ABSTRACT
A century ago, close to 80 percent of the world’s Jewish population spoke Yiddish. Today, less than 15 percent speak Yiddish, and those who do are, primarily, over the age of seventy, Hasidim, or students of the language. Although Yiddish speakers are still among us, for the mainstream Jewish population of North America, the language has all but ceased to function as a mode of communication, that is, as a signifier, and has instead become a subject unto itself – a signified. Although Yiddish remains the vibrant language of the streets in many religious communities, the idea of Yiddish has remained an important cultural symbol within a secular, English-speaking, North American Jewish mainstream, and it is worth exploring the reasons for this more deeply. Awareness of, if not fluency in, the Yiddish language has helped North American Jews to address key concerns about their cultural identity in the twenty-first century. For the purposes of this chapter, we shall focus on three of these concerns: the role of a nationstate in contemporary Jewish identity, how Jewish historical memory informs contemporary group identity, and whether the Jewish experience can be compared to other immigrant and minority experiences in North America.
