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Echoes of Yiddish in the Speech of Twenty-First-Century American Jews
- Wayne State University Press
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Echoes of Yiddish in the Speech of Twenty-First-Century American Jews sarah bunin benor Introduction From the Shtender (desk/lectern) of the Kluggerebbie: As a bona fide member of the global Jewish conspiracy to make the world a better place, I hereby testify to the wisdom exhibited herewith by the author. With a deft pen and a happy heart, she has distilled the deepest soul, the kishkes [intestines] of the Jewish people, into a remarkable work that would have made her bubbie [grandma] so proud and full of nachas [pride] if it were not for those Nazi bastards who took her to the next world.1 So begins Lisa Alcalay Klug’s 2008 book Cool Jew. In this faux rabbinic haskama (letter of approval), Yiddish serves as a hook to pull the reader into a vision of “cool” Jewishness. Klug’s use of Yiddish words represents not an isolated instance but a widespread phenomenon among contemporary American Jews. In the twenty-first century, young American Jews are using Yiddish-influenced English to indicate facets of their ethnic and religious selves, even when their parents and grandparents do not. Today most descendents of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the United States have little knowledge of their ancestors’ mameloshn (mother tongue). Small pockets exist where Yiddish is still spoken as an everyday language, both in Haredi/Black Hat Orthodox communities2 and among a few hundred other Jews dedicated to keeping Yiddish alive.Yet, for most American Jews,Yiddish is a “postvernacular language,” a source of nostalgia, crystallized in the form of jokes, tshatshkes (keepsakes), refrigerator magnets, and festivals.3 As part of this 320 S a r a h B u n i n B e n o r change in vernacularity, Yiddish has left its mark on the English speech and writing of American Jews, as well as Americans more generally, in the form of Yiddish-origin words, phrases, and grammatical constructions.4 In this essay, I investigate some of these echoes of Yiddish among English-speaking American Jews.5 Based on a large-scale online survey, I found that some Yiddish influences are making a comeback, that is, they are used more by younger people further removed from the generation of immigration. Even Jews who report that none of their ancestors who immigrated to the United States spoke Yiddish (10 percent of respondents, including descendents of speakers of German, Russian, Ladino, (Judeo-)Arabic, Farsi, and other languages) use many of the Yiddish influences. Two overlapping groups of American Jews seem to draw on Yiddish as a form of identification: those who emphasize their religious distinctiveness and those who emphasize their ethnic (and often secular) distinctiveness. Yiddish is connected culturally and emotionally to the Jewish collective memory of a recent eastern European past that includes robust strains of both religiosity and secularism. Whether contemporary American Jews consciously draw on these links or simply use words they associate with friends or relatives, it is useful to analyze the relationships between past and present and between language and identity. The quantitative data in this essay come from an Internet survey about the use of Yiddish-origin words (known in linguistics as “loanwords”) and other elements of language that I conducted with sociologist Steven M.Cohen in 2008.6 We disseminated the survey to Jews and non-Jews using snowball sampling and yielded more than 40,000 responses. In this essay, I analyze a sample of 26,429 respondents who self-identify as Jews, were born and live in the United States, and spoke only English as children (not including languages learned in school). For comparison, I also look at a sample of 4,874 respondents who do not identify as Jews or as having Jewish heritage. Although the sample is by no means random and therefore does not constitute an accurate representation of Americans or American Jewry overall,7 it allows comparison across subgroups. We can compare the reported use of Yiddish-influenced English among people of different ages, ancestral origins, and levels of Jewish engagement. In addition ,the survey left spaces for individuals to write comments,and I offer qualitative analysis of some of these. I also present qualitative data on the use of Yiddishisms by young Jews in film, online, and in other venues. Proficiency in Spoken Yiddish According to the survey, a small percentage of American-born Jews are pro- ficient enough to carry on a full conversation in Yiddish. The survey...