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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