Does anyone speak yiddish

Orthodox Jews sometimes debate the Talmud in Yiddish. Old people on bus benches in Jewish neighborhoods gossip in the language of their youth. And a small but growing number of younger Jews who grew up speaking English are turning to Yiddish studies. This much activity might have surprised the pioneers of the Los Angeles Yiddish Culture Club, who drew up a year charter when they staged their first evening of tea and cake in Even then, Yiddishists were worried that America would prove rocky ground for their transplanted tongue.

Sixty-three years later, the club still stages a formal program every Saturday night from October through June at the Institute of Jewish Education on 3rd Street in the Fairfax District, but no one knows how long it will last. In fact, no one really knows how many Yiddish speakers there are--either in Southern California, home to an estimated , Jews, or in the world at large.

But there is no doubt that the number has been shrinking. Joshua Fishman, a sociolinguist who teaches at Yeshiva and Stanford universities, said there may be 3.

Yiddish the name literally means Jewish has its roots in the Dark Ages, when Jews who lived in southern France and northern Italy migrated into what is now Germany. They spoke their own language, similar to the Romance languages of that day, but exchanged it for a form of medieval German, adding words from Hebrew and using the Hebrew alphabet. Modern Yiddish emerged as they gradually moved to Eastern Europe.

From the early s on, as more worldly Jews became a part of the cultures around them, some looked down on Yiddish as a zhargon, the language of ignorant village folk. But that ignored a rich literary tradition that goes back at least as far as , and a secular Yiddish literature that flowered from the middle of the 19th Century on. Novels, plays, poetry and newspapers appeared in the language, along with prayer books and translations from the Bible.

In waves of emigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, about 7 million European Jews spread the language to the United States, Canada, South America and what is now Israel. But others stayed behind. Most of them were gassed or shot or died of cold and hunger in concentration camps after Nazi forces conquered the Jewish centers of Eastern Europe. By then, Hebrew had become the language of the Jewish settlers in Palestine. And in the United States, Yiddish was often discarded as worn-out baggage from the old country.

Now, except for some ultra-religious enclaves in Israel and the East Coast, and a small circle of secularists in New York whose Yiddish-language nursery school is so popular that it has a waiting list, there is nowhere left where Yiddish is the common language. We have a half-dozen young people too. According to some estimates, Yiddish is the fifth most commonly spoken language in Brooklyn, behind English, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese.

In the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Boro Park alone, the number of Hasidic Jews, for whom Yiddish is the primary language, is well over , If you are interested in Yiddish, you have probably received articles of this kind of from well-meaning relatives. Along with the problematic assumption that Hasidim have nothing to contribute to the continuing vibrancy of modern Yiddish culture, one problem with these tropes is that they obscure a much more interesting cultural phenomenon: the way that Yiddish serves as a conduit for creating an overlapping space between the margins of both the secular and religious communities, allowing for a creative dynamism between the two.

There were hundreds of Sholem Aleichem schools, Peretz schools. Where are they? How many Yiddish books are being published? The secular people dominated everything and now they've lost. Hasidim are pushing everyone to be more religious, more Jewish. Rabbi Frankel's bemoaning of the potential extinction of Yiddish illuminates a greater issue: The language has become synonymous with Orthodox Judaism and has lost its meaning within the secular parts of the faith.

It's a dying language among mainstream Jewish Americans but a thriving one among the Hasidim, who speak the language almost exclusively. Historically, American Jews have been more moderate and relaxed in following the tenets of Judaism, classifying themselves as "Reform" or "Conservative" more often than "Orthodox.

In total, 83 percent of Jews in America did not consider themselves Orthodox, and even those raised Orthodox tend to switch over to the less traditional forms of Judaism at higher rates than those raised in other parts of the faith.

Berger experienced this switchover firsthand. They might have gone to schul , but that's it. But the Orthodox community's previous status as a reclusive community is changing—and rapidly.

Alan Cooperman , the director of religion research at Pew, said that the growth of the Orthodox community is a story of demographics. Berger pointed to mushrooming neighborhoods of Orthodox Jews in Los Angeles, Toronto, and Chicago, with "minivans full of Hasidic kids.

That's unthinkable now. There's , Hasidic Jews in New York alone, and they're growing fast. The Census points to a curious pattern of aggregation of Yiddish speakers in four metropolitan areas, calling the Yiddish-speaking community "an extreme example of language concentration":. This means that 88 percent of all Yiddish speakers lived in just one of these four metro areas.

The same report said that many Jewish American Baby Boomers grew up speaking Yiddish at home, but dropped it—along with an Orthodox lifestyle—when they reached adulthood. Berger hypothesized that today's secular Jews just aren't that interested in speaking Yiddish. They use Yiddish as their lingua franca and to discuss the Torah. They don't read secular works. The future of Yiddish is a mixed bag, he says: "There will be a substantial population of people speaking it, and they're going to increase.