James Carville tells Democrats to ‘start speaking Yiddish’
James Carville Photo by Getty/Bloomberg/Contributor
By PJ Grisar April 27, 2021
James Carville thinks Yiddish should be the language of voter outreach. Well, kind of.
In an interview with Vox, the longtime political consultant and “Muppets” cast member expressed his concern about “jargon-y language” surrounding subjects like race, suggesting a more accessible form of messaging for Democrats.
“I always tell people that we’ve got to stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Yiddish,” Carville said. “We have to speak the way regular people speak, the way voters speak. It ain’t complicated. That’s how you connect and persuade. And we have to stop allowing ourselves to be defined from the outside.”
Which is a nice sentiment — if a very antiquated one.
While Yiddish was certainly the lingua franca of Ashkenazi Jews for some time, the analogy makes very little sense in the 21st century. Most regular Yiddish speakers now are Haredi, numbering around half a million to a million people according to YIVO.
While there are plenty of non-Haredi speakers, too, Modern Hebrew is spoken by about 9 million people, no small few of them learned it in Hebrew school to the neglect of other Jewish languages. While Lashon Hakodesh was once the domain of the synagogue, and Yiddish the vernacular of everyday life, the Hebrew revival movement, begun in the 19th century and boosted by the founding of the state of Israel, has completely changed the paradigm.
Still, it’s kind of amazing that Carville had a deep enough knowledge of Jewish history to make such an analogy given how far removed we are from Yiddish’s pervasiveness. But that makes it all the more bizarre as a clarifying analogy for speaking in terms everyday people understand, given how few folks might understand it. (For what it’s worth, ESPN’s Max Kellerman, while a bit perplexed, liked it.)
Because of the strangeness of the statement, it’s possible Carville’s true message to Democrats was more direct than it seems: Start courting the Yiddish vote.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
