Where is Yiddish? Depends on Your Perspective
The Washington Post brings us an interesting chart from the Pew Research Center. The chart tracks language presence in the United States from 1980 to today. Because Yiddish had the most stark decline between then and now (from #11 in 1980 to dead last today) the Pew chart is labeled The decline of Yiddish, the rise of Tagalog. Which, ok, is pretty accurate. The Washington Post’s headline, however, is How We Stopped Speaking Yiddish. Which isn’t just bizarrely non-descriptive of this charticle (the ‘How’ never comes up), it also speaks to the media’s love of a good ‘Yiddish in decline’ narrative.
For comparison, Greek was at #8 in 1980 with 401,000 speakers. Today it’s at #14 with 307,000 speakers. In 1980 Yiddish had 315,000 speakers and today around155,000. (By the way, I’m pretty sure this is an underestimate given the population explosion in the Hasidic world and how that explosion does not show up in official records.) Between 1980 and today both Greek and Yiddish dropped six positions.
So, why no tears for the dramatic decline of Greek? Italian? Polish?
While the Washington Post leads with the disappearance of Yiddish, Salon reprints Ross Perlin’s Jewish Currents piece on Yiddish on the Internet. Perlin, a Yiddishist living in New York, finds a thriving Yiddish world on line.
The Washington Post may have stopped speaking Yiddish, but there’s a whole lot of folks typing, texting and publishing in it online. But you have to be interested in finding them.
So the narrative here is that Hasidim the Yiddish speakers of today, since they are ancient religious fanatics of the antiquated Shtetel life are not considered normal american people by the Washington Post.
Interesting post, and the link to Ross Perlin’s article was really interesting, but I don’t understand the last link which goes to an archived JTA article from 1942 about the number of native Yiddish speakers in the 1940 census.