By Ruth Wisse
Like the kibbutz children in the Israeli joke who think that they will begin to speak Yiddish once they become grandparents, most people consider Yiddish a harmless property of Jewish old age and of a toothless past. With ignorance and distance the inclination to sentimentality increases, so that today the association of Yiddish with nostalgia is almost irresistible. Even practiced speakers and engaged students of Yiddish tend to approach the language and its culture protectively, with the instincts of tender curators.
The Politics of Yiddish
“One cannot fully know the process of the Jewish transition into modernity without knowing what Yiddish holds,” wrote Ruth Wisse in 1985. Since then, the scholar who is now the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University has done as much as anyone else on earth to let people without a command of mameloshen in on what they are missing. In addition to her numerous books and essays on Yiddish fiction and poetry, she has also reflected deeply on “the politics of Yiddish,” whose failure she here explains and laments. This essay is republished by permission of Commentary, where it first appeared.—The Editors.
