As a language of modern political action, Yiddish became the voice of mobilized Jewish masses on an unprecedented scale. The rapid engagement of Yiddish speakers with political activism at the turn of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic coincided with the equally swift efflorescence of modern Yiddish culture. However, this relationship between language and politics was not entirely correlative. The radicalization of Jews in eastern Europe began among small circles of intellectuals who read and spoke Russian, in which most of the region’s Jews were not fluent. These activists subsequently turned to Yiddish as they sought to engage the larger Jewish population in political thought and action, a development that transformed the language as well as many of its speakers.
The initial interest in Yiddish among some Jewish anarchists, communists, socialists, trade unionists, and Zionists was largely instrumental, as there was no other language they could employ as effectively to reach most Jews, whether in eastern Europe or in new, growing immigrant communities abroad. Political activists were generally skeptical about the capacity of Yiddish to communicate historical analyses, socioeconomic concepts, and ideological tenets. In fact, political writings in the language expanded its vocabulary primarily by turning to modern German. At the same time, some activists who used Yiddish to propagate their political agendas also drew on traditional Jewish idioms, turning them to new uses. For example, the term bedikes khomets (“the search for leavened foods”), a ritual conducted before the start of Passover, was used in the Russian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century to refer to police searches of suspected revolutionaries’ homes for illegal documents, which might uncover an analogous form of forbidden ferment.1 Abraham Cahan, a socialist activist in New York at this time (and eventual editor in chief of the socialist Jewish Daily Forward), employed similar idioms when lecturing on politics in Yiddish to immigrant audiences, likening a boycott to kheyrem (“excommunication”) and the protective value of a union card to that of a mezuzah.2
As with earlier uses of Yiddish for popular edification, whether among traditionally pious Jews in the early modern period or by maskilim during the nineteenth century, the language was associated with a non-elite audience, whose knowledge base was considered limited. Indeed, Yiddish signified this limitation, marking its readership by default as insufficiently literate in other, more prestigious languages and therefore lacking in sufficient schooling of one kind or another. However, the context and agenda of modern political activism in Yiddish differed from previous didactic turns to the language. Unlike early modern books of moral instruction or guides to ritual observance, political activists’ use of Yiddish challenged, rather than validated, rabbinic authority and advocated breaking with traditional beliefs and practices instead of enhancing Jewish piety. In contrast with the liberal, integrationist aspirations of the Haskalah, the activists’ movements called for radical change on a grand scale. Moreover, they positioned their audience as central, vital figures in this agenda. Rather than treating them as inferior to an intellectual elite, radicals hailed the Yiddish-speaking masses as a defining force for the Jewish collective and as future leaders of a transformed world.
Nevertheless, most political activists’ commitment to Yiddish was provisional at first. Their movements’ respective agendas either were universalist—and therefore deemed ethnic and religious loyalties to be of limited worth, if not inimical to their cause—or, in the case of Zionists, were increasingly committed to creating a new Jewish national culture centered on the development of Hebrew as a modern vernacular. Nevertheless, the urgent need to engage a large, rapidly radicalizing population of Yiddish speakers engendered a rich political print culture in the language, manifest in party newspapers and periodicals, ideologists’ books and treatises, and election posters and propaganda pamphlets, as well as works of poetry and prose. This literature included the early fiction of Isaac Leib Peretz, whose stories depicting the oppression of impoverished Jews were popular among Jewish revolutionaries, and the poetry of Joseph Bovshover, David Edelstadt, Morris Rosenfeld, and Morris Winchevsky, all of whom immigrated from the Russian Empire to the United States in the 1880s and 1890s. Collectively known as “sweatshop poets,” their verses decried the physical and emotional sufferings of beleaguered immigrant workers and exhorted them to action. Some of this poetry was set to music and sung at political gatherings in eastern Europe as well as the United States.3
Activists in the Russian Empire soon came to regard Yiddish as valuable in its own right. During the period of reactionary political repression that followed the failed 1905 Revolution, Jewish radical movements turned increasingly to cultural activism. This development entailed contentious debates over Jewish language use, not only among those who advocated variously for Modern Hebrew, Russian, or Yiddish but also internally among the various champions of Yiddish. Members of the Labor Zionist party Poale Zion supported Yiddish as an integral part of Jewish life in the diaspora while also promoting Modern Hebrew as the primary language for Jewish life in Palestine. Under the leadership of Simon Dubnow, the Folkspartey advocated for Jewish autonomy within a liberal democracy and supported Jewish multilingualism, recognizing the value of Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish. The various Jewish socialist parties—the Jewish Labor Bund, the Fareynikte Yidishe Sotsyalistishe Arbeter Partey (United Jewish Socialist Workers Party), and the Socialist Territorialists—all promoted the use of Yiddish. However, they differed among themselves regarding the ends toward which the embrace of Yiddish should be mobilized—for example, whether cultural activity in the language that did not promote socialism should be encouraged.4
The most renowned debates over the use of Yiddish in Jewish cultural politics at this time took place at a conference convened in Czernowitz in 1908, the first such public gathering to discuss the status of Yiddish and plan for its future. The conference attracted a range of individuals committed to the language, including leading ideologists (Nathan Birnbaum, Chaim Zhitlowsky), political activists (Bundist Ester Frumkin [née Khaye-Malke Lifshits], Labor Zionist Lazar Khazanovich, diaspora nationalist Noah Prylucki), and authors (Sholem Asch, Peretz, Abraham Reisen). The conference’s agenda raised a series of issues on language development, such as Yiddish pedagogy and standardization, as well as support for various cultural activities. However, debates over the status of the language, especially in relation to Hebrew, dominated the proceedings. Indeed, the conference is best remembered for proclaiming Yiddish to be “a national language of the Jewish people”—thereby accommodating those who insisted that Hebrew also be so recognized—and demanding for Yiddish (and, implicitly, its speakers) “political, social, and cultural equal rights.”5 The signature accomplishment of this conference, therefore, was not strategic but symbolic: a public proclamation of the legitimacy of both Yiddish and its speech community in nationalist terms. At the same time, the conference’s agenda demonstrated the ideological value to be invested in the language by raising the needs of standardization, education, and high culture. In this respect, the Czernowitz Conference was comparable to other landmark language conventions of the period, including for Hebrew in 1903, Esperanto in 1904, and Catalan in 1906.6
As championing Yiddish became part of the agenda of various eastern European Jewish political movements, the language was no longer regarded simply as an instrument for disseminating information and promoting activism but as a defining emblem of Jews as a political collective. During the first decades of the twentieth century, a number of leading activists in Jewish politics—Ber Borochov, Dubnow, Prylucki, Nokhem Shtif—also made pioneering contributions to the study of Yiddish language and its development. They regarded these efforts as part of a larger project of uplifting eastern European Jews, in which the transformation of their vernacular was integral to their social and political advancement. Barry Trachtenberg writes of Borochov’s scholarship and advocacy that his aim was to “turn Yiddish into a state language in the absence of a state. It would therefore be the task of the Yiddish philologist to forge a collective national identity not only by giving Jews a standardized means through which to communicate with one another, but by instilling in them a shared historical narrative, demarcating the nation’s borders, and determining—by virtue of fluency—one’s status as a ‘citizen.’ ”7
Organized support for Yiddish became an ideology—secular Yiddishism—that endowed the language with political agency. Yiddish straddled two distinct aspirations of many eastern European Jewish radicals: participating in a broad-based class revolution with fellow proletarians of all backgrounds and maintaining a distinct Jewish collectivity. Ardently secular in their convictions, they nonetheless refused to assimilate into a Russian cultural mainstream. Yiddish could speak to the large Jewish working class and, moreover, speak for them as the emblematic voice of Jewish labor. At the same time, Yiddish could proclaim Jewish concord across class lines in the face of anti-Semitic attacks (including by some radicals) and signify a distinct Jewish culture as the equivalent of an ethnic nationality. Thus, in 1910 all Jewish political parties in Austria exhorted Jews to list Yiddish as their first language in the census as a signifier of Jewish solidarity.8
As their ideological embrace transvalued the language, Yiddishists demanded that Jewish radicals who had become estranged from Yiddish engage it with new attention to its significance. Some argued for the language’s vital presence in the Jewish body politic, articulated in a corporeal discourse. In 1897 Zhitlowsky exhorted a group of radical Jewish students in Basel to return to Yiddish and thereby “reunite yourselves with the masses. Unify the separated limbs of our people. Return it to its senses!”9 Nor were such convictions exclusive to Yiddishists; writing in Hebrew to his fellow Zionists in 1903, Mordecai ben Hillel Hakohen insisted: “Only by means of the Jargon [i.e., Yiddish], can we understand the internal life of the Jewish masses. . . . As long as we do not understand Jargon, we will not feel the pulsebeat of the masses or train our ears to hear . . . the masses when they address us or each other. Nor will we have the real key . . . to the people’s heart.”10
This purposeful embrace of Yiddish is exemplified by the fact that it was not the native language of several leaders of Yiddishist political movements. Nathan Birnbaum (autonomism), Borochov (Poale Zion), and Vladimir Medem (Bund) all had limited, if any, command of Yiddish until they became politically active as young men, at which time they began studying it. This new consciousness about the language among the most politically active Jews redounded to eastern Europe’s Yiddish-speaking masses, who subscribed to political movements’ periodicals, joined their youth movements and labor unions, participated in their rallies, and attended other public events.
As Jewish political movements evolved, Yiddishism increasingly diverged from Zionism. Like cultural Zionists, Yiddishists envisioned secular activities, centered on language, as having the capacity to unite Jews as a nationality. But cultural Zionism promoted Hebraism, which required that the Jewish masses learn what was, in effect, a new language: not the language of ivre but what in Yiddish is called hebreish (“Modern Hebrew”). Instead, Yiddishists advocated embracing the longstanding vernacular shared by millions of Jews as a language to be cultivated, rather than condemned. Moreover, Yiddishists viewed the diaspora not as degrading but as having defining value for Jewish life, thereby putting them at odds with political Zionists, who prioritized establishing a Jewish sovereign state.
Yiddishists’ convictions about language and diaspora were conjoined in the political principle of doikeyt. The familiarity of Yiddish exemplified the geographical imminence of doikeyt. At the same time, doikeyt transvalued the places where Jews lived and the language they spoke with one another in the course of daily activities as defining sources of national consciousness and pride. One’s milieu, physical as well as linguistic, was not to be regarded as inferior, nor was it simply to be taken for granted. Rather, it should be embraced and thereby revolutionized.
After World War I, the redrawn map of eastern Europe enabled unprecedented possibilities for political activity in Yiddish. New republics created by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 transformed subjects of the former Romanov and Habsburg Empires into citizens of new countries. The conference made special provisions for their ethnic minorities, including the right to form political parties that could publish and convene public meetings in their native languages. Jewish political parties—religious and secular, Zionist and diaspora nationalist—employed Yiddish to communicate with the Jewish public and to operate youth movements, school systems, workers’ associations, public health organizations, and amateur sports clubs.11
“Worker—Your newspaper is the Folkstsaytung.” This 1936 poster advertises the Folkstsaytung (People’s newspaper), which was published by the Yidisher Arbeter Bund (Jewish Labor Bund) in Warsaw from 1921 to 1939. Both the poster’s slogan and the artwork by H. Cyna link this Yiddish newspaper with the Jewish working masses and with public activism, which would be reinforced by the poster’s display in city streets. (From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.)
Yiddish was central to the Soviet Union’s recognition of Jews as a national minority. In tandem with the endorsement of Yiddish, the state repudiated Hebrew for its association with religion and Zionism. During its first decades, the Soviet Union both underwrote and supervised minority language activity—including press, theater, publishing, education, and research—thereby providing Yiddish writers, performers, educators, and scholars with unprecedented governmental attention that was both supportive and constraining. The state mobilized Yiddish to regulate daily life—for example, providing legal forms in Yiddish, as was done with other minority languages—and to realize large-scale efforts to transform Jewish life ideologically, socially, and economically. Under the aegis of the Soviet Union, every public use of Yiddish was imbued with political meaning, reflected in form as well as content.12
As Yiddish manifested Jews’ public presence in the Soviet Union, the fate of the language, its culture, and its communal leadership was tied to shifts in state policy toward national minorities. Public Yiddish culture declined under Stalin’s leadership in the 1930s, as part of larger efforts to centralize state authority. Yet after the outbreak of World War II, the Soviet Union mobilized Yiddish culture to promote the international struggle against fascism, including visits to Jewish communities in England and North America by writer Itzik Feffer and actor Solomon Mikhoels as representatives of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1943. Shortly after the war’s end, however, the Soviet Union liquidated public Yiddish culture. Schools and other institutions were shut down; leading writers and activists were arrested in 1948, falsely convicted of anti-Soviet activities, and executed in 1952.13 Akin to a political prisoner, Yiddish was “rehabilitated” in the late 1950s, as part of a larger cultural thaw under Khrushchev, and maintained a limited public presence in the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991.
In the United States, by contrast, the lack of state regulation afforded Yiddish-speaking political activists expansive opportunities to organize and publish. At the turn of the twentieth century, immigrant Jewish radicals printed political materials not only for domestic distribution but also to be smuggled into Russia, where such works would not receive the censors’ approval.14 Immigrant political movements promoted their respective ideologies through their own Yiddish newspapers, some of which had long runs, especially the anarchist Freie Arbeiter Stimme (1890–1979) and the socialist Jewish Daily Forward (1897–1986).15 Over the years, these papers’ editors negotiated ideological changes wrought by major events—including wars, massacres, economic turmoil, the collapse of regimes and creation of new countries—using a medium that can, in effect, reinvent itself on a daily basis. Throughout these upheavals, the Yiddish language served as a constant, both instrumentally and symbolically. At the same time, the trajectories of the American Yiddish press also reflect generational dynamics, shaped by immigration and education as well as language use and political convictions.
As social media platforms, these American Yiddish newspapers were at the hub of activities that included political action (strikes, elections, rallies) and cultural events (lectures, excursions, balls). Alongside the press, a politically charged American Yiddish performance culture developed in the first decades of the twentieth century, including choruses affiliated with political organizations, radical theater productions staged by ARTEF (acronym of the Arbeter teatr-farband [Worker’s Theater Union], 1925–1940), and comical left-wing sketches performed by Modicut (1925–1933), a puppet theater created by Yosl Kotler and Zuni Maud.16 Efforts to engage immigrants’ children in political activism centered on secular Yiddish schools run by the Labor Zionist Farband, socialist Arbeter Ring, and communist Internatsyonaler arbeter-ordn. Summer camps run by these movements (named Kindervelt, Kinder-ring, and Kinderland, respectively) strove to provide youngsters with utopian environments in which Yiddishist political and cultural ideals were imparted in conjunction with athletics, crafts, and performances.
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Jewish political activists dealt with Yiddish as a subject of opprobrium as well as support. Yiddishism took shape in eastern Europe within a shprakhnkamf, in which advocates for Yiddish wrangled with both Hebraists and language assimilationists. The contending arguments for or against various languages were rooted in new ideologies of Jewish nationalism, which were informed by ongoing political discourses in Europe. Language use was central to nineteenth-century discussions of nationalism among ethnic groups in the Romanov and Habsburg Empires. As historian Raymond Pearson notes, the region’s minorities “seized upon language as the criterion which granted their nationalism equal status with any other.”17 These groups maintained that a single, shared language and its attendant culture (literature, press, education, theater, folklore) defined a nationality both inclusively—uniting speakers across regional and class differences—and exclusively, distinguishing one nation from another. Many eastern European Jewish nationalists embraced this model, flouting Jews’ traditional internal diglossia, their widespread geography across ethnolinguistic boundaries, and their growing interest in mastering the languages of their neighbors—Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian, among others—as well as languages of culture with which they may not have had any direct contact, including English, French, and German.18
External efforts to encourage eastern European Jews to abandon Yiddish as their vernacular and turn to state languages had been underway in some locations since the late eighteenth century, fostered by government endeavors through education and bureaucratic regulation. Joseph II issued edicts in the 1780s intended to transform Jewish life in the Habsburg Empire, such as permitting Jews’ admission to secular schools where German was the language of instruction and mandating the use of German in official documents and records. In 1844 the Romanov Empire opened schools that taught Russian language and secular subjects to Jewish children.19 Magyarization of Jewish education was instituted in 1867 in Hungary, following the establishment of its semi-independent status within the Habsburg Empire.
Results of these efforts varied within each country, reflecting differences in language use correlated to region, class, education, and religiosity. In the western provinces of the Russian Empire, Jews’ linguistic assimilation was largely confined to small but influential groups of intellectuals, professionals, and members of the upper economic strata. By the turn of the twentieth century, the majority of Jews in Hungary spoke Hungarian. In many cases, they spoke German as well, though census data counted Yiddish as German; Hasidim in particular were distinguished by continuing to speak Yiddish.20 In Romania, Jews living in major urban centers, especially Bucharest, tended to adopt Romanian as their vernacular, while Jews in provincial locales were more likely to maintain the use of Yiddish. Even as these states strove to promote an official monolingualism, eastern European Jewish populations evolved new configurations of their longstanding multiglossia, especially in communities located at political and cultural frontiers. For example, Jews in Czernowitz, the capital of Bukowina under the Habsburgs, evolved a complex “mixture of languages (German, Yiddish, Romanian, Ruthenian, Russian) that resulted in a characteristic local jargon,” which was maintained even after the region came under Romanian control following World War I and Romanian was proclaimed the official language.21
Like Yiddishists, Hebraists resisted linguistic assimilation in the name of establishing a modern Jewish national culture centered on language use. However, informed by both maskilic principles and Zionist ideologies, Hebraists typically viewed Yiddish as inimical to Jewish nationalism, associating the language with their portrayal of the diaspora as exile, in which Jews were detached from their ancient cultural and political roots. Ahad Ha‘am (né Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg), the founder of cultural Zionism, argued that only Hebrew had ever been the Jews’ national language. He insisted not only that Yiddish lacked the dignity or respect for this level of prestige, but that it was “an alien tongue acquired in a strange land.” The fallen state of exile, he maintained, had reduced Jews to a weakened condition, in which they resorted to Yiddish “only under compulsion” and would doubtless soon rid themselves of this “external and temporary medium of intercourse.”22 Literature scholar Avraham Novershtern notes that the shprakhnkamf was severest in sites of the most radical transformations of Jewish life: the Zionist settlement in Palestine, where Hebraists’ “efforts to deny any place for Yiddish sometimes took ugly and even violent forms,” and the Soviet Union, where “all manifestations of Hebrew culture were banned,” in part “due to the active intervention of the Jewish communists, who considered Yiddish the only legitimate language of the ‘Jewish working masses.’ ”23
As Hebraism became a central aim of Zionism, efforts to establish Hebrew as a language of daily life focused on Jewish settlers in Palestine. There the “rebirth” of vernacular Hebrew paralleled the mission to establish a Jewish state on the site of ancient Israel as a response to the onerous conditions of Jewish life in the diaspora. Hebraists linked the creation and mastery of their new vernacular with suppressing the diaspora languages spoken by Jewish immigrants to British Mandate Palestine. This undertaking entailed the equivalent of military action: Hebraists organized the Gedud megine ha-safah (Battalion of the Defenders of the [Hebrew] Language) and the Igud le-hashlatat ha-ivrit (Organization for the Enforcement of Hebrew) to police Jewish settlers’ language use. Historian Liora Halperin suggests that Hebraists’ persecution of Yiddish was due, in part, to fears that “the British, who had granted Hebrew official status, would renege on this commitment if they came to believe that Hebrew was not the real mother tongue of many Jews.” Anti-Yiddish activity included campaigns against showing talking films in the language—most infamously, a 1930 protest against a presentation of Mayn yidishe mame (My Jewish mother) in Tel Aviv, during which members of the Gedud megine ha-safah disrupted the film with noise and threw ink and “foul smelling objects” at the screen. As a compromise, the film was shown without sound—in effect, staging a performance of the silencing of both the yidishe mame and the audience’s mother tongue.24
Historian David Shneer notes that the suppression of Hebrew in the Soviet Union had been “part of the internal Jewish battle for more than a decade to create a monolingual, modern Jewish culture, a battle taken on by—not created by—the Communist Party and Soviet state.” In this context, advocacy for Yiddish and against Hebrew was articulated in terms of class conflict. Thus, Shneer observes, in 1926 the Central Jewish Bureau of the Council for National Minorities likened the use of Latin in Christian Europe to that of Hebrew as a language associated with “materially privileged segments of the Jewish population.” These Jews “had a contemptuous attitude toward Yiddish, the language spoken by the Jewish poor,” which therefore “reflected the needs of the exploited classes.”25 As a consequence of this view of Hebrew, journalist Yehoshua Gilboa reports, the Soviet Union banned all activity in the language, including “communist and explicitly pro-Soviet publications. . . . Even the ‘Internationale’ in a Hebrew translation” was deemed “counter-revolutionary.”26
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The outbreak of World War II roiled and eventually undid Jewish political life in eastern Europe. Stripped of their basic rights as citizens in Nazi-occupied territories, Jews struggled for their very survival. German forces confined Jews in ghettos and established Judenräte (German: “Jewish councils”) to govern these imprisoned populations under German supervision. These councils used Yiddish to communicate with ghetto inhabitants; at the same time, the language played a vital role in organizing underground resistance movements and covert projects to document both the German persecution of Jews and their resilience. Interwar Jewish political activism provided a foundation for these efforts, exemplified by Emanuel Ringelblum, whose youthful experience as a member of Poale Zion inspired his career as a historian and community activist in the years before the war. In the Warsaw ghetto, Ringelblum organized an extensive clandestine project to collect records of Jewish life and death in the ghetto.27 Jews undertook similar efforts to document their persecution in other ghettos and also composed Yiddish poems and songs that gave voice to suffering and inspired resistance.28 The language was “written . . . with blood,” as Hirsh Glik, a poet of the Vilna ghetto, famously stated in his “Partisans’ Hymn.” This was no mere metaphor, as documented by a photograph taken by Zvi Kadushin in the Kovno ghetto. During a raid, as one of his neighbors lay dying, the man wrote on the floor in his own blood the words Yidn nekome! (“Jews—revenge!”).29 In the early postwar years, examples of how Yiddish had served as a means of resistance to persecution during the Holocaust—through songs, poems, jokes, sayings, and other expressions—were collected and published by writers Szmerke Kaczerginski and Yisrael Kaplan, among others.30
On June 26, 1941, a man shot during an attack in the Kovno ghetto wrote the words Yidn nekome! (“Jews, revenge!”) on the floor, using his own blood. His message was photographed by Zvi Kadushin (George Kadish), a math and science teacher who secretly documented the ghetto using handmade cameras. (From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)
The political uses of Yiddish that had flourished in the first half of the twentieth century were either greatly weakened or terminated altogether in the wake of the war. Beyond the mass murder of Yiddish speakers throughout Europe, this decline was due in part to the much-altered social and political circumstances in which Jews around the world now found themselves, as well as to rapid changes in their language use: the suppression of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union and constraints on its use in countries under Soviet domination, the repudiation of Yiddish by the State of Israel, and extensive linguistic assimilation among Ashkenazim living in the Americas, western Europe, and elsewhere, as a result of both external pressures and internal desires to integrate successfully in these countries. Notwithstanding these developments, some prewar Jewish political organizations continued to advocate for Yiddish or used it to communicate with constituents in the postwar period. A case in point is the Jewish Labor Bund, which, historian David Slucki notes, was transformed into a transnational movement after the war, extending its principle of doikeyt to Yiddish-speaking communities in major cities in Argentina, Australia, France, Israel, Mexico, and the United States, among other countries.31
In the decades since the Holocaust, Yiddish has emerged as a political voice in new ways, involving a variety of populations, ideologies, and agendas as well as different ideas of the language’s symbolic value. The subaltern status of Yiddish in Israel tacitly marked public use of the language in print and performance as acts of resistance against the state’s language policy and its implications for Jewish culture in the new country. Sometimes the political significance of using Yiddish in Israel was more overt. For example, actors Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher, famous for their comic satires in interwar Poland, settled in Israel in the 1950s, where they continued to perform in Yiddish. Yiddish studies scholar Diego Rotman observes that the duo “sought to invert, deprecate, and thus subvert” Israel’s “political elites” and their “vaunted self-image” by taking the “national Hebrew narrative” and relating it “in the Yiddish vernacular.”32
The postwar reconstitution of Hasidic communities in locations far from their eastern European origins—London, Antwerp, Montreal, Jerusalem, Melbourne, and especially New York—engendered new uses of Yiddish as a political language. Hasidic leaders employ Yiddish to promote political action within their communities, for example, when endorsing candidates for whom their followers should vote in elections. Conversely, local politicians and government agencies sometimes make use of Yiddish to engage Hasidim. In addition to the instrumental value of communicating in the language to disseminate public health information or notices about changes in mass transit, as has been done in New York, this practice implicitly acknowledges the importance of Hasidim as constituents. Their use of Yiddish has also figured in debates concerning the limits of their political power. In 1994 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against the Satmar Hasidim of Kiryas Joel, located in Orange County, New York, who sought to create a separate state-funded school district, exclusively for their children, within the town. Though the court’s majority ruling was based on the principle of the separation of church and state, a dissenting minority opinion questioned whether the issue at hand concerned culture rather than religion, given the community’s extensive use of Yiddish as their language of daily life.33
The advent of Yiddish as a subject of study at university has attracted some students whose interest in the language is overtly political. In the United States, this was notably the case in the 1970s, as some young activists on the New Left were interested in learning about earlier generations of Jewish radicals. Studying Yiddish enabled these students to acquire information about this history and forge a symbolic bond with earlier progressive activists. University students continue to be drawn to Yiddish because of its association with various Jewish social and political alternatives. Some opt to learn Yiddish over Modern Hebrew, whether rejecting its association with Zionism or as a reaction against the State of Israel’s history of asserting a Hebrew hegemony by marginalizing and oppressing diaspora Jewish languages and cultures. This valuation of Yiddish has even attracted interest among young Jews in Israel, such as members of the Israeli group Hemshekh-dor (Generation of Continuity), who promoted the study of Yiddish at the turn of the twenty-first century as part of a call to their generation of Israelis to connect with Ashkenazic heritage. The group argued that this rethinking of their identity as Israelis not only would be to their own benefit but also could have a positive impact on their relations with Palestinians and the Arab world.34
Concurrently, cities in Europe have become home to Yiddish language courses, publishers of Yiddish translations, and performances of klezmer music and Yiddish song. These cultural endeavors, in which non-Jews play a significant, often leading, role, have noteworthy political implications. For example, Jewish heritage activist Ruth Ellen Gruber argues that “playing klezmer and Yiddish music in Germany and Poland presents a symbolic attempt to right wrongs: to reconstitute Jewish culture destroyed in the Holocaust, to ‘bring back,’ to ‘resurrect,’ to ‘heal.’ ”35 Engaging Yiddish culture in this context recalls Europe’s Jewish past both as an important subject in itself and in order to address challenges that Europeans now face with regard to multiculturalism.
All of these recent activities complicate the once self-evident tautology conjoining Yiddish language, Ashkenazic culture, and Jews. Far from the turn to Yiddish as an expedient for engaging masses of native speakers in political thought and action, as was the case little more than a century earlier, the language is now used to test the limits of what might constitute Yiddish culture and its relation to a public, thereby creating new possibilities for Yiddish to find a political voice.