Oy, schlep, shpiel, schmuck, shtick and glitch.
However, in the past two years, there has been a surge of new Yiddish learners. During the pandemic more than 300,000 people registered to learn Yiddish on Duolingo, a language-learning app. Data from the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University shows that figure is equal to about half the total number of Yiddish speakers in the world today. And 61 percent of users on Duolingo, who self-reported their age, said they were under 30. Additionally, YIVO reported a 500 percent increase in enrollments during that time period and now offers 10 times as many courses — mostly Yiddish courses — as it did before the pandemic.
“There is a deep and profound hunger for knowledge of this history, culture and language,” said Jonathan Brent, director and CEO of YIVO. “What we are seeing is not simply nostalgia for a lost world but a repossession of it, and with that, a reassertion of a stubborn, proud, deeply held Jewish identity.”
He said for American Jews, Yiddish is a part of their heritage they may not know much about even if they went to Hebrew school.
Ben Kaplan, YIVO’s director of education, said that many people were interested in learning Yiddish before the pandemic, too, but were limited, as was YIVO, by geographic constraints. “There was this audience that was just lying in wait … but it was hard to get people together,” Kaplan said, noting that most YIVO students before the pandemic were from New York, where YIVO is based, New Jersey and Connecticut.
For Duolingo, the uptick in Yiddish learners fit into a larger trend. In the first six weeks of the pandemic, Duolingo saw 30 million new registrations. Currently, the app has 49.5 million active users.
The app began offering the language in April 2021. It had been planning for a few years to offer Yiddish, which has several dialects composed mostly of Hebrew and German, along with some words from Polish, Russian, and other Slavic and Romance languages. “Something that’s really important to us is that we are offering courses that represent all humanity: geographically diverse, linguistically diverse. … Yiddish also offered us the chance to work with dedicated and committed speakers,” said Cindy Blanco, managing editor of learning content and a senior learning scientist at Duolingo. Blanco and her team deferred to their Yiddish-speaker contributors when it came to picking which dialect to use. Ultimately, they decided on a Hungarian Hasidic pronunciation dialect along with grammar and vocabulary from YIVO’s version of Yiddish, noting that it would be the most intelligible across most Yiddish dialects.
“You could easily make five to 10 Yiddish courses,” said Blanco, who credited mass interest in Spanish and French with allowing Duolingo to offer languages with a niche audience, such as Yiddish, Navajo and Zulu.
For many new learners of Yiddish, the language offers a kind of connecting thread to loved ones, along with a past world and its lost culture. Lauren Modery, 39, a writer who lives in Colorado, is a new Yiddish learner who said she found it hard to find a way to learn Yiddish before the pandemic. In one attempt, she said she never heard back from a Yiddish meetup at a local community center. But in January, she saw that Duolingo was offering Yiddish and signed up. “My interest level is really high, and I’ve stayed engaged in a way that I don’t always stay engaged with things,” Modery said. Modery, who is Jewish, grew up in a nonpracticing Jewish family but wanted to reconnect to her roots. “When my great grandparents came over [to the United States] they did what a lot of Jews did and assimilated into America. They dropped Yiddish, and the descendants weren’t given much of a chance to be Jewish,” Modery said. “I just had a really strong interest for the past two decades of learning where my family came from … I wasn’t handed down a lot of things or traditions or language, and this is my way of filling in those holes. This has been very meaningful to me.”
For Jeremy Price, 49, a professor of education at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, learning Yiddish on the app has reconnected him with his grandparents, who he used to visit every weekend in Brooklyn. “I grew up hearing it all the time. They spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want anyone to understand what they were saying to each other,” he said. Price said he has taken to dropping Yiddish words in his everyday speech. A favorite in discussions with colleagues is “tachles.” “I could say, ‘where the rubber meets the road,’ but it’s not ‘tachles,’ ” he said.
Hayley Rae, 22, who recently earned a master’s degree in text and performance, said she began learning Yiddish to better explore and engage with Yiddish language plays, none of which were offered during her studies. She has also started translating pages from Yiddish scripts per day. “Yiddish to me, as a diasporic language, carries a lot of power and strength. It’s really its own distinct language. It has its own rhythm and pace and way of existing,” she said. “At the moment for me it’s more for cultural study, but the future is a long and wide thing.”
The wave of interest of Yiddish has also been reflected in new Yiddish-based businesses. Bubuleh, a clothing label, features Yiddish words and phrases on its trendy clothing items. Its founder, Jordan Star, said he decided on the brand’s theme as a tribute to his grandparents. “Yiddish is the medium by which I’ve experienced unconditional love and support that a lot of us don’t really have when we get older,” Star said. Star said he chose Yiddish over Hebrew since he sees it as less obviously associated with Judaism — a relevant consideration, he said, during a time of record-high antisemitic incidents.
Star, who is gay, said these days he feels more accepted in society as a gay man than he does as a Jew. “A lot of people don’t feel safe wearing visibly Jewish clothing. … A lot of Jews grew up in this country learning to whitewash their Jewish identity,” he said. “We’re in this moment of a Yiddish resurgence and connecting with our roots. For a lot of people, it’s a connection to important people in their lives who they don’t have anymore.”
Renewed interest in the language extends to the performing arts. In November, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene is putting on a revival of a Yiddish-language production of “Fiddler on the Roof” that it originally performed in 2018. The Yiddish Arts and Academics Association of North America last year opened Yiddishland California in La Jolla, Calif., a space for concerts and performances, among other things. Events at longtime institutions such as the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., and the number of klezmer music festivals, continue to grow as well, both in the United States and abroad.
Kaplan also noted new TV shows on Netflix that feature significant amounts of Yiddish, including “Unorthodox” and “Shtisel,” which both feature Haredi, or strictly Orthodox, characters. A Swedish unscripted miniseries from last year, “Woodski’s World,” is also in Yiddish.
Just as the language apps are making Yiddish more accessible to more people, technology is doing the same for research into Yiddish culture and history. YIVO recently completed a massive online archive, the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project, featuring 4.1 million pages of documents and books from Yiddish culture that were saved from the Nazis and Soviets. YIVO data shows more than 20,000 users accessed the site within the first six months. Among them were academics studying, variously, Eastern and Central European history, Jewish history, Yiddish language and culture.
This is not the first major revival of Yiddish since the Holocaust, according to Brent, who said the fall of the Soviet Union ushered in a new era of scholarship and growth, including by non-Jewish scholars in Eastern Europe. Most new Yiddish speakers are Jewish or of Jewish decent. But people who aren’t Jewish, especially in former Soviet countries, now also seek to learn the language to better understand their own history, according Brent.
“Young people — Jewish and non-Jewish — around the globe are discovering through the Yiddish language unknown ways of expressing their ambitions and interests and taking a stand against the brutality and cruelty that sought to annihilate it,” Brent said, referring to the Holocaust.
YIVO’s Kaplan said he does not see interest in Yiddish abating any time soon. Brent was more reticent when asked about the future, given past prophesies about the language. “People predicted 10 years ago Yiddish would be a dying language,” he said, “and now obviously it’s not.”