Jews and a Connection to Language
From the desk of Ori Tsameret, Programming & Education Director
Two weekends ago, I was privileged to get the chance to partake in my third iteration of Meeting at the Mountain: A Community Shavuot Experience, an annual Tikkun Leil Shavuot event hosted by the Tucson JCC. This year, I decided to make some space to discuss and unpack one of the richest and historically contentious aspects of Jewish culture and identity: language. Specifically, I wanted to talk about how different movements, demographics, and historical events have shaped the ways that Jews have related to languages and to try and get at what makes this such a personal topic for so many of us.
Many Jews have fond memories of hearing parents, grandparents, or other relatives speaking in languages from ‘the old country,’ wherever that may be, of hearing Yiddish and ‘Yinglish’ slang employed in sitcoms, or getting through grueling Hebrew school classes in anticipation of their B’nei Mitzvah. Many may even associate these different linguistic phenomena with certain ‘segments’ of Jewish communities or particular Jewish aesthetics. Yet how many of us get to hear of or experience the ways these languages and their partisans interacted and changed with each other over time? How often are the migration patterns of Jews, or the push and pull of assimilation and tradition discussed as influences?
This is what I was hoping to get at in my Tikkun Leil Shavuot session, “Jewish Language Wars in Europe, Israel & Beyond.” Fostering a dialogic educational setting, I asked my participants to share why they cared about this topic, what languages they were bringing with them, and what languages shaped their family history. In return, I shared of my experiences with various languages, starting with my mother tongue of Hebrew, learning English upon moving to the US, getting into Arabic, Japanese, and now Swedish at various points in my life, and discussed my ancestors’ mother tongues of Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish, and German.
Having established our relationships to various languages, it was curious how many of my participants had no direct experience with traditionally “Jewish” languages: Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, and others. Nevertheless, everyone was keen on the importance of the topic. This contrast made me wonder if the future of Jewish languages, as well as the meaning of Jewish culture that neglects these languages or at least, does not depend on them. We have no shortage of hilarious English-language Jewish comedians, for instance, after all.
My participants eagerly picked up on these questions and put forth plenty of their own, as well as lots of comments and opinions to spare. We discussed the influence of political movements such as Zionism on the relationships between Hebraists and Yiddishists, the impact of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, on attitudes towards various Jewish languages, and the meaning of minority language status in countries like Bosnia and Herzegovina or Russia, especially in areas with small Jewish populations and few Yiddish or Ladino speakers. Along the way, we got to learn more about each other’s upbringings, Jewish cultural commitments, and aspirations for the state of Jewish language in the world today.