Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture

The evocative name Yung Yisroel signified the “youth” and newness of the group, its desire to be part of the newly forming Israeli culture, and its links to the modernist Yiddish literary movements that blossomed throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Europe and America.

As a result of these interactions, Yiddish—and specifically the writers and work associated with Yung Yisroel—affected and was at the root of some highly significant changes in Israeli literature from the 1950s onward. But since Yiddish was deemed as, to use Yael Chaver’s expression, “the language that must be forgotten,” this influence remains hid

Yung Yisroel, which consisted of refugees and immigrants situated within an emerging social and cultural backdrop indifferent or even hostile to their activities.

During the first two decades of Israel’s existence, few literary works sought to actualize the human experiences of the Holocaust by transmuting them into a poetic discourse that would make them emotionally and intellectually accessible.

his poetry, like theirs, maps not only the linguistic shifts and transformations that occurred within modern Hebrew itself but also the long-standing tension between a “revived” Hebrew vernacular and native, diasporic languages, Yiddish in particular.

he suggests the Yiddish writer who writes in the distinctly Israeli paradigm of Zionist-socialist culture should carry on as if in the diaspora, namely, surround himself with Yiddish books and create a spiritual atmosphere in which Yiddish will not be forgotten. However, in Israel, for the first time, Birshtein wrote of the need to justify his writ

reflect Israeli life, landscape, and language as well as to respond to the challenges of writing Yiddish in Israel.

fate of the Yiddish language in Israel. It is homeless in its own home.”

most of the audience associated Yiddish both with Soviet and pre-Soviet times.