Oy gevalt, Yiddish is dying. It’s listed in the Encyclopedia of The World’s Endangered Languages, which means that an entire generation is at risk of not knowing such phrases as nosh, shmear, pitsel and shayna maidel. Indeed, where would we be as a people without some good bagels and shmear? Unless bubbes, zaidies and alter kochers (grumpy old men) keep teaching us Yiddish words, they might be lost to the dreck (garbage) forever.
Leave it to Grammy Award-winning art director and graphic designer Janet Perr to help bring Yiddish back into vogue, first with the quirky book “Yiddish for Dogs,” and now with her new book, “Yiddish for Babies: A Language Primer for Your Little Pitsel.” The picture book teaches 29 Yiddish words with entertaining pictures of babies in various states of “Yiddish”: playing with a dreidel, letting out a geshrei (scream) and looking ongepotchket (gaudy) decked out with excessive amounts of jewelry.
The book’s aim is to help babies understand their parents when they start yelling things like, “Stop kvetching, dinner will be ready soon,” which the book reads next to a mother with a hot pot in her hand.
The book also teaches babies to look and act just like their bubbe in Boca. “Nu? Did you hear we’re having a playdate later?” one baby says to another on an outdated flamingo-colored rotary phone. “Yay,” the other baby responds, through a key-lime phone.
But the book is not just for babies. One of the last pages teaches parents the phrase yiddisher kop (smart person). So they can kvell: “Baby’s on her way to Harvard. She’s a real *yiddisher kop.”
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Gevald! This book and others like it would be the final nail in the coffin of Yiddish, if mameloshn weren't alive and kicking strongly enough to knock the stuffings out of such travesties!
a shande un a kharpe fun an amhoritste! feh!
Travesty, schmavetsy. If it's yiddish, it's OK by me! And I know I speak for the others in our yiddish club: Sura Leah, Rochel Chana, Dasha Riva, Golda, Shifra, Masha, Malka, and Leyaleh !
Is anyone else getting tired of Yiddish being presented as a funny little language, or rather jargon? Yiddish means a lot more than peppering one's English with (poorly spelled) Yiddish expressions for funny effect. It represents centuries of Ashkenazi culture and a rich literary tradition, not only comedy.
Yiddish is not an endangered language. The haredi community maintains a distinct Jewish society, speaking its own language. It is not dying out. For the non-haredi Jews, Yiddish is no longer their language. It's finished, and all these newspaper headlines using the term "revival" are simply misleading and untrue. "Revival" means that people who did not speak Yiddish as a native language are now raising Yiddish-speaking children. That is not happening. One's real language is the language of one's society - not merely the language of one's parents. There is no Yiddish-speaking society. The American Jews are English-speakers, because they are part of the larger American society - not a distinct society like the (Yiddish-speaking) haredim or the (Hebrew-speaking) Israeli Jews. Yiddish is for American Jews a hobby (a Yiddish weekend, a Yiddish play, a Yiddish book of jokes) or an academic pursuit. A revival of Yiddish would mean a shift in identity. It would mean the end of an American identity and the re-adoption of another identity. It would mean the undoing of a century of assimilation. Since Jewish identity is of secondary importance to most American Jews, Yiddish will remain merely a hobby (and in the next generation, there will be some other hobby).
"A revival of Yiddish would mean a shift in identity. It would mean the end of an American identity and the re-adoption of another identity. It would mean the undoing of a century of assimilation." Yehuda, I must take exception to your cut-and-dried concepts of identity and assimilation. Actually, a revival of Yiddish would represent a great benefit to the American Jewish identity, because that is in fact where most of us come from. America is a pluralistic society. In my family we are observant, but by no means haredim. I, my wife and three young children speak Yiddish every day. Not just a few cutesy expressions, but real, fluent Yiddish. About 90% of our communication with the children is in Yiddish. It is neither a hobby nor an academic pursuit, it's our family language. My wife and I are American born, we speak English well (in fact we both have advanced degrees in English literature), but the twins learned their English in school. In no way does this mean the end of an American identity, but for us it is a more interesting and integral identity. When you say "It would mean the undoing of a century of assimilation," I find this a fairly meaningless abstraction. Both my grandfathers came to the US approximately a century ago. I knew both of them (my grandmothers both died young), as well as many other relatives of their generation. I also knew my parents and those of their generation -- I had lots of aunts, uncles and cousins. Both the assimilation or resistance to assimilation are quite palpable in our experience, not some vague force totally beyond our control. Nor do I regard assimilation as totally negative, we are American and that means a great deal to us. Lets better call it acculturation. So Jewish identity can evolve and still have continuity, because our family histories are at the core of of our Jewish identities. Admittedly all this takes some effort, and I don't claim it's a mass movement, but we are by no means alone in the USA (or Europe, or Australia) in raising our children in Yiddish.