receptive to borrowing from English and other languages but I think that just shows the vitality of the language that it is open to
• 92:30 - 93:00 borrowing I mentioned you know it's not the type of borrowing in terms of quantity of pattern I mean the so I didn't talk about this but pop like has done many studies on places of code switches and the code switching is my in my data is typical of UN speakers you know and it's not you know I mean it's not unique to to the easy speaking population if you study the spanish-speaking or Haitian Creole speaking population in you know you get the same kind of patterns I think what's interesting is that you know another
• 93:00 - 93:30 aspect of the language context that is interesting to look at is for instance you know I think the contact with Hebrew in the in the Hasidic community is probably different from the one in more secular communities the other thing I wanted to mention is that it's not always easy to jump to the conclusion this is directly the result of the contact with English that's what I try to show with diminutive II you have many so I mean languages
• 93:30 - 94:00 change anyway and it's not clear that it's always a direct result of the contact with English address a result of language change which is also some things that Celtic and human kind of explores and you know we can't be too strong I mean it's it's hard to actually come to straightforward conclusions sometimes like the loss of gender distinctions like day and so I mean I think in that sense from my own purpose I think it's nice to digitalize return Nitish
• 94:00 - 94:30 tax but it would also be great to go back to these spoken sources like the recording on Van Hajj and actually look at the changes in the spoken language because I think we also make the mistakes of thinking that this is what the Hasidic Raza demand doing today but actually we don't have recordings I mean we don't have many recordings of what was going on in terms of spoken language so until we have we look at that I think conclusions about language change versus language influence are going to be very tricky I have a long long list of questions but
• 94:30 - 95:00 unfortunately I think we're just about out of time we'd like to take a couple of questions from the audience so if the people who can get to the mic mics fastest can ask their questions or have the mics brought to them up until the 1960s the conceptualization in this country was of a melting pot we then shifted to a multi-ethnic picture of
• 95:00 - 95:30 ourselves before that time Judaism was a religion there were various groups and the language continuity of Yiddish was upheld by the Sholem Aleichem schools and places like that but certainly beginning in the 60s and 70s that movement died out and there really was no setting within which Yiddish was learned until the academic departments and yivo started language learning by
• 95:30 - 96:00 and large secular non-religious use see their religious see their Jewish identity in terms of a whole series of cultural choices that they make whether they want to observe Passover or Hanukkah talk about bagels and so forth and I think it --is-- and that community is not really very important and their children there is no setting within which their children can learn Yiddish it's only when children become adults
• 96:00 - 96:30 and are interested in Yiddish that you have that kind of learning taking place so what Rose was talking about is a very hidden kind of thing I think by and large for most people the modern orthodox are obviously a different category and there you have the development of a kind of newer culture because there weren't people like that 25 or 30 years ago I I completely agree and I didn't I didn't mean to give too too optimistic a
• 96:30 - 97:00 picture of the majority of secular American Jews obviously what what goes on in as I said relatively small small world is not necessarily representative but nonetheless it's there you know the National yudish book center can claim as I understand to be a mass membership organization with I'm not sure you know tens of thousands maybe you know multiple hundreds of thousands of members that you know all told and you know III I think there is that there is that connection but it is you know as
• 97:00 - 97:30 you say it doesn't necessarily come with knowing you know more than more than a few words or having the most tenuous kind of connection and there was a real snap there was a real break in in transmission but I think it's important to realize that you know there's a kind of emerging field within linguistics of revival istic sand there is a whole kind of an idea of language revival that you know in many ways has spread beyond what happened with with with Hebrew for instance where there were all kinds of forces that that prompted the revival of
• 97:30 - 98:00 Hebrew and there's a feeling of you know the accessibility of the past the fact that you can go online and if you if you want to hear you know hear as much Yiddish as you can as you get a handle and that people you know hundreds of thousands of people watch a YouTube video it's not you know it's not speaking at home it's not raising eight you're speaking child but it means that there is some greater sense of access now than there was partly because people have worked so hard to to get this material up there you know that was not
• 98:00 - 98:30 really accessible before if you didn't live somewhere that where there were Yiddish speakers so I don't want to give too rosy a picture but at the same time there is this you know there is a kind of a real metalinguistic community there is a real way in which you know it is you know within reach for those who get interested but those are still a minority okay we're gonna have one last question then we're gonna break for dessert so first of all thank you so much to the
• 98:30 - 99:00 panelists and this is really wonderful I wanted to I wanted to ask a question and you kind of touched on it now at the at the end of this answer but specifically you know speaking to something that Ross said he mentioned ruffles you know article about revival versus continuity and I wanted to ask is there something in Yiddish identity you know
• 99:00 - 99:30 for identity for that people are choosing now that that kind of creates that attachment to the idea of revival is it like what do you do you see that as being you know perhaps a part of modern Yiddish identity I guess by choice I think when you know when people begin to probe you know it can start with somebody just kind of looking at
• 99:30 - 100:00 their family tree trying to figure that out or just sort of you know having an interaction with a grandparent I mean the little you know the smallest little sort of wormhole you go down and then you suddenly and I you know I know several people that this happened to some extent happened to me you start sort of going down one of these wormholes and all of a sudden you're you know you confront the the great sort of mass of Yiddish culture which was sort of there waiting all along but you didn't necessarily know about it I mean most people don't know about it but it's it's there you can you can sort of get to it and then that can lead in all
• 100:00 - 100:30 sorts of other directions and and connect you to all sorts of historical experiences and other communities it connect connect you to you know people from Eastern Europe and and and Germany as well who are non-jews but have an interest in it connect you to all kinds of different communities so I think in a way there is there is a sort of there is a sort of gateway there there is this I think there is this ability now to kind of leapfrog a little bit over you know over generations where Yiddish transmission was was snapped because the
• 100:30 - 101:00 resources are there the question is is is this just going to be sort of the activity of individuals who pursue it as a sort of hobby or will it take root in some in some deeper sense I think yeah and just to add to that there are also secularists Jews and leftist Jews and queer Jews for whom Yiddish is a way into Jewish community and we see this for example in Los Angeles the there's a group called the Shalom community which is a secular religious
• 101:00 - 101:30 school and not religious but like a Hebrew school but but with Yiddish and they don't learn fully yet if they learn post vernacular Yiddish so they have instead of teachers they have letters and Bell furs and and and they learn and their classes have the names of the Hebrew letters but instead of Bob it's evolved and instead of a bar mitzvah they have a bar mitzvah and a BAS Mitzvah so so for them Yiddish is a way of of being Jewish but in a non-religious way and in a leftist way
• 101:30 - 102:00 and they are actually connected with workman's circle in Los Angeles and they all have ties to two yiddish kite los angeles so so organizationally we see these onn and workman's circle also has a connection to the queer community so we see connections to all of these among all of these groups as sort of an alternative way of being Jewish outside of synagogue life I think we have to stop here unfortunately I mean it really
• 102:00 - 102:30 is unfortunate because everything each of you said just brings to mind that many more questions so I think your homework assignment should be to come up with a list of questions and see to it that there are more events like this so we can spend more time talking about these things thank you very much to the panelists and to the organizers and to the audience
• 102:30 - 103:00 and yeah now you have to go and have dessert I'm really sorry