Is English the new Yiddish?

English is not the new yiddish

As you correctly note “Yiddish was THE language of German and Eastern European Jews” (emphasis added) it was not the local language that Jews just happened to speak. It was THEIR language.

I agree it is incumbent on Jewish schools to teach English. and your last sentence is true as well (I am no exception) .
But the answer to your title is an unequivocal no

“[speaking adequate English] is not the case in some Chassidishe yeshivos, but I think that’s a conscious decision they’ve made.
Not clear. Are you saying the chassideshe yeshivos deliberately make a decision to retain teachers who cannot communicate well in English?? Why would they “consciously” make such a decision, which would obviously be dysfunctional for their students who live in a world where English language skills are generally a prerequisite to a parnassah.

There’s a famous story about the Satmar Rebbe zt’l, the Divrei Yoel. When he was looking to hire an English principal (to meet the government mandates for secular studies) for the Satmar Yeshiva and found the right candidate it was time to negotiate a salary. The Rebbe asked him how much material he intended to include in the curriculum. The Rebbe told him if you set a curriculum to cover 2.5 hours a day, your annual salary is $20k. (This was in the early ’60s.) But, continued the Rebbe, if you set a curriculum for 1.5 hours a day, your annual salary will be $24k.

Yinglish is the new Yiddish.

1. More Jews speak Hebrew than any other language. Among Orthodox Jews, that has been the case for a generation (at least), but is not true even among frei Jews (unless you use the Israeli definition of Jewish, i.e. anyone of Jewish descent within the last three generations who hasn’t converted to another religion).

2. Americans are increasingly become “online” rather than “printed word” oriented, so when the goyim go post-literate (i.e.skill in reading is for specialists only), Yinglish will start turning into a new language, just as Yiddish did 1000 years ago, with the caveat that there is no guarantee that frum Jews will stay in America (especially if the “blue” side gains strength as their anti-religion bigotry will force us to migrate).

Ujm, nonsense. Sephardic Jews never spoke Yiddish. Even among Yiddish speakers, there were different dialects. Sometimes one was unintelligible to another. Rav Arye Levin re-tested a boy from a Hungarian background he rejected for the yeshiva because he thought that maybe the kid did not understand his Lithuanian accent. The international language ofJews, at least so far as writing was concerned, was always Hebrew. Jews typically were also conversant in several European languages because of their business connections. Rabbi Menashe ben Yisrael, for example, was fluent in ten languages. My grandmother spoke English, Spanish/Ladino (she could converse with Puerto Ricans and called her language Spanish), French, Greek, and Turkish and also knew at least some Italian.

UJM: I disagree with your implied position that yeshiva bochurim cannot become proficient in BOTH languages, albeit using yiddish for limudei kodesh. To argue otherwise, is to advocate functional illiteracy that will complicate their ability to earn a parnassah and engage in the world as it is. They will not be living in the Alte Heim, as much as some may yearn for what were NOT “the good ole days of yiddeshkeit”.

Avi K
Where was your grandmother from? It sounds a lot like my father, who grew up in Rhodes, where he knew Turkish, Greek, and Italian because the island was at various times governed by those various governments, depending on who won the most recent war, plus Ladino.

I took my regents going to high school in a chassidishe yeshiva, Chasan Sofer where we only learned in yiddish and took hebrew as an extra language getting an a academic degree.

@Anonymous Jew, “the large majority of the descendants of those 12 million yiddish speakers who left the Pale no longer speak Yiddish ”
for that matter sadly most are not Jewish the vast majority intermarried and are not longer Jews.
Yiddish is alive and well and fourth most spoken language in Brooklyn and has about 3 million speakers worldwide.
Almost all Yiddish speakers are bilingual quite a number a triligual, most yiddish speakers in Montreal, Buenos Aires and Antwerp speak four languages some even five

Nechoma, my grandmother (and grandfather) were from Smyrna, Turkey (now Izmir).

Ujm, millions? Ha! In Israel, many Chareidim, especially Lithuanians, can’t even put together a complete sentence in Yiddish. I once saw an older Russian immigrant try to speak to a Lithuanian Chareidi in Yiddish. The latter was completely tongue-tied.

“Some of the Chassidishe yeshivas intentionally keep their students functionally illiterate in order to deter them from going off the derech”

I hope what you are saying is incorrect, but if true, keeping students functionally illiterate is no guarantee they won’t go OTD… More likely , it will guarantee they will be unable to earn a parnassah or find a kallah who has any aspirations for a normal life. In fact, it is more likely than not to make them unable to function in society and ultimately lead them to go OTD

HaGoen HaRav Elazar Man Shach zt’l told American educators that Yeshiva boys should be taught Chumash in Yiddish, even if the boys speak English amongst themselves. He furthermore said that both boys and girls should learn to be comfortable in Yiddish. He also said that Yiddish is spoken by “all jews” (that is his phrase). He referred parents to send their children to Yiddish teaching yeshivos.

Chazal say (Kiddushin 82a) that someone who does not teach his son a trade teaches him to steal.

Here is another example of how great the Jewish people are. We’re arguing over English class and what is good enough, when I see headlines like: “Only half of California students meet English standards…” or in Philadelphia, only 37% of kids can even read English properly.
Furthermore in nyc where only 46% of 3rd through 8th graders can pass an English test, they’re concerned about Jewish kids learning it. How special!
I notice that from coast to coast, so-called bilingual people are at a premium, typically getting paid more than non-bilingual people. Maybe English is overrated, otherwise, if we resolved this conversation and did place an emphasis on English, we would corner that market too.

There are two issues in deciding the which language is the “new Yiddish.”

Yiddish eventually became a uniquely Jewish. Also, it was the most widespread primary way jews of all stripes understood each other in the latter half of the second millennia of the common era.
The question: if a language has only one of those two qualifications, can it be the “new Yiddish”?

Next question:
If you take a random grouping of 1,000 known Jews (defined by orthodox tradition) and say a sentence in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English, which language will be understood by the most people?

I’d guess English >> Hebrew >> Yiddish but I’d need to do more research on the demographics of known Jews.

meirs, who are you to argue on the Gemorah? or you don’t think kids becoming listim is a problem?

DY? He says – no need to teach parnosa, Gemora says there is a need. Pick a side.

The thing that bothers me about the current usage of Yiddish, particularly in Chassidish usage, is that it is often spelled phonetically instead of according to the standard spelling. As a simple example, the Yiddish word for “good” can be pronounced Gut or Git, depending on which side of the Gefilte Fish Line one comes from, but, either way, it is properly spelled with a vav, not a yud as I have seen on many signs in New Square. Yiddish is a real language with standard spelling and grammar.

P.S. The Gefilte Fish Line is a real thing. Google it.

Redleg: I don’t think there’s ever been a standardized spelling in Yiddish, any more than there’s no standardized spelling between American English and British English. Yiddish has at least as many differences and variations as English, is not (many) more. And legitimately so.

And to the extent that there are spelling errors by some Yiddish speakers so are there spelling errors among English speakers. Neither are the norm. Not among American English users, British English users, Chasidish Yiddish users or Litvish Yiddish users.

And YIVO is meaningless and full of hot air.

philosopher, thanks for the reference. SSeems like this gefilte fish line is really a recent innovation started in Poland due to growth of beet sugar industry .. How could people insisting on “ein hadash” and wearing 18th century hats agree to change _the_ gefilte fish is not clear to me!

As to Yiddish, there was a newspaper “Der Emes”. How would you spell it?

philosopher, >> A newspaper named Der Emes would be spelled in Yiddish דער אמת

FOUR mistakes in the word “emes” from the actual paper … Should shock you into how much we know of language and, in this case, history …

>> was surprised that they did not mention the third reason, loshen, that they spoke their own language was the third reason Hashem took the Jews out of Egypt

this is a good point, sad when Torah is presented in a convenient way to conform with the hashkafah .. also, note that Yiddish obviously originated as a mixture of Hebrew and the local German language. If Jews in Mitzrayim spoke something like a mixture of Hebrew and Mitzri, not sure the Midrash would say that they spoke their own language. Possibly true, that at some point Jewish groups adopted old-style levush and loshon to resist modernity, but not to say that either of them originated as distinct.

In regards to the midrash, possibly a case can be made that these are last-resort measures that were necessarily in the presence of slavery and the absence of any other ways to unite between Jews and separate from Mitzrim. One would think that Torah might be a sufficient way to separate.
By this logic, those who learn may not need levush, those who do not – do.

Re Der Emes –

The newspaper cannot be used as any proof of spelling in Yiddish. The newspaper was a Soviet paper, not a Jewish paper, and the word Emes is a word in Loshon HaKodesh, so no need to change the spelling for Yiddish. The fact that the Soviets did not connect Yiddish to the Torah, they needed to spell the word phonetically. But the real way to spell that would be exactly as philosopher said דער אמת.

Nechomah – gets the prize! Yes, this is Soviet Yiddish where they on purpose spelled words phonetically to disconnect from Yiddish. I just wanted to highlight the point that there are many Yiddishes, this one being somewhat extreme.

Parenthetically, one elderly Jews who just left USSR told me, sadly, that Soviets closed his heder and he only learned how to read Yiddish, and he is sad his whole life that he did not learn Hebrew. I gave him a Humash and, playing a Navi, order him – read. He cried when he read “Bereshis buru” … Like a person who has a treasure under his house, but does not know it. Is he rich?

Always ask questions, what a sad story. The loshen Hakodesh language is our heritage far greater than Yiddish.

On another topic, I see that you don’t pronounce the ח as most Sephardish and Ashkenazim do, as we pronounce it letter chet or ches.

I am assuming you are an Eidas Hamizrach or Sephardi or perhaps Yemenite. Can I ask where you and your family originate from? I have never had a proper explanation where the Hebrew “hes” dialogue comes from.