ABSTRACT
Jewish communities around the world and across history have spoken languages that differed from those of their non-Jewish neighbors. These languages have included distinct structural features, lexicons, phonologies, contours, and more, varying to greater or lesser degrees from other local languages. Beyond linguistic variation, Jewish languages are engaged by different communities in widely varying ways to diverse ends and indexing all sorts of identities, relationships, and histories. The literature on Jewish languages has so far overlooked the ways in which they may operate in a single social field or region, especially in today’s highly diverse and mobile world. This chapter focuses on one such region—the United States. This chapter argues that American Jews in the 21st century look to a range of Jewish languages to navigate and make sense of what it means to be Jewish in the modern world. Drawing on languages from Yiddish, to Judeo-Spanish, to Modern Hebrew, to Jewish English, this diverse group not only engages Jewish languages to do Jewishness, but to define what Jewishness and Jewish community can and should be. Though different in their trajectories, usages, and modes, these Jewish languages are performative, working as key sites and means of boundary-making and identity formation.
