THE BLUEPRINT
The Urban Jewish Monthly-vol.2, Issue 7
July 2002 • Tamuz-Av 5752
Gevalt! The New Cultural Currency of Yiddish
By Aliyah Vinikoor
"I was born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine, where seemingly even the air is filled with Yiddish," says Asya Vaisman, 18, a junior at Barnard College majoring in Yiddish. Upon moving to the States, however, Vaisman soon realized that Yiddish did not hold a similarly ethereal position in American Jewry. Instead, she found that most American Jews write off Yiddish as either a dying language or one that is confined to the ultra-Orthodox world. But for Vaisman and many like her, New York City signifies a grand laboratory in which these perceptions are slowly being counteracted. For these Jews, Yiddish is being lived daily.
Yiddish, the language spoken by Ashkenazic Jews in Central and Eastern Europe for more than 1,000 years, has experienced 'rebirths' in the past. Following the Haskala-the Jewish Enlightenment in Europe at the end of the 19th century- Yiddish was transformed into the language of a new modernist movement with its own art, literature, and theater. But today's increasing interest in Yiddish is unique in that those involved, by and large, grew up in homes where Yiddish was not their mama-loshen, or mother-tongue. "Although Yiddish was not spoken in my house, I grew up knowing that it is a very important part of my cultural heritage," says Vaisman.
This is typical of the language's new students, says Marc Caplan, who studies Yiddish as part of his doctoral work in comparative literature at NYU. "They are interested in recovering that aspect of their culture that was abandoned," he says. "They take their 'Americanness' and modernity for granted and are now interested in the Yiddish culture and community that other avenues of Jewish life in America haven't provided us."
Caplan says that he was first attracted to Yiddish as an alternative way to explore his own Jewish identity.
"The majority of the Jewish community is focused on either Israel or the synagogue, or both. But Yiddish is not necessarily Zionist or nationalist, and definitely not religious. Yiddish studies is an openly, aggressively alternative way to being Jewish. However, through my Yiddish studies I became interested in Hebrew, which I now study, and in going to synagogue, which I now do each week," he says. "Yiddish really opened up possibilities that I never imagined,"
"My Jewish homecoming experience was really through Yiddish," concurs his wife, Brukhe, who grew up in England. She first became interested in Yiddish when she enrolled at Oxford's summer Yiddish program as an undergraduate. "I had read a lot about foreign cultures in their native languages, but I never felt a connection to them. Only when studying Yiddish did I recognize the cultural background of the text as my own. It was deeper than just mentioning Shabbos or the synagogue-it was the language itself."
Brukhe, who moved to New York in 1993 to study Yiddish at Columbia, currently teaches Yiddish language courses at Jewish Theological Seminary and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, while writing her dissertation on Orthodox Yiddish Literature in Poland between the wars. She and her husband met through the New York Yiddish circuit, and to a large extent their private life revolves around Yiddish. "My husband and I are very active in an admittedly small group of people who try to speak Yiddish as much as we can outside of academia. Except for when we have non-Yiddish-speaking guests over, we speak Yiddish between ourselves exclusively."
"Speaking only in Yiddish is becoming more common in our immediate circle of friends," says Marc. "I think that Yiddish academies recognize that if we don't speak it, practically no one outside of the Chasidic world will. It's like Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who serves as our role model, in a way: if we are committed to creating a living language, than we need to begin by speaking it ourselves."
While they don't have any children yet, Marc and Brukhe plan on raising their family in Yiddish.
"We're involved in an attempt to bring Yiddish into our personal lives," says Brukhe. "It's ideal to combine both the living language and the culture. To study Yiddish means neither to ignore its rich culture nor to sit in the library all day and not speak the language."
As she undertakes both of these efforts, Asya Vaisman, the Yiddish Major, says she finds herself spoiled by New York's Yiddish resources. She has worked for the New York-based Yiddish youth organization Yungtruf, organized a Yiddish club and a Klezmer band at Columbia where she sings Yiddish songs, participated in YIVO's summer program, and has taught high-school Yiddish at JTS. Additionally, Vaisman has worked directly with Yiddish documents at the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library.
"There are Yiddish culture festivals, conferences, camps, and programs happening all the time," she says.
Professor Jeremy Dauber, director of Columbia's Yiddish Studies Program - the oldest such program in the United States - finds young people's increasing interest in Yiddish very exciting.
"There are a lot of people interested in Jewish history and culture, much of which was written, performed, and sung in Yiddish. There is new music, Klezmer, new novels, and retelling of Yiddish plays and stories going on," he says. Last year, 72 students at Columbia were enrolled in Yiddish language courses — chiefly in the beginning levels. Dauber credits new Yiddish cultural expressions for his program's popularity. "Using Yiddish in art is the best thing we can do. We need to explore Yiddish as part of a much larger Jewish milieu."
But are these experiments the products of a Yiddish renaissance or the birth of something entirely new?
"I don't think this is a rebirth per se," says Dauber, "but a cultural continuity that now includes Yiddish. We may be beginning to see a new form of Jewish life that includes lessons we've learned from this inheritance."
"I think that right now a lot of younger people are looking for ways to explore their Jewish identity that's authentic but at the same time isn't part of religion. There is also an increasing interest in the marginal, the offbeat, the alternative, the voice of the outsider. Yiddish serves as a good way to do this as well. There is the idea of the mama-loshen — that this was the language of women, of the worker, the rebel, the modernist, the artist. And this is all true, but it was also the voice of the traditionalist," says Dauber. "Its interesting to keep an eye out for the way in which Jewish artists are going back and influencing the culture by drawing inspiration from this literature."
While these new expressions of Yiddish have drawn some criticism from purists, they are mostly welcomed by younger Yiddish-scholars. "I'm active in trying to draw on the cultural resources to create something new for the 21st century," says Brukhe Caplan. "This does not mean that Yiddish is dying; it just means that Yiddish is different."
"I don't resent the fact that Yiddish is being used for modernist purposes, especially in music. This is what keeps it a living language," says Tamar Kaplan, currently living on the Upper West Side while writing her dissertation for the University of Pennsylvania.
However, for Kaplan, who spent a summer studying Yiddish at the Oxford Center for Yiddish Studies in 1999, it will take more than experimental art and music to restore Yiddish's position at the heart of American Jewry. Even for someone like her, who "grew up in what you could call a 'Yiddish culture' as much as it exists now," Yiddish is still relegated to the realm of academics. Pursuing a doctorate in modern Jewish history, Kaplan understood that a working knowledge of Yiddish was necessary if she wanted to read related documents in their original text.
"I actually just finished reading a document in Yiddish," she says, "and the language just speaks to me. To read Jewish history in the language of the Jews, in our...it gives a flavor of what's going on that you couldn't get through translation. To me that is very exciting."
As someone who was raised in the modem-Orthodox community, Kaplan represents a constituency that Professor Dauber sees newly attracted to Yiddish. "There is a phenomenon of Orthodox Jews in the modern world who try to explore their Jewish identity in new ways.
Yiddish is one way of their balancing, nuancing what they learned in day school, high school, and yeshiva," he says. While they are pursuing Yiddish recreationally and academically, it does not define their Jewishness as it does for so many young people who come to Yiddish with a more limited Jewish background. "It's coming at the same milieu but through a different angle."
Indeed, the Yiddish outreach work being done has focused on the social and cultural life of Yiddish.
Marc Caplan, who started Svive, a conversational subset of Yungtruf, says that "we try to bring Yiddish into our social, private, and creative lives. It's the Yiddishist's approach to out-reach-Svive-to get involved, but not necessarily in a Jewish context."
"We must really start feeding the bottom of the pipeline," says Professor Dauber. "At Columbia there are three classes of first-year Yiddish, but after that the numbers drop off precipitously. We want to expand the net of people who could be interested in experiencing Yiddish literature as wide as possible."
"I came to this knowing very little about Yiddish writers myself," he says. "We want to introduce Yiddish literature, history, and culture and Jewish culture to as many as possible-to have Yiddish be part of the broad education offered to undergraduates, as well as a field of scholarship."
New York City, says Professor Dauber, is a gold mine for anyone interested in Yiddish studies either recreationally or substantively.
"The wonderful thing about New York is that if someone wants to experience something, its there," he says. "Museums and various institutions in New York City have done a tremendous job to promote Yiddish. There are film screenings, one-act plays, and exhibitions. Take advantage of it. We're hoping for an even greater rebirth."
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