Oy vey! Yiddish Making a Comeback at Colleges

Yahoo/AP ^ | 12/21/2011

[nickcarraway]

A group of American college students stands in a semicircle, clapping and hopping on one foot as they sing in Yiddish: "Az der rebe tantst, tantsn ale khsidim!"

In English, the lyrics mean: "When the rebbe dances, so do all the Hasidim."

This isn't music appreciation or even a class at a synagogue. It's the first semester of Yiddish at Emory University in Atlanta — one of just a handful of college programs across the country studying the Germanic-based language of Eastern European Jews.

[Ax]

Back in 1974, I volunteered for a liaison program with the Israeli Air Force. The requirement was that I take a 44-week Hebrew course. Four weeks short of finishing, the funding for the project went away. We finished the class but never got to use it. The American Christian instructor said that Yiddish was the language of the ghetto and REAL Jews spoke Hebrew. His wife was orthodox Jewish and the instructor took part in the Jewish rituals. There a few holocaust survivors at the hospital where I volunteer and I try to hit them with some of the Hebrew that I do remember, and they’re always amazed that a “goy” can speak it.

[Ax]

Don’t know how that got posted twice.

It’s been so long that I don’t even remember what form we learned, but it must have been ashkenazi. I wish I remembered more, but time takes its toll. Not long after we finished the course, I got sent out to Teheran for a couple of months. While out shopping for souvenirs one afternoon, I stumbled on to a jeweler’s shop on the main drag, Takht-i-Jamshid. It was owned and operated by Jews, whom I assumed to be Sephardic. I tried speaking with them in Hebrew, but failed miserably. A few years later, I got stationed in Saudi Arabia, and while there, my late wife and I took some Arabic lessons in the embassy. There were a lot of similarities between Arabic and Hebrew, the most obvious being the tri-radical root system of the verbs, and sublineal diacritical marks. I didn’t do very well at Arabic either. Turns out I do a lot better with the Romance languages. I did well to teach my kids English. If they want to learn Hebrew, they’ll have to do it on their own. At my age now, I wouldn’t take on anything as challenging as Hebrew or Arabic.

[Jack Hydrazine]

What you learned in school, what you hear on the TV and radio in Israel, and most everywhere in Israel is Sephardic. I am sure the Persian Jews have their own dialect, too, just like the Yemenites.

[SJackson]

Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume

If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.

..................

Nice, as long as majors understand the nature of future career choices.

[Eleutheria5]

In...colleges? I picked up my knowledge of the language on the streets of Brooklyn, and in 770 Eastern Parkway. They’re actually paying tuition to learn our charming little mishmosh? Meshugas.

[Eleutheria5]

וואס מיינסטא? אבאמא איז אן אויסגעטרענטע פאץ

[rmlew]

And which dialect will they use, Yekke, Litvish, or Southern/Polish?

I remember at my Bar Mitzvah, two cousins from different sides of the family were arguing in Yiddish, but couldn't understand each other. They were drunk, hard of hearing, and slurring in different dialects. I'd didn't get the humor at the time. My mother, who used to teach Yiddish at CUNY, came over to mediate, but suddenly started laughing hysterically. The two participants were a rabbinic student turned communist and an assimilated chemist turned hasid. A daughter-in-law of one of the participants comes over and says that they were arguing over a poem written by another relative and that one or both are remembering it incorrectly.