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Download Original 301.48 KB Levy 1 Contemporary Yiddish in America: Intersections with Politics, Race, and Sexuality Francine Levy Franklin & Marshall College Department of Anthropology Class of 2021 A thesis submitted for Departmental Honors Submitted April 23, 2021 Levy 2 Introduction At the beginning of the 20th-century, my paternal great-great-grandparents immigrated to the United States from Kyiv, Ukraine. Yiddish was their familial language – thus, when my father tells me about his “schlep” across town for work, he communicates his lengthy commute while also repeating language he learned from his grandparents. Yiddish often is referred to as a “dead” language, yet I notice its ubiquity in my everyday conversations and pop culture: my English professor extending an invitation to her home for a “nosh” to continue a class discussion, or as I watch the characters of the television show, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” exchange Yiddish phrases in 1950s New York City. While Yiddish phrases are integrated into casual exchanges and Hollywood scripts, I now experience the language on a deeper, more academic and personal level. By tracing Yiddish’s development in America from the arrival of Eastern European Jews in the late 1800s to its “heyday” in the 1920s and 1930s and decline after the Holocaust, I honor my immigrant family’s voices and situate their narratives in a contemporary context. My project examines the paradox of Yiddish: while it is no longer a primary means of communication for the descendants of Eastern European Jews, it remains central to Jewish American identities. Jeffrey Shandler, an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, refers to contemporary Yiddish as a “postvernacular language:” its secondary, symbolic purposes are more important than its primary goal of communication (Shandler 2004: 19). I formed my research around this concept – how is Yiddish used today, if not for communication? Through the postvernacular lens, I attend to speakers’ identities, the distinction between Yiddish and Hebrew, and Yiddish’s association with social movements and politics. As Levy 3 I began my research on contemporary Yiddish, I realized I could not fully present the cultural heritage without investigating its “roots” in America. Thus, my research changed direction – rather than focusing solely on Yiddish today, I analyze how it has developed in America since the beginning of the 20th-century. I discovered valuable scholarly works to shape my project. A foundational source for my research is Yiddish & English: The Story of Yiddish in America by Sol Steinmetz. Besides being a lexicographer and linguistics expert, Steinmetz was an ordained rabbi and authority on Yiddish (“Sol Steinmetz, RIP.”). His book traces Yiddish’s development in 9th-century Europe to its present-day “survival” in the United States (Steinmetz 2001: 23). Yiddish & English provided me with a solid background on Yiddish history before exploring Netta Rose Avineri’s and Jeffrey Shandler’s contemporary ethnographic studies. Avineri’s work had a domino effect on my research. Her dissertation, “Heritage Language Socialization Practices in Secular Yiddish Educational Contexts: The Creation of a Metalinguistic Community,” led me to Jeffrey Shandler’s work and various Yiddish online forums. Her dissertation analyzes contemporary secular engagement with the Yiddish language and culture in the United States. A central tenant to Avineri’s research on contemporary secular Yiddish speakers is “nostalgia socialization,” the appreciation of the past to understand one’s place in the present. Although no longer the lingua franca of Eastern European Jews in America, Yiddish remains an essential aspect of contemporary Jewish American identity. Individuals remain attached to Yiddish’s history and sentimentality and pursue the language and culture to strengthen their identities. Avineri cites Jeffrey Shandler’s work, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture throughout her dissertation. Shandler outlines two critical elements of contemporary Yiddish: its “postvernacular” nature and “metalinguistic community.” Levy 4 The postvernacular mode relates to Yiddish as a metalinguistic community: a group that strongly connects to a language and its speakers but lacks familiarity with the language (Aveneri 2012: 2). Avineri and Shandler observe that individuals seek Yiddish to connect with its cultural elements rather than to communicate. Notably, Yiddish’s intersections with social movements, leftist politics, or the LGBTQ community are not “new” developments of the 21st-century. Eastern European Jewish immigrants have historical, long-standing connections to these campaigns, beginning when they arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th-century. While these political and social connections are long-standing, Yiddish speakers’ motives and demographics have shifted and transformed throughout the years. By investigating Yiddish in the 20th-century and working to the present day, I can comprehend how Yiddish speakers respond, or remain neutral, to significant events in America, from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter, the Jewish labor movement to leftist political candidates. I develop these concepts through five separate but interdependent sections. My first section, “The Bond Between Yiddish and Politics,” charts the Jewish labor movement in New York, from the beginning of the 20th-century to the 1950s. Yiddish played a crucial role in forming the unions, acting as a “glue” for disenfranchised laborers and providing them with an exclusive way to communicate. The unions were established on a socialist outlook – while Jews’ involvement in the labor movement dwindled alongside their rising economic statuses, socialist leanings remain present among Yiddishists. I relied on a combination of historical essays and recent news articles to recognize the consistencies between the 20th-century labor movement and contemporary Yiddish political leanings. I first acquainted myself with the history of the labor movement through Will Herberg’s essay, “The Jewish Labor Movement in the United States,” which provides a detailed account of Levy 5 Jews’ efforts to unionize. Then, to grasp the contemporary political inclinations of Yiddish enthusiasts, I referred to recent news articles and Op-Eds on Yiddish websites such as The Forward and In Geveb, in addition to stories by The Washington Post and CNN. My research and personal interviews reveal that Yiddish offers individuals a space to speak their political opinions freely and safely. At the same time, it appears as if Yiddish speakers can be exclusive, too. For example, Donald Trump’s attempts to use the language received criticism and anger from Yiddishist communities. The long-standing association of Yiddish with politics confirms that the language operates in ways other than communication. I grasp the various ways speakers use Yiddish through conducting personal interviews and undertaking participant observation of recorded interviews available on the Yiddish Book Center’s (YBC) website. More than 1,000 interviews with Yiddishists are available to view on the website, spanning from 2011 to today. A “Yiddishist” is someone who “looks to Yiddish culture as the source of a rich Jewish identity and proposes to salvage...its language, literature...and music (Svigals 1998: 44). The decade of content from the YBC enables me to grasp the Yiddishists’ attitudes and perspectives over time. I divide the recorded interviews into two categories: the earlier videos, 2011-2014, and the more contemporary, 2015-2020. The YBC videos led me to focus on Yiddish’s intersection with identity and faith through a social constructivist approach – how do individuals renovate and reconstruct Yiddish’s cultural symbols and activities over time? From 2011-2014, Yiddish – and Judaism – appear to become more critical to enthusiasts later in life. In contrast, 2015-2020 interviews showcase a new generation that feels as if Yiddish does not add to their religiosity but can express their faith in a unique way. The alterity of Yiddish distinguishes it from Hebrew, which I detail in Section II, Levy 6 “The Battle of Jewish Languages,” by investigating the history and current status of the two Jewish languages. Historically, Yiddish was employed by Eastern European Jews as an everyday spoken language, while Hebrew was the “holy tongue.” The Zionist movement’s beginnings (between the 1880s and 1939) brought the two languages into conflict. Hebrew was selected as the national Jewish language at the expense of Yiddish. My Yiddishist informants reflect on the two tongues and demonstrate mixed feelings about the advancement of Hebrew. However, there is a consensus that both languages are valuable – neither should be disparaged nor discarded. In addition to the diverging opinions of Hebrew versus Yiddish, I examine the gendered uses of languages, as Hebrew is masculinized and Yiddish is feminized. The contrasting uses of Yiddish and Hebrew – the former as a preservation of a traditional way of life and the latter as a vehicle to explore the Jewish faith – begins to poke at why pursuing Yiddish culture and language is anthropological. Yiddish is not simply a language; as Joshua Friedman, a cultural anthropologist and Jewish studies scholar, explains, members of a linguistic community (Yiddishists) are not united by language practices but by language ideologies (Friedman 2009: 3). This claim connects with Avineri’s notion of metalinguistic community – the
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