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Identity/Crisis
A Yiddish Renaissance: Language, Memory, and Modern Jewish Life — with Rukhl Schaechter (Re-run)
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- [00:00]
Rachel Schachter
Hi, Identity Crisis listeners. This week we're bringing you a favorite episode from earlier this year. It's a joyful dive into the modern
- [00:07]
Tessa Zitter
day renaissance of the Yiddish language.
- [00:10]
Rachel Schachter
Enjoy the show.
- [00:17]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I'm Yehuda Kurtzer. We're recording on Thursday, January 15, 2026. I want you to listen to this short piece of dialogue from the 2003 Christopher Guest film, A Mighty Wind, a mockumentary comedy film about a folk music reunion concert in which three folk bands reunite for a television performance. The film is about a concert being staged in memory of legendary folk music producer Irving Steinbloom. In this scene, his son Jonathan, played by Bob Balaban, goes to pitch the concert idea to Lars Olfan, played by Ed Begley Jr. Here is how the goyishly encoded Olfan speaks to the very Jewishly encoded Jonathan Steinbloom.
- [01:08]
Rachel Schachter
The nachos that I'm feeling right now because your dad was like mishpucha to me when I heard I got these tickets to the Folksmen, I let out a geshrai and I'm running with my friend, running around like a vildachaya right into the theater in the front row. So we've got the shbilkas because we're sitting right there and it's a mitzvah, what your dad did, and I want to try to give that back to you. A kinohor, I say, and God bless him.
- [01:31]
Yehuda Kurtzer
There's a lot going on here in this scene. If you look up the clip on YouTube, you can see the Steinbloom character smiling vaguely at this Jewish masquerade being performed for him. This awkward act of code switching that's being done for him or maybe for his late father. All in this delightful mashup of English and what we might call the knowable Yiddish that even a non Jewish music producer might acquire over time in relationship to his Jewish colleagues. The stuff of a shareable show business vernacular. You wonder, watching this scene, those of us who know the meaning or the approximate meaning of all of those words, even those of us who know what those words mean but are actually not Yiddish speakers, you wonder, for whom is that joke intended. This happens a lot in Curb youb Enthusiasm as well, perhaps the most Jewish television show ever made. Like when John Ham, the most un Jewish of Larry David's friends, the one with the most un Jewish name, he tests out which Yiddish word he should use at Albert Brooks's fake funeral, is it bashert? He asks. Like a sad act of fate? No, Larry David responds, you should use the word tsuras. I'm feeling a lot of tsuras. And then my favorite line, ham says, eh, how do you spell that? And again, you wonder who really gets that joke. It's a Jewish joke, which both Jews and non Jews are supposed to get. But none of them these days really understand Yiddish beyond these few words. Probably not the comedy writers either. The Yiddish words amazingly both separate the Jews and the non Jews in these scenes, insiders and outsiders to the discourse. But it also kind of unifies them that they share these little bits of language that are now part of the American English lexicon. So Yiddish. And I say this somewhat sheepishly as I feel like I should know Yiddish. I want to know Yiddish, but I don't. It has an immense amount of richness in both substance and metaphor for the modern Jewish experience. Over a decade ago I read a mind blowing book called Adventures in Yiddish Land by Jeffrey Chandler, a professor at Rutgers. He argued that Yiddish was for most Jews today, a post vernacular language. It was reclaimed and rehabilitated in the second half of the 20th century, largely by people who had not grown up with it as their vernacular spoken language. To speak Yiddish and to partake in Yiddish culture, therefore, was to dance between engaging in a kind of act of memory retrieval, but also in an act of creating something entirely new. I remember growing up in the 80s hearing about the fears that Yiddish was or would be a dying language, with most of its native speakers killed by the Nazis. Those that had survived, now living and speaking in English in America or in Hebrew in Israel. It has not been a dying language for decades now. Nobody who studies dead languages or dying languages would include Yiddish. It's a great story of a language that came back from the brink, resuscitated both by ultra Orthodox Jews and their population boom in the last couple of decades, as well as by efforts by secular and in some cases religious Jews of Ashkenazic descent to reconnect with their ancestral roots. In recent years it has taken on a more politically tinged currency as well. The language that for some Jews signifies a pre American, pre Zionist diasporism that they now seek to reclaim. Perhaps an escape from the political realities and choices that the last 75 years have forced them to accept. It took me a while to wrap my head around all of the meanings of the return of Yiddish. I come to understand Yiddishism today as an extraordinary window into the fragility of Jewish identity, a way of understanding what it means to grasp at a history and a culture that was so violently disrupted as an effort to shape, to define, to give literal words to a Jewishness, a Yiddishkeit that seems to give some Jews both a sense of situatedness in a past that they feel they desperately need, while also giving them a taste of total otherness from the society they belong to, even as they feel somewhat alienated from it. Rachel Schachter is the editor of the Forewords, the Yiddish version of the Foreword. We can actually unpack that sentence. It's one of the two remaining Yiddish newspapers outside of the Hasidic Jewish world, but it is an online daily publication. According to Wikipedia, she's the first woman, the first person born in the United States, and likely the first Sabbath observant Jew to hold that position. Rachel, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I want to start just by asking you to tell us your Yiddish story. I think you are a native vernacular Yiddish speaker, but I'm curious to hear a little bit about what that was for you, in what ways that felt like it made you feel different than some other Jews, or whether this is just the linguistic waters in which you swim.
- [06:28]
Rachel Schachter
Thank you. It's great to be here. I am actually the daughter of Mortra Schechter, who was a professor of Yiddish and lexicographer who helped create the dictionaries. He was at Columbia University for many years. Very popular teacher. Most of the Yiddish instructors today who are 50 and over were his students. He inculcated in us four kids the importance of preserving the Yiddish language. He himself was a survivor. He married my mother, who was born here in the States, but was a native Yiddish speaker as well. And they raised us all in Yiddish all the time. My father, I look at him as the Yiddish Ben Yehuda. He was, you know, he helped us see Yiddish as a growing language, as something that we need to constantly add words to. In fact, as a young girl, I contributed three words that ended up in the dictionary.
- [07:20]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Oh, really? What were they?
- [07:21]
Rachel Schachter
Marshmallow. He said, we don't have the word for marshmallow. We have to come up with a word for marshmallow. And I said, how about snakey schiller, which means a little snow pillow? He liked it, so he put it in. The other one was, we needed a word for flip flops. In those days, we called it thongs. So I said, how about fingershirch? And then my father said, we need a word for poison ivy. So I said, how about Sam Bletloch? Sam is Poison Bledlech or leaves. So that went in. And I was only like 9 or 10 at the time. It was great to be the daughter of a dictionary creator. He also, many years later, right before his death, he had already almost completed what he called the Yiddish dictionary for the 21st century. After he passed away, my sister, Gitul Shechter Vishwanath, and a linguist, a student of my father's, Paul Glaser, finished it and it came out, you know, a couple of years ago, and it's now online. So you could just pay $36 a year and you could just keep looking up words every day. He really did so much for making sure that people not see Yiddish as a language. That's just something to read, you know, like academic. He wanted it to be a living language. And so when we sat at the dinner table, if we started speaking English, we had to put a penny in a pot. So there were a lot of pennies in that pot.
- [08:45]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yeah. It's so interesting that you use the analogy to Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who is both a kind of rehabilitator in some ways, of Hebrew. It's kind of a political decision whether you call him a rehabilitator or an inventor of ultimately a modern language. So by analogy, when you use that phrase with respect to your father and the work that he did, it's not the same as just growing up speaking Yiddish and continuing to speak Yiddish. It also suggests that this is a project of cultural invention or cultural renewal. So I'm curious how you think about that dynamic in. In this kind of work. To what extent is speaking Yiddish just doing something normal that Jews have done for a really, really long time? To what extent is the work of trying to promote and produce Yiddish also about a project of kind of invention of something? I'm curious how you think about that dynamic.
- [09:37]
Rachel Schachter
My father and Yiva, which is where he worked as well. Yiva is the Institute for Jewish Research. It has the archives and Yiddish classes, and its focus is on Eastern European Jewish life. So they came up with standards of spelling and standards of the dictionaries. You know, so it was very important that Yiddish be able to be used for modern concepts. You know, on the one hand, we want to preserve the lushenkodish words that we had in the shtetl, loshenkodish, you know, the Hebrew and Aramaic derived words and words like hasenahoma. To get married. There were many Jews who started to speak a Germanized form of Yiddish. It was the journalists at that time and the writers Wanted to show how sophisticated they were. So they would throw a lot of German words in. So Jews, instead of saying, sichot hassene gehat she got married, they would say, zichot verheierat, and it's not Yiddish. So one of the jobs that Yiva saw for itself as a result, my father, was to get rid of those. It's called deitschmirisch. Deitsch means German. Deitschmirisch is somewhat German because it was Yiddishized German. So to get those German words out and bring back the authentic Yiddish words like hassenham, there are many more examples of this. I'm just using this as an example. But the other problem we have is, yes, we can talk about, because we had that in the shtetl, those blintzes and pierogies. But when you want to talk about, you know, space technology or sex, we need to have new words. So my father felt very strongly that any word that we have in English or in French or in German, we need to have something like that in Yiddish. And what he and others try to do, especially when creating the dictionaries, is make it sound as authentically Yiddish as possible. It's a tall order. You know, you want to get the concept across. You don't want to use German as much as we could. We used international words like televisie is obvious. Television. It's an old television. In all these languages you have that, we don't have to make up a new one. Ben Eliezer went a little too far, like he was making up words that really wasn't necessary because everybody else was using the international words. So in Yiddish, we do that as well. We just use the words that everybody else is using the root, and then televiz. Ye instead of television, because ye is a Yiddish kind of suffix.
- [12:13]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yeah.
- [12:14]
Rachel Schachter
But yes, it is very important to create new terminology for concepts if we want to speak in Yiddish. And that was the goal, was not just to read Yiddish, but also to speak it to your children, to your spouse, to your best friend.
- [12:30]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Sure. I assume that when this kind of work happens, actually it still happens in every language on planet Earth. You're always going to have new need for language to express new realities and new things. Yiddish is not alone in this respect. I imagine that there's two planes at which this takes place. It takes place for Yiddish in places like Yivo or with dictionary authors and writers, which is kind of the intellectual version of constructing language. But it also takes place in. In Williamsburg and in Bnei Barak. It takes Place in communities where Yiddish is the daily vernacular. I assume that there's also a kind of creation of language or a modification of language that's taking place there, which isn't top down. It's not driven by a kind of bureaucratic hierarchy. How does the continued work of the shaping of Yiddish as a modern language for the 21st century interact with the kind of organic language production that might be taking place in those communities?
- [13:23]
Rachel Schachter
Okay, first of all, a correction. Unfortunately, B' nai brak is all in Hebrew now.
- [13:28]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Oh, is that right? Wow.
- [13:29]
Rachel Schachter
Yeah. Even the mir yeshiva, which was they had the shiur in Yiddish, are now in Hebrew. So b' nai brak is not as good an example as meeshearim. You walk through meeshearim and you'll see everybody speaking Yiddish. Williamsburg, Kiryas Yoel. There are still places where they speak Yiddish all the time, but I don't see that much language invention among them. They just take English words and give it a Yiddish accent.
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Yehuda Kurtzer
Got it.
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Rachel Schachter
So I went to. You know, it's a very Yiddish kind of verb to walk to, but the two goes before the walk. So you don't have that in English. An English speaker won't understand what they're saying, but they're using the word walk. And it should, you know, it should say, er pent sigegangen. I went over zum gescher to the store. Instead, they're saying, so I would like to see them go back to the way their parents and grandparents spoke. But, you know, that's not cool for them. They want to be cool, and they like throwing in the English words. It's easier. Some of them actually have begun using dictionaries, even the dictionaries outside of the Hasidic world. And I could tell because when I see a poster somewhere in Yiddish in, you know, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, they have signs that are in several languages. One of them is Yiddish. And if you're there, you'll see there are many Hasidim who go there.
- [14:58]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Sure.
- [14:59]
Rachel Schachter
And the Yiddish is quite good. This is not the Yiddish that I hear on the streets of Williamsburg. So that person is using a dictionary, possibly even my father's. So I find that fascinating and that they realize a need. They want the person who's reading the poster. This is important news about the hospital. They want them to be able to understand. And so that is interesting to me that they are using dictionaries now.
- [15:25]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yeah, I suspect it's not just that they want to be cool, but it's also that they are Assimilated, right?
- [15:32]
Rachel Schachter
Yes, yes, I would say, yeah.
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Yehuda Kurtzer
I mean, Yiddish itself is in some ways an assimilation language. Right. It's not a completely detached language from the languages through which it was created. Right. So it's always dancing.
- [15:44]
Rachel Schachter
Yeah, I would say acculturated rather than assimilated. Because assimilated has the concept that you're running away from your Jewish identity. And that's not true. But they are, of course, affected by everything in their surroundings. All languages are one thing I've observed which I find very interesting. I've seen it in Williamsburg. I've seen it in with Israeli taxi drivers at an older age who know Yiddish. The men are so eager to speak Yiddish to me. The women are not. They are almost indignant. What, you think I don't know English well enough? That's what it says to me. They cross the board, I speak Yiddish to them, they answer in English, I answer in Yiddish, they answer in English. Whereas the men, when I speak to them in Yiddish, they say, oh, wie cantira sein gut Yiddish. How do you know such a good Yiddish? And it's very interesting. The women do want to assimilate. They want to be Americans, that's how I understand it. Or Israelis. They want to be modern. And if you look at the life of a Hasidic woman as opposed to a Hasidic man, you'll see the women are more acculturated. Many times they're the ones, the breadwinners, the major breadwinners, and they're working sometimes even with non Jews. So they are very much in that world. Whereas the men, you know, they go to shul three times a day and they are constantly in a Yiddish speaking environment, learning in Kolel, you know, that for them Yiddish is much more natural. The women still feel the pressure of speaking Yiddish to the children. But sometimes I have the feeling that if they were given a choice, they would rather speak to them in English. So this is a case where in the Hasidic community, the men are the ones who are really holding down the linguistic fort.
- [17:28]
Yehuda Kurtzer
This is fascinating because it correlates exactly with this incredible social science research that was done by Nahumi Yafi, who's a researcher from within the ultra Orthodox community in Israel. She did this incredible study about the happiness index within Haredi communities and found that the women are just much more miserable than the men. And part of that has to do with the fact that the women bear the burden both on the household as well as in terms of making money. And they don't have access to those very activities that all of that sacrifice is meant to make time for. Right. In other words, you're poor. But if you're poor because you have decided to commit your life to studying Torah and that's what you're doing every day, you have like a way of compensating for that sadness with happiness. But if you don't have access to that, you're just miserable. And I think maybe the language is another window into that dynamic of.
- [18:25]
Rachel Schachter
It's very interesting, it's powerful. And another thing that I found, even if, you know, as I said, they mix in a lot of English, when I use a Yiddish expression with them, they get it right away. Whereas a secular. When I say secular, I also mean religious. But outside the Hasidic community, Yiddish student will not. They won't get the irony. They won't get the lush and Kurdish reference. I'll give you an example. If I say ala montik undanishtik every Monday and Thursday, it means all the time. So, you know, if somebody says, what's he up to? And says, allah, he comes to me all the time. Why Mantik and danishtik, those are the two days that Jews read the Torah. Those were the days that the marketplaces would meet because they knew that a lot of Jews would be there. So it came to mean all the time. Usually said with annoyance.
- [19:17]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yeah.
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Rachel Schachter
And when I use an expression like that, with a chassis, they laugh, they get it right away. When I tell to somebody, let's say in nyu, who's studying Yiddish, and I say, alla, even if they know Yiddish, and I say alla montik and danishtik, they will look at me like, what do you mean? Which you know, and that is an interesting distinction that when it comes to Yiddish culture, usually when we talk about Yiddish culture, it's literature, theater and film. And that's something that the non Hasidic Jews would appreciate. But the Hasidic Jews get a different kind of culture, which is the subtlety of the Yiddish language, the humor, the irony of the Yiddish language, which the American students don't get, because American humor is very different than Jewish humor.
- [20:05]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yeah, I want to come back to that secular and religious encoding in a minute, but I first want to just ask you about the Four Verts itself. And I'm curious about who reads it and why. And one thing I noticed when I was doing research for the episode is that when I pull it up on my browser, it's captioned in English. And I found that fascinating, right? As essentially a Quote, foreign language publication. You're also signaling to non readers of Yiddish, this is what's actually taking place here. And I was like, is this a newspaper or is this a teaching tool?
- [20:38]
Rachel Schachter
Very good question. So the Fawitz was created in 1897 as a Yiddish newspaper for the immigrants, a way of acquainting them with American culture, with American society, with the trade unions, how they can fight for their rights. It was all in Yiddish. But as the years went on and the children of those immigrants spoke less Yiddish and had no need for a Yiddish newspaper because they could read the news in English, you know, the Vorovitz started to transform itself and start thinking, how could we help those people who. Who have moved away from Yiddish, make them feel like Yiddish is something that's worth preserving? And it came to its culmination, ironically, during COVID Before COVID the worker circle and Yiva were thrilled if they could get 50 students a year in their Yiddish classes. Once Covid happened, it jumped up. They now have 1,000 students a year, at least. Why? Because while people were stuck in their homes, many people started picking up a new language. They had nothing else to do. They couldn't go to work, they couldn't see their friends. And so people were studying Latin and French. But there were also many Jews and even non Jews who said, yiddish is something I always wanted to learn. So when Duolingo took Yiddish in as its 39th language, what happened was within two weeks, a quarter of a million people had signed up. Since then, it has gone down, but it's still remarkable.
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Yehuda Kurtzer
That is remarkable.
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Rachel Schachter
And the numbers in the Yiddish classes around the world are now extremely high. And I think that shows that there are many people out there who don't know Yiddish but want to know it. So when the previous editor in chief of the Yiddish Forward, Boris Sandler, was here, he saw right away that we needed to use video, because with video, Yiddish videos with English subtitles, you could reach so many more people. And that's what probably you're talking about when you say the English captions. So we started a cooking show. I have a cooking show with Eve Jack Nowitz, who is a scholar of Yiddish cooking and a gourmet chef. We film it in my kitchen, and we've done, I think, about 45 episodes already. And there you'll see everything's in Yiddish, the entire process, you know, letting people know how to say all these ingredients in Yiddish, how to say chopping and slicing and frying. So it's a great Yiddish lesson. But for those people who Just want to know what's going on. We have the English subtitles. And it was also during COVID when one of my colleagues said, we need to do something for the people who are depressed at home, can't see their grandchildren, can't go to work. What can we do for them? And then somebody said, rachel, why didn't you start a Yiddish word of the day? And I said, I can't. My videographer can't come into my house. So one of them said, rachel, all you have to do is go to photo booth and press the button. It was like a world opened up for me. So, you know, Yiddish bore. The day has become so popular and it's precisely because each day it's a different topic and it's a two, three minute mini lesson. It's just the right amount for many people who don't feel like taking a whole course. But. And it's also for people who do remember Yiddish from their childhood. And this is a refresher for them. And they say, oh, I haven't heard that expression in years. So we are continuing to do that. And then we had a Yiddish task force come together late last year. What else can we do for our Yiddish readers and viewers? And people kept saying, you have to do a podcast and what ideas can you come up with? And I said, there are so many more people who understand Yiddish than can read it. Or, you know, they knew the Aleph Beijs when they were kids, but they haven't picked up a Yiddish newspaper in years. So why don't we do a podcast where I read Yiddish articles aloud slowly, and let's see what happens. Maybe there is a group out there of people who really want to read the Yiddish articles, but they're not going to bother. It's too hard. And so we started it this Sunday and we already had 800 listeners. And I got some wonderful emails and post, you know, people who are posting on Facebook. Wow, this is just what I needed. I really love hearing the Yiddish. I've had somebody in Amsterdam, he said, I'm not Jewish, but I listened to this and I, I understood some of it. So then I listened a second or third time and I began to really pick it up, keep doing it, but
- [25:34]
Yehuda Kurtzer
nobody's coming to the forwards to get their news about what's happening in Iran.
- [25:39]
Rachel Schachter
So. That's right. We used to do that. When I first came in 1998, we did have a new section in Yiddish and it was world news. What's happening in Israel, what's happening in Russia. We Stopped that. Although now students of Yiddish are saying they would like to have that they would like to see.
- [25:57]
Yehuda Kurtzer
It'd be helpful to them.
- [25:58]
Rachel Schachter
Yeah, how to say these things in Yiddish. And so I'm thinking of actually bringing that back.
- [26:04]
Yehuda Kurtzer
What do you think accounts for that? 250,000 students signing up for duolingo. What are the forces at work that are driving folks into this audience? I have my own theories, but I'm curious how you've mapped that out in terms of your own thinking.
- [26:16]
Rachel Schachter
Okay, so there are a number of groups we're talking about. One is children of Holocaust survivors. You know, their parents, for the most part, were fluent Yiddish speakers. They probably spoke to each other. Their spouses spoke to each other. Maybe they even spoke to the kids. But the kids answered in English. They wanted to be Americans, and they spent their whole life striving to be good Americans. And now, as they're in their 70s and they're looking back and their parents are gone, their grandparents are gone. And this is a common phenomenon when people age. They start to look at their childhood very sentimentally and nostalgically, and so they have very warm feelings for Yiddish. So there is a site called Another Yiddish Word of the Day, but it's a very different vibe. It has, like, 145,000 members. And I can tell from the comments that most of them are older. I can see their faces. And they talk about, oh, guess what this means? And they will write, a shmata. What's a shmata? And then, like, 50 people will answer. Nobody's looking at other people have already answered the question. But it's very interesting to me that these are older Jews who heard Yiddish as children. Some actually knew it fluently but lost it, and others still understand. So that's one group. Then you have academics who need to study Yiddish for their field. It could be Jewish history, it could be Hebrew literature, but they need to know some Yiddish literature as well. And then you have Millennials. They're looking for a Jewish identity that's not aligned with Israel. They may be religious, they may not be religious, but their interest is in going back to what they see as the Jewish Labor Bund, which was a Yiddishist organization by the masses of Jewish workers, and they identify with them. So they say, we are Bundists, and we want to learn Yiddish. So, you know, each of these groups has their own reasons for coming to the Yiddish language, and we try to meet their needs as much as we can.
- [28:25]
Yehuda Kurtzer
I would imagine that the obstacles around learning the language are so fundamentally different. For a lot of those different audiences. Because if you're trying to reclaim a language that your parents spoke, you're looking for a certain type of what may feel like a familiarity that slipped away from you, which is totally different from encountering a language as a graduate student. I remember this actually when I was in graduate school and I took a class on the Dead Sea Scrolls, I was studying ancient Judaism. My Hebrew is just fluent. It's been fluent from my youth, both as a Hebrew modern spoken language, but also as a language of the Jewish people. And I would sit with students in that class who were encountering like biblical and rabbinic Hebrew for the first time. And it was a wild experience because they understood all of the syntax and morphology, but struggled to make sense of the words. And I just read it and knew what it meant, but I couldn't say to you, it's the third person heat pile. I can't. And I just never learned it that way versus somebody who's learning the language with a kind of political overtone. Right. So I'm curious how that actually merges in a Yiddish speaking community also, because I imagine that some of the things you were talking about before of like how Jewish is the language wind up encoding very differently for someone who's studying it as a kind of reclaiming of a secular Jewish identity versus those who kind of recall the ways that very Jewish words like hasina, as you said before, kind of swim fluently together. I'm curious how that plays out in the construction of this thing called the Yiddish speaking community these days.
- [30:07]
Rachel Schachter
Yeah. These students who are taking up Yiddish because of, let's say, political reasons, they know that when they read Yiddish literature, they have to become familiar with all these very traditional religious terms that may not have relevance to their lives, but they get it. They get it because they want to get it. They want to understand what the Jewish mentality was like. So if they don't know what tchinists are, Tchinists are Yiddish prayers that were created and recited by women. And in fact, I've seen a number of young people interested in tachinnis because they see it as a feminist concept. Here was something, usually the prayers were written by men. Here is something that the women created in the shtetl. We want to no more. And they will do their homework. Many of them really try to understand what that Yiddish speaking traditional culture was like in the shtetl. It doesn't mean that they themselves will become traditional Jews or they will become religious, although there are some that are shoma, shabbos, because they are looking for a Jewish identity and they see Shabbos as a very important part of it. They may not become 100% kosher, but they'll become vegan, which is their way of saying, you know what? I really identify with that feeling of maintaining a certain separation Jewishly. So, you know, it's hard to be kosher if you don't live in New York City. You know, where are you going to go? Out to eat? So but if you're a vegan, that's one way of expressing their Jewish identity. And I do find that interesting. I have a newsletter called Yiddish Brief. It is in English and it is especially for all of these groups who are much more comfortable with English. But they really want to know more about Yiddish. So in there I include articles that recently came out about Yiddish. It could be in the Wall Street Journal or in the New York Review of Books. There are many articles that are written about Yiddish and I want people to see that our language is being acknowledged by the world at large. Also videos of Hasidic songs that are coming out. The Hasidic community is so prolific that I would say every two weeks there's a new Yiddish song. And they're not all about religious life or about God. One of them I remember was very touching, was a father's plea to his three year old son, Boy, now that they cut your hair because you have the upshare and at 3 years old and you have pes, you're not going to want me to come and kiss and hug you anymore. In other words, it's about human relationships. So the Hasidim today talk about acculturation. They have learned that there's so much you can talk about and sing about that doesn't have to be just about God. Indirectly it is because you're talking about an upsharn, which is a traditional religious custom. But what's coming through is his desire to connect with his son and not to lose his affection. So I post those Hasidic songs whenever I can. And I also let people know about events happening all over the world. Especially they're online pertaining to Yiddish. A lecture in English about, you know, Yiddish women poets of the 19th and early 20th century. Videos about Yiddish food, what I call Yiddish food, Eastern European Jewish delicacies, deli food. Unfortunately, these are foods that are being lost because many of the younger generation, I understand about the deli. It's not very healthy, I understand, but very delicious though. I know, But I'm less concerned about that being lost than about the dairy foods that Jews ate. Like I said before, the pierogen pierogies that were eaten with sour cream, you know, and borscht and cabbage borscht and so many different varieties of. You know, there's fluden, I believe you're a bit of a baker yourself, right? Somebody told me that.
- [34:17]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yeah, I cook a lot.
- [34:18]
Rachel Schachter
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [34:19]
Yehuda Kurtzer
I don't really bake.
- [34:19]
Rachel Schachter
So flyden is a pastry where kind of like a jelly roll where when you have the dough flattened out, you have. You put apricot butter on it, and then on top of that you put raisins and nuts. Maybe dates if you want. Although dates weren't in the shtetl. It's more like an Israeli addition. And then roll it up and you put an egg wash on it. It is so good. And people don't know what fluten is anymore. They'd rather have the chocolate cake.
- [34:46]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yeah.
- [34:47]
Rachel Schachter
You know, which is.
- [34:48]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Well, after I do a couple years of duolingo, I'm going to come on your cooking show and we're going to see.
- [34:52]
Rachel Schachter
Oh, that would be great.
- [34:54]
Yehuda Kurtzer
That would be great.
- [34:55]
Rachel Schachter
Although duolingo does not teach you grammar. That's one of the down points.
- [35:00]
Yehuda Kurtzer
That's all right. I could just chop things
- [35:03]
Rachel Schachter
and I'll say it for you.
- [35:04]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yeah. I'm also not super worried about the food. I think actually there's interesting trending around this. I don't know if you active on social media, but Katz's Deli has an incredibly active Instagram and they have lines around the block now from tourists who come to New York to eat at Katz's Deli. So there are ways that food cultures will persist, but it's just how food kind of operates. It reinvents itself in those ways. And it won't look like. Ultimately won't look exactly like what the Jewish deli meant at one time or another. But the Jewish deli itself has been like a place of the migration in. Of food trends around a kind of shared cuisine. It's not that fixed. Yeah. I'm curious, though, about the Jewish peoplehood thing, which is what it means for you. You don't have to speak personally, but even just as a scholar of this, what it means for you that there are Jews who are searching for Yiddish as a means of effectively demarcating themselves as other from other Jews, as a kind of repudiation of Hebrew, as a repudiation of the state of Israel. You know, on one hand, acquiring Yiddish connects you to the Jewish people in one way. It has the potential to connect people to ultra Orthodox Jews in super interesting ways. I don't know if that's actually happening. On the other hand, there's something feels very tragic about I don't like these Jews. I'm going to get this Judaism in order to be able to replace it. What are your thoughts on that?
- [36:30]
Rachel Schachter
I wrote an article a year after October 7th about the split in the Yiddishist community between those Jews who are, let's say, children of survivors, religious Jews who see Israel as the place that saved the Jewish people after the Holocaust. Finally, we have a home that we can run to as opposed to that is a growing number of young people who are interested in Yiddish again as an identification with the Jewish Labor Fund. And they are anti Zionist because they feel that this Holocaust, what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust, should now be transferred to all sorts of minorities who may be in danger of a genocide. And so they say, we identify with those groups. The Jews don't need our help anymore. The Jews are fine. They have their own army. And in fact, that army is very militaristic and is very cruel and all these things that they put into it. But that's what creates a problem within the Yiddishist community. We want to work together, but it's such a sensitive topic that what I try to do in the forward is to make sure that we avoid politics, not that I tell writers what to write. And I have had writers submit poetry that is anti Zionist, very clearly anti Zionist. And I've also had people send in poetry that was very firmly pro Israel. So that I will take. But as the mood of the forward, I wanted to stick to Yiddish culture. That's something that we can all appreciate and whatever we do with it is their business. But I want to make sure it's a neutral territory so that we can share.
- [38:20]
Yehuda Kurtzer
I've really enjoyed our conversation. I guess I see one last question which is so much of this, as I said in my introduction, is been a surprise, right? Where what has happened in this field, in this sector, in this language over 40 and 50 years is something that really, again, I don't know if it could have been predicted. There was, I don't know. You remember this, I'm sure the real fears of the disappearance of this language and to see this kind of cultural renaissance. It goes back to what you said about the Hasidic singer. Whenever I hear somebody say there's no new Jewish culture being produced, my first question is always, well, what languages do you speak? Right. Because there is a tremendous amount both in Yiddish in Hebrew that is being produced all the time. What do you think will surprise us in the next 20 years? Coming out of the Yiddish world? What else should we watch for as cultural trends, as linguistic trends? What do you think we should be attuned to as we continue to think about this framework of the reclamation of Jewish language as one of the Jewish projects of the 21st century?
- [39:19]
Rachel Schachter
Well, one of the things I've noticed is Yiddish films coming out not just in the Hasidic community, although you have them too, that there are a couple of horror films that came out in Yiddish in the last couple of years. I am not into horror. I have enough of my own suras. I don't want to have nightmares. But there are many Jews who do enjoy that. And the fact that it was made in Yiddish was very interesting to me. The fact that a movie like Shtetl was made. I don't know if you've seen Shtetl. If you haven't, you should. No, it talks about the day before. The Nazis have arrived and you see what the shtetl is like with all its bickering and optimism and the different movements, the Zionist movement, the pro communist movement, fighting with each other. It's like a microcosm of what the shtetl life was like. And then the next day the Nazis come and we know it was all obliterated. The word shtetl is missing the E. It's S, H, T, T, L. Because what we're missing now. So it's a beautiful film shot completely in Yiddish and Ukrainian. And the Ukrainian is very minor, no English at all. So that gives me pleasure knowing that people see Yiddish as something that we should not be translating into English all the time. Let's maintain, let's preserve that Yiddish. And also the fact, even though this is a small group, but it's so symbolically important, is that every year for the past over 40 years, there has been a Yiddish retreat in upstate New York in copaic of students of Yiddish. And families and senior citizens come together for an entire week of Yiddish camp. Everything's in Yiddish. The dining room is in. It's like Camp Rama, the way it should have been, or Camp Mossad, the way Camp Mossad was. Everything was in Hebrew. It's called the Yiddish Voch, which means the Yiddish week. Those of us who have been going there for years and years. It's a shot in the arm. For a whole week we are in a Yiddish speaking shtetl. We play volleyball, we put on a talent show, the swimming pool. Everything is in Yiddish. And of course you have to remind the kids because they start speaking to each other in English ne Yiddish. But it's so important. You know, people all over the world who are studying Yiddish know about the Yiddish volume. It is an inspiration. It's something that they think about coming to eventually. And that's what we need is we need to inspire people to stick with it. It's not easy. But you know what, as we say in Yiddish, it's hard to be a Jew in general. So this is one joyful way of maintaining our Yiddishkeit.
- [42:03]
Yehuda Kurtzer
Yeah, our language should be the worst of our problems. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Rachel.
- [42:08]
Rachel Schachter
Thank you.
- [42:18]
Tessa Zitter
Here are some other things that are happening at the Shalom Hartman Institute Arbeit mi Drach in New York buzzed with activity this week as we hosted our mid year Student Leadership Summit where dozens of college students from different campuses gather for training, community building and learning with Hartman faculty. These student leaders have been supporting Hartman's work this year through campus ambassadorship, as Madrim in our Teen Fellowship and embedded as team members in different parts of our organization. Everything from the Kogod Research center to the marketing team that promotes this podcast. We are especially excited to launch our new camp counselor internship at six different camps this summer. We wish them a productive semester and summer of growth and leadership. Thanks for listening to our show and special thanks to our guest, Ruhl Schachter. Identity Crisis is produced by me, Tessa Zitter and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was researched by Gabrielle Feinstone and edited by Josh Allen with music provided by so called transcripts of our show are now available on our website. Typically a week after an episode airs, we're always looking for ideas for what we should cover in future episodes. So if you if you have a topic you'd like to hear about or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us@identitycrisisalomhartman.org for more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what's unfolding right now. Sign up for our newsletter in the show notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere. Podcasts are available. See you next time and thanks for listening.