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FYI, Yiddish is alive and well (well, not as well as before the Holocaust). There are babies who were just born who are surrounded in a Yiddish speaking environ

FYI, Yiddish is alive and well (well, not as well as before the Holocaust). There are babies who were just born who are surrounded in a Yiddish speaking environment. Their first language will be Yiddish. However those people are a subset of the Haredim. They are a large and noticable group, but is is basically only them. Yiddish used to be a language shared by from the very observant community all the way to the Jewish atheists. That has (unfortunately?) passed. However enough living people speak Yiddish. Any old Yiddish play can be instantly translated. It is an active Wikipedia language and can even be found in Google translate. Most modern books in Yiddish will be Jewish related. But if you want to learn Yiddish, it should be easy to find a course or website (eg Duolingo) to help.

paganel 5y ago
> However those people are a subset of the Haredim. Yes, I know about them, there was a (quite hopeful) event [1] recently where they rented an entire plane from New York to Satu Mare and then they visited Sighetu Marmatiei, the small town where Elie Wiesel was actually born, plus they re-built a synagogue in there. I was talking more about the (very) secular Yiddish culture and associated language norms that we used to have around these parts of the world, retrospectively it's quite visible in classic Hollywood productions like The Apartment (I'm sure there must be more than one study about the Yiddish cultural influence on Billy Wilder's movies) and especially in Ernst Lubitsch's movies. That part is all gone. Plus the whole socialist/left-wing movement that was heavily influenced by the local Jewish community (who had been raised in the Yiddish culture), that is of course also long gone, what was not destroyed by the Nazis and by other local rightwing autocrats was transformed (for a lack of better word) into the zionist movement (i.e. not wanting to make a better world for everybody, just for the Jewish people following Herzl's writings, which is fair enough but still a loss imo). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AeizpoEWsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AeizpoEWsg

paganel 5y ago

> However those people are a subset of the Haredim. Yes, I know about them, there was a (quite hopeful) event [1] recently where they rented an entire plane from New York to Satu Mare and then they visited Sighetu Marmatiei, the small town where Elie Wiesel was actually born, plus they re-built a synagogue in there. I was talking more about the (very) secular Yiddish culture and associated language norms that we used to have around these parts of the world, retrospectively it's quite visible in classic Hollywood productions like The Apartment (I'm sure there must be more than one study about the Yiddish cultural influence on Billy Wilder's movies) and especially in Ernst Lubitsch's movies. That part is all gone. Plus the whole socialist/left-wing movement that was heavily influenced by the local Jewish community (who had been raised in the Yiddish culture), that is of course also long gone, what was not destroyed by the Nazis and by other local rightwing autocrats was transformed (for a lack of better word) into the zionist movement (i.e. not wanting to make a better world for everybody, just for the Jewish people following Herzl's writings, which is fair enough but still a loss imo). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AeizpoEWsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AeizpoEWsg