Yiddishist movement

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Yiddishism is a cultural and linguistic movement that promotes Yiddish, the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jews, as a modern language with its own high culture. It began in Eastern Europe in the late 19th century, a time when Yiddish was spoken widely but often looked down upon. Important early figures included Mendele Mocher Sforim, I. L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem. Although the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah) sometimes rejected Yiddish, some maskilim used the Yiddish press to spread new ideas. Yiddishist thinker Aleksander Zederbaum helped build the Yiddish press with Kol Mevasser, and Joshua Mordechai Lifshitz argued that Yiddish was a separate language and could connect Jewish and European cultures. He is often seen as the first conscious language reformer for Yiddish.

In 1908, the Czernowitz Conference in Czernowitz (now in Ukraine) brought about 70 delegates from different Jewish worlds. It declared Yiddish a modern language with a developing culture and called for more Yiddish teachers, schools, press, literature, and theater. The meeting was mostly symbolic and did not create a single unified movement, and attendees disagreed on questions like whether Yiddish should be the national language. Still, it raised the language’s profile and laid groundwork for future efforts.

In the following decades, Yiddish culture and organizations grew. In 1925, YIVO (the Yiddish Scientific Institute) was founded in Wilno (Vilnius) to standardize Yiddish spelling and study its history and literature. The General Jewish Labour Bund, a secular Jewish socialist party, promoted Yiddish as a national language for Jews and helped spread it in the diaspora. In the Soviet Union, Yiddish enjoyed state support in the 1920s and 1930s, with official use in some areas and even a Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Birobidzhan established in 1928. However, persecutors and purges in the late 1930s hit Yiddish writers and scholars hard.

Many Jews moved to the United States, especially New York, where Yiddish culture thrived in theater, newspapers like Forverts, and labor movements. The Holocaust destroyed most of Europe’s Yiddish-speaking communities, wiping out about 5 million Yiddish speakers. After the war, Yiddish education continued in the United States and elsewhere, supported by universities and summer programs. In Israel, Hebrew became dominant, and Yiddish faced stigma in some circles, though it never completely disappeared.

Today Yiddish still survives in schools, universities, and cultural groups. The Yugntruf movement supports young Yiddish speakers, and the Yiddish Farm in New York offers immersive language programs. Yiddish is also taught online on platforms like Duolingo and studied in universities around the world. While far fewer people speak it than before, renewed interest keeps Yiddish culture alive and evolving.