ABSTRACT

This chapter examines a rather unusual ethnic media text: YidLife Crisis (YLC), a Canadian web series conducted primarily in Yiddish. YLC began production in 2014, and aired two seasons of episodes with the support of Yiddishkayt —a Los Angeles cultural incubator for projects related to Yiddish culture—and the Jewish Community Foundation of Montreal. Sue Vice describes the way Yiddish, on television, often functions as an inside joke, either between characters or between the text and audience members “in the know”. Thus, YLC emerges, spatially, where Yiddish was historically, and remains, spoken, and extemporizes that speaking into the more secular realms of Montreal. In YLC, Yiddish functions as a doorstop, ensuring the door of future possibilities remains open in the Jewish cultures it imagines. Yiddishkeit is the term used to describe the secular Jewish culture of Eastern Europe in the 1880s.