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Behind the Aegis

(54,852 posts)
Wed Sep 13, 2023, 04:03 PM Sep 2023

How Yiddish became a 'foreign language' in Israel despite being spoken there since the 1400s

It’s 1945, three years before the establishment of the state of Israel and at the very end of the Holocaust.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising leader Rozka Korczak-Marla comes to Tel Aviv, addressing the assembled in Yiddish about the extermination of Eastern European Jews.

David Ben-Gurion, who would soon become Israel’s first Prime Minister, then spoke to the crowd in Hebrew. “A comrade has just now spoken here in a grating, foreign language,” he declared.

Ben-Gurion’s shocking remark was part of a pattern of denigration expressed by advocates of Modern Hebrew within the Zionist movement during the pre-state years. It aimed to delegitimize the Yiddish language using violence, intimidation and propaganda.

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How Yiddish became a 'foreign language' in Israel despite being spoken there since the 1400s (Original Post) Behind the Aegis Sep 2023 OP
damn elleng Sep 2023 #1
I have never been to Israel, so I don't know the situation there DFW Jun 2024 #2

DFW

(56,517 posts)
2. I have never been to Israel, so I don't know the situation there
Tue Jun 11, 2024, 10:05 PM
Jun 2024

And I don't speak Yiddish anyway, but I know that quite a few people in Eastern Europe and North America (presumably Jewish) still know it, and use it as a lingua franca among each other. I have seen a film where the whole dialogue was in Yiddish. It was about Jewish immigrants in New York, and it had German subtitles, so I could follow what was being said. There was a lot that was similar to German, but without the subtitles, I would not have been able to follow the whole thing.

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