Here are some reasons, even in these gloomy times, to feel good.
In Haifa, there’s a man named Hossam Haick. He’s all of 33 years old, and he is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Last September, he was honored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review, which named him one of 35 young scientists from around the world noteworthy “for achievements which have dramatic ramifications on the world as we know it.”
His distinctive achievement is the development of an electronic device based on nanometer-sized sensors that is essentially an artificial olfactory system which can detect cancer from the breath of the patient — an electronic nose. You exhale on the nose, and you learn whether you have cancer, even at a very early stage, before the tumor has actually formed. You’ll know the result within two or three minutes, and you’ll even know whether the cancer is in your lungs, colon or breast. (As lab work progresses, the goal is to add further discriminatory power.) Detected so early, the successful treatment rate from the detected cancers may be four or five times current rates.
The achievement would be worth noting on its own merits. But there are a couple of elements that make it still more enticing. First, Haick’s lab, the recipient of a $2.2 million grant from the European Union (the largest E.U. grant ever awarded an Israeli scientist) now employs 20 scientists and researchers from Germany, Singapore, China, India, Russia and, of course, Israel. The Israelis include Muslim and Christian Arabs, Russian immigrants and sabras. Science is an international language.
Second, Haick is himself a Catholic, born and raised in Nazareth. He could easily have stayed in the United States, where he did post-doctoral work at Caltech, but he chose to return to Israel because he believes that science has a kind of unifying power that can bring people from different religions and nationalities together in one place, working with each other and understanding each other.”
But before being carried away by what may be utopian possibilities, it is worth noting that Haick is one of only a handful of Israeli Arabs to hold a full-time senior position at an Israeli university. Utopia may be very far away; gains in equality of services and opportunity for Israeli Arabs are a more imminent goal, a function of political will.
Language: Having sung the praises of science as a transnational language, let me turn to as non-transnational a language as there is, a language that is not only not transnational but not even national. I refer here to Yiddish.
Science is glitzy; Yiddish is heymish, homespun. But the number of homes where it is spun has, of course, been declining. For almost all practical purposes, Yiddish has become a language for certain Haredi communities here and in Israel, no longer available as a lingua franca uniting Ashkenazic Jews across national linguistic boundaries let alone as the core of a folk culture.
For almost all practical purposes, but not quite all. These days, there is a mild — but fascinating — rebirth of Yiddish in New York with Yugntruf and in Los Angeles with Yiddishkayt, quite independent of Haredi Judaism.
Take Yugntruf. Yugntruf (“call to youth” in Yiddish) says it “cultivates the active use of the Yiddish language among today’s youth here and abroad by creating opportunities for Yiddish learning and immersion, and by providing resources and support for Yiddish speakers and families.” Estimates of the number of people involved in Yugntruf range from several hundred to about a thousand, hardly enough to call it a movement but more than enough to sustain a sense of camaraderie — or, more appropriately, khavershaft.
My hunch is that some part of the re-awakening reflects an effort to define a Jewish culture that does not revolve so centrally around Israel as Jewish institutions typically do. But whatever the motive, the phenomenon persists, with some young parents determined to speak only Yiddish to their children, dozens of families connecting at Yiddish salons and, come summer, Yiddish Voch, an annual week-long retreat in the Berkshires that draws some 150 people.
Who are these people?
The board chair, Meena-Lifshe Viswanath, is an undergraduate at MIT studying civil engineering.
There’s Leizer Burko, board secretary, whose B.A. at New York University was in Renaissance studies, where he was interested especially in Germanic philology; afterward he received an M.A. in Germanic studies (medieval Germanic languages) from the University of Minnesota, and now he’s working on his doctorate at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He knows Yiddish both from the YIVO Summer Program and from the Forverts, where he worked for three years as a typist and editorial assistant.
There’s Abby Miller, who learned to speak Yiddish in college at the University of Texas at Austin(!), interned at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., studied at the YIVO Yiddish program in 2002 and now teaches deaf students with special needs in Framingham, Mass.
And Jordan Kutzik, who studied Yiddish at Gratz College and at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University in Lithuania; he’s a sophomore at Rutgers, majoring in Spanish and linguistics with special interests in childhood bilingualism and Yiddish.
And then there’s Daneel Schaechter, currently in his senior year at New York’s Hunter College High School, who after a gap year in Israel hopes to attend the University of Pennsylvania, sing in their Jewish a capella group, The Shabbatones, and race on their cycling team.
Vunder iber vunder hot mit undz getrofn; wonder upon wonder has happened, is happening, to us. Un mir zaynen ale shvester, ale brider; we are all sisters and brothers. All.
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About one hundred years ago, a conference was held in Czernowitz in which it was declared that "Yiddish is a national language of the Jewish people". The participants of the conference held different passports. Some were citizens of the Russian Empire, other were citizens of the Autro-Hungarian Empire - and even a few had come from the USA - yet they all saw themselves as members of the very same nationhood, the Jews. They wanted to found a movement of Jewish nationalism, a national identity defined by the Yiddish language, and its non-territorial ideology was meant to compete with the territorial ideology of Zionism (that promoted the return to Hebrew).
Yiddishism is an ideology that still exists today (the Yugntruf, mentioned by Mr Fein, is a Yiddishist movement). Beyond ideology, there is also a sociological reality about language. A language is a creation of a particular ethnicity, a particular people. Therefore, Mr Fein's reference to Yiddish as non-national indicates the total collapse of the historic Jewish identity. Of course Yiddish is a national language, just as the Yiddishists declared at Czernowitz. It is the creation of a particular peoplehood, of a particular group of people that see themselves as sharing a common descent ("nation"). However, it would seem that this simple sociological fact is no longer understood in the American Diaspora. Mr Fein apparently understands "nation" as "an independent state". Since there is no Yiddish-speaking state, so seems to be the new logic, "Yiddish is a non-national language".
Yiddish speakers always saw the Jews as a distinct peoplehood, a nation. Certainly, the Yiddish language Forward was always well aware of this simple fact. It's sad to read that in the English language Forward, the historic identity of Yiddish has been totally lost.
The interest in Yiddish is not "an effort to define a Jewish culture that does not revolve so centrally around Israel". Actually, there is a clear parallel between the culture of Israel and Yiddish culture. In both cases, a Jewish language is seen as a central component of Jewish identity. In Israel, since the end of the 19th century, the revival of Hebrew became the very heart of the Jewish culture of the new yishuv. Others in the Jewish world viewed Yiddish as the natural carrier of Jewish culture. There was a lot of friction between the two ideologies, but actually there was a basic agreement between them: language is at the heart of the collective Jewish experience.
So, actually the interest in Yiddish is not about Israel; rather, it's about American Jewish life. Those who wish to "revive" Yiddish are actually saying that a non-Jewish language, American English, is not the medium through which they would like to express their Jewishness. The English-speaking Jewish community has mainly Jewish religion to offer its members. Yiddish-speakers have additional options for expressing Jewish continuity.
Sadly, real "revival" of Yiddish is impossible under the present conditions. The Yiddish-speaking haredim speak Yiddish as the language of a whole society. They understand in their instincts (without studying the social sciences in college) that language and identity go hand in hand. Yiddish for them is a means of maintaining their uniqueness. The secular Yiddishists also understand that Yiddish is part of one's Jewish identity. However, unlike the haredim, they don't have a complete society. They can speak Yiddish at home with their children, and they can organize a "Yiddishvokh" at some hotel, but in reality they live in an English language world. There are no day-schools or higher education in which Yiddish is the language of instruction, and so Yiddish cannot become a complete first language. It remains a very nice hobby for some or an academic research career for others. If revival is on the agenda in America, then the activists will have to take an example either from the revival of Hebrew or from the haredi way of life. They will have to find the way of re-creating a language-based society that stands in its own right.
Just as Czernowitz is no longer Czernowitz (and good riddance to Czernowitz) so is Yiddish no longer the language of non-Orthodox Jews (and good riddance to secular Yiddish).
The early Zionists were anti-Yiddish and wanted Hebrew to replace it, viewing Yiddish correctly as a language for cowards (read 'City of Slaughter' by the Hebrew poet Bialik).
The anti-Zionist Bundists were pro-Yiddish. Not too many of those around these days either.
Dave - Why "good riddance to secular Yiddish"? Do you think it's better now that secular Jews are English speakers? Language is a carrier of culture. For millions of English-speaking Jews, Jewish culture is simply foreign to them. They wouldn't even recognize the letters of our alphabet. The abandonment of Yiddish wasn't good news at all from the point of view of Jewish continuity. In today's Diaspora, you have to sit children around the campfire and explain to them that they are Jews. It's not so obvious or self-evident anymore.
Bialik's poem 'City of Slaughter' is not anti-Yiddish at all. He wrote also a Yiddish version of this poem. Bialik also lived his private life in the Yiddish language, even in his Tel-Aviv years. The poem criticizes the traditional, passive Jewish existence - not language.
Yes, the anti-Zionist Bundists promoted Yiddish, and they saw Yiddish as the very definition of Jewish peoplehood. It's also true that not too many of them are around anymore - but not because of the failure of their ideology. They disappeared because they were murdered in the Holocaust. So, while I don't like their anti-Zionist positions - still, I would be a much happier person if they were still around to debate with!
yiddish language is reborn in Canada. Come to Toronto and you will find a school which speaks yiddish to children from elementary to high school grades. Winnipeg use to have an all Jewish language radio program. It lasted for well over thirty years until the demise of its founder Mr. Noach Whitman of Blessed Memory. Yiddish will help us to stop the horror of intermarriage and raise the Jewish Pride which is so lacking among our people.
I agree with Rabbi Kravetsky that Yiddish expresses Jewish pride. Hebrew does as well, obviously. Speaking one's own language is a source of pride in one's peoplehood (and it defines a peoplehood). Clearly, the lack of pride is one of the reasons for the demise of Yiddish. Many Jews belittled their own language throughout the 19th-20th centuries, calling on their brethren to adopt Russian or German or English. In essence, Jewish identity was seen by many as a hindrance to a better future. A real rebirth of Yiddish would happen in the reverse order - first, there has to be a willingness to be distinct, and then this distinctiveness could express itself in the renewal of a Jewish vernacular. I don't think that there is really a substantial North American Jewish audience for being so obviously different than others outside of the haredi community.
I don't believe that "Yiddish is reborn in Canada". The Bialik school teaches Yiddish (and Hebrew), but there isn't any re-created Yiddish speaking society. The graduates of the school raise English-speaking children, obviously. Reality cannot be changed by giving alternative definitions to words. "Rebirth" could describe the renewal of Hebrew in the Land of Israel. People whose native language was (generally) Yiddish raised their children in Hebrew and created a Hebrew-speaking society. So far, the rebirth of Hebrew remains a unique event in the history of mankind. What is happening today in very modest numbers is a renewal of interest in Yiddish culture - but not revival.
Yehuda’s quote “Yiddish is a national language of the Jewish people.” is apposite. Yiddish is A national language (the language of former Ashkenazim), not THE national language – thus Hebrew. It is pointless to expect to replace English, the world’s technical language, with Yiddish. On the other hand, there is a magnificent Yiddish literature, so we must make sure that Yiddish is not lost.