Exile Language
William Pimlott: Fondness for Yiddish, 23 September 2021
Yiddish in Israel: A History
by Rachel Rojanski.
Indiana, 319 pp., £32, January 2020,978 0 253 04515 7 Show More
by Rachel Rojanski.
Indiana, 319 pp., £32, January 2020,
“... hegemony of Hebrew was established early on as a marker of a strong and stable Israeli identity. Ben-Gurion’s government saw Yiddish as an ‘anti-nationalist’ goles shprakh (‘exile language’) that represented life in the diaspora. Yiddish had been spoken by an urbanising and emigrating people who were moving from small towns and villages in the ... ”