Neville,
1. Good riddance to Yiddish! It is no more than an a dialect of Alemannic German. In fact, I have a friend whose wife is from Switzerland. She said that she can understand Yiddish if the person speaks slowly.
2. Not all Ashkenazic names are worth keeping. If someone could not pay a high enough bribe he received a derogatory name. For example, “Krumbein” means “Cramp”. Some names were nice in their original places but not in new places. For example, “Fink” is often a name of levi’im because it means “finch”. As the finch is a songbird it came to mean I squealer in English.
3. Actually, the Jewish settlement was found by Sephardim. Observant Ashkenazim who came here also adopted many of their customs, especially beingthat in many cases the Gra and Chassidic leaders agreed with the Bet Yosef against the Rema. For example, not wearing tefillin during Chol HaMoed and ducahaning every day (at least outside the Galil – there for some reason they only duchan on Shabbat Musaf).
4. I try to love all of Hashem’s creations and especially Jews.