Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture

The development of nostalgia for the Soviet past and the Soviet space coincided with the largest migration of east European Jews to the Western Hemisphere since the turn of the twentieth century.

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

post-Holocaust Yiddish literature, which according to David Roskies is built on two pillars: utopian faith and collective lamentation.

modernization, migration, and the Holocaust drastically transformed and displaced Yiddish language, literature, and culture. The newly established State of Israel also displaced Yiddish, even as it served as a site for the displacement of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the postwar period.

Performing Soviet patriotic music triggered nostalgia for the collective past, whereas performing Yiddish music made longing for one’s youth personal.

tendency within the group, which saw itself as attempting to find light within the shadows and to connect with what Yungman called a “nation that is not yet a nation, but erev rov fun shvotim [a multitude of tribes].”

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

Yiddish is most firmly established as a vernacular . . . and as such, its association with radio, theatre, and even daily press is not hard to fathom. . . .

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.