On Yiddish

The Nazis slaughtered most of its speakers. American English welcomed some of its vocabulary while American institutions encouraged its speakers to leave it behind. In Palestine, the Zionists denigrated it, limited its appearance in public spaces, associated it with the shame of exile and the backwardness of ultra-orthodox communities that rejected modernity and secularization. A dying language, perhaps, but no language dies a natural death.

For most Ashkenazi boys and girls who grew up in Palestine after WWII Yiddish was not simply a foreign language but an alien language, a language of aliens. Many people of my generation have stories that attest to the willful construction of this alienation and alterity. We did not know that and what we had been deprived off, and when we understood, it was usually too late or too complicated to make the effort to retrieve what had been lost.

Nurith’s beautiful film captures a moment in time, 80, 70, 60 years after this loss was orchestrated and what it captures may seem like a miraculous resurrection. Modernist, avant-guard poetry is being recited and interpreted in Yiddish centers around the globe. Once again, in many diasporic communities, an erotic, politicized, multi-layered Yiddish flirts with its older sister, Hebrew, steals from it, challenges and makes fun of it. The revival of a dying language has been announced.

But is this really what the film shows? I watched Nurith’ film several times, and each time was captivated by a different aspect of its aesthetics, composition, and message. Watching it before today’s screening I became aware that what seemed to me at first as a documentary of a revival is a eulogy, and a monument for a dead language.

Look how Nurith introduced each of her speakers, following them from an urban public space into the privacy of their study, living room or kitchen. In these spaces, Yiddish emerges as language of privacy, of intimate experiences that belong to a few exceptional individuals, a language of monologues and stylized poetry. Somehow the privacy and intimacy of the language is inseparable of it secularized intensity. The Orthodox communities in Brookline or Bnei Brak or Jerusalem, or the hybrid Hebrew/Yiddish or English/Yiddish of the younger generation of Orthodox Jews have all been left outside the frame.

Are the young, impressive Yiddish enthusiasts shown in the film reviving the slaughtered language or are they the guardians of its archives, the keepers of its secrets? And what is the role of the film itself? Does it document the revival of Yiddish or takes part in its museification? Are the private rooms where Yiddish poetry is being recited the sonic white boxes of the dead language, its archival cabinets and drawers, or the launching pads for its resurrection? Can both options be maintained together? And, finally, can one respond to this question without bringing into the frame the actual “Jewish condition,” and the state of Hebrew as the language of sovereign Jews, the language of the Jewish masters, the colonizers of the land and its native people, but also of multiple diasporic Jewish communities that in one way or another collaborate with the masters’ colonial enterprise?


Adi