How Many People Speak Yiddish?

grace413

Sun, Sep 07 2014, 2:40 pm

Both my DH and BIL spoke Yiddish as a first language as they were children of Holocaust survivors. My DH tends to wear baseball caps, T-shirts and jeans - it really freaks people out when he speaks Yiddish.

My parents spoke Yiddish as a second language, used it to keep secrets from us, and as the obedient child I was ( Very Happy

) I never learned. Too bad, DH and I could have used to keep secrets from our kids, once they learned Hebrew.

Yocheved84

Sun, Sep 07 2014, 6:39 pm

P.S. Wanted to add that my student, from the Dominican Republic and Catholic, told another student that he had a lot of chutzpah and that he was acting like a schm*ck.

I thought that was awesome.

amother

Sun, Sep 07 2014, 6:43 pm

My friend didn't get accepted to a charedi school because she didn't speak Yiddish. She's Sephardi, but anyway, what a joke, I've never heard anything so ridiculous. Apparently her mother said, we speak Hebrew, much of Yiddish comes from Hebrew. She never forgot that episode.

kitov

Sun, Sep 07 2014, 7:24 pm

amother wrote:

if it was a yiddish speaking school then I can understand.

zaq

Sun, Sep 07 2014, 7:47 pm

There is an entire society of secular Yiddishists. They have at least one online forum, probably more than one, and they are not, for the most part, people in their 80s and 90s. They are rather are on the young side, have decided that ethnic is cool, but religion not so much, and this is their way to connect to their Jewish roots without getting tangled up in that inconvenient religious stuff.

Consider the fellow who founded the Yiddish Book center in Amherst. No interest in saving Yiddish siddurim, machazorim, or tanachs, very interested in rescuing Yiddish translations of Shakespeare, medical texts, history books, novels, poetry books, cookbooks, and travelogues. To be fair, it may be that there are so many Yiddish siddurim, machazorim and Tanachs around that there would be no room for anything else if he accepted them. But it's quite clear that his mission is ethnic-linguistic and not religious.

amother

Sun, Sep 07 2014, 7:51 pm

My yeshivish dss know quite a lot. They attended a yeshiva where at least some shiurim were given in Yiddish. They're now fluent in Yinglish, and I often have to remind them--irritably, I might add--to speak to me in standard English, which I'm not sure they still remember.

The thing is, they can learn gemara in Yiddish, but I wouldn't place any bets as to whether or not they could argue politics or follow a recipe written in Yiddish.

poelmamosh

Sun, Sep 07 2014, 8:13 pm

amother wrote:

follow a recipe written in Yiddish.

How about this?
cabbage strudel

On that note, zaq, in our shlichus with college students we have come across quite a few Yiddishists (one who was doing post-doctorate language studies at Columbia and then went on to a job at the Forvarts--this was about 10 years ago!)
More recently, I gave a Parsha class in Yiddish to 2 girls. I gifted them with the friediker rebbe's zichronos (the Previous Chabad Rebbe's "memoirs", which are really stories of the beginning Chassidim written in a very beautiful, literary Yiddish). They loved talking Yiddish to me and dh (he is more fluent--it is his first language).
Last summer, they spent time on a Yiddishist commune upstate (can't remember the name) where they raise sheep to make Tzitzis. I don't know the level of religiosity/kosher, though Confused

Emily Thorne

Sun, Sep 07 2014, 8:22 pm

amother wrote:

Which words from Yiddish derive from Hebrew?

Yocheved84

Sun, Sep 07 2014, 8:34 pm

[quote="poelmamosh"]How about this?
cabbage strudel

Looks yummy! Only followed a few min of it, though.

The Klezmatics are very popular among young people, and the Yiddish classes at the Ivies get a fair amount of kids. And there's a weekend retreat every year upstate for young people, too.

We'll never be as fluent as our families of origin, but it's a lot of fun and gets people in touch with their heritage....

poelmamosh

Sun, Sep 07 2014, 11:29 pm

Yocheved84 wrote:

The Klezmatics are very popular among young people, and the Yiddish classes at the Ivies get a fair amount of kids. And there's a weekend retreat every year upstate for young people, too.

We'll never be as fluent as our families of origin, but it's a lot of fun and gets people in touch with their heritage....

Right, for some reason we get the mailings: Klezcamp. My kids (aged 10, 7)couldn't believe it wasn't something frum

What I remember is that the girls had a much harder time reading/writing than regular conversation because of a lack of Hebrew background. We did some emailing (sorry, "blitz-briv"--they taught me that word!) for practice, then one of them gave up, it being too hard what with on-screen keyboard clicking (couldn't touch-type in Hebrew) and the spelling, oh, the spelling...

dimyona

Sun, Sep 07 2014, 11:59 pm

sgmama wrote:

Which words from Yiddish derive from Hebrew?

So many! Here are a few:

Afileh- afilu (even if)
b'roiges - berogez (angry)
Punim - panim ( face)

Lots and lots more.

bat1

Mon, Sep 08 2014, 12:09 pm

My yiddish is perfect! 2 old israelis once past me on the street and overheard me talkin yiddish, they were dumbfounded! I was still a girl then and they were like "how does such a young girl know yiddish" LOL! told them I grew up with it!

busydev

Mon, Sep 08 2014, 12:19 pm

I know a bissel of yiddish... and thats about it LOL

I really dont know any yiddish other then the words that are part of "yeshivish"

dh is the same.

and we are debating sending DS to a yiddish speaking school...

Chayalle

Mon, Sep 08 2014, 2:22 pm

Zehava wrote:

Yiddish by definition is a language that picked up words from wherever Jewish people lived. Some is German, Russian, polish, Hungarian. So I don't think ours is more watered down than in previous years.

Ha Ha.

My father always tells us about the guys in Yeshiva who tried to communicate with him in Yiddish (he grew up in Vienna.)

They would ask him "Du gleichst es du"

They meant to ask if he likes it here.

Well - Gleich means straight, in German.

He could not figure out what on earth they were trying to ask him.

DH told me he always thought "smetena" (sour cream) is a yiddish word. It's not. Or it was absorbed into Yiddish. Holuptche and Kokosh cake are not yiddish, either.

Chayalle

Mon, Sep 08 2014, 2:24 pm

Yocheved84 wrote:

P.S. Wanted to add that my student, from the Dominican Republic and Catholic, told another student that he had a lot of chutzpah and that he was acting like a schm*ck.

I thought that was awesome.

And my Italian supervisor at work told me to skip the whole megillah and not shlep things out.