(RNS) — Technological advances as well as changing social attitudes have sparked a cultural renaissance among Hasidic Jewish communities, for whom Yiddish is the native tongue.
(Photo by Jen Theodore/Unsplash/Creative Commons)
David I. Klein
November 22, 2024
(RNS) — As many local media outlets around the world are struggling, the Yiddish press is experiencing a rebirth, surprising many who not long ago pronounced the Jewish language as doomed after millions of its core speakers died in the Holocaust.
“Since 2000, over 30 Yiddish print media have been founded, almost exclusively in the Orthodox Jewish milieu of New York and the surrounding area,” said Bjorn Akstinat, a German media researcher who recently compiled a directory of Yiddish media outlets.
Sparked by technological advances as well as changing social attitudes, the boom has led to a parallel cultural renaissance among Haredi and Hasidic Jewish communities (sometimes called ultra-Orthodox), for whom Yiddish is the native tongue
An outgrowth of old High German, heavily influenced by Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic languages, and traditionally written in the Hebrew alphabet, Yiddish was the primary language of Ashkenazi Jews living in central and Eastern Europe for nearly 1,000 years. At the turn of the 20th century, more than 10 million people spoke Yiddish, encouraged by hundreds of newspapers on at least three continents, with a wide range of religious and political bents.
America’s once largest Yiddish-language newspaper, “Forverts” (The Forward), was founded in 1897 to bring immigrant Eastern European Jews the news of the world — and their new world — in their native tongue. By the eve of World War I, it had been joined by more than 150 other periodicals in New York alone, at least 20 of them dailies, rivaling the output in Warsaw, Krakow, Vilnius, Minsk and other cities with large Jewish populations.
One might write for a religious audience, one from the perspective of the local Communist Party, one for far-left Zionists and yet another for far-right Zionists, and so on.
In Europe, that world was shattered by the Holocaust, and for its survivors, many residents of the U.S., Israel and elsewhere, assimilation meant speaking English or another local tongue. In Israel, Hebraicizion encouraged Jewish immigrants to leave their native languages on the boats they came on and adopt modern Hebrew. For most, Yiddish quickly became a thing of memory.
According to Rukhl Schaechter, Yiddish editor of The Forward, by the 1990s, the last Yiddish outlets were mostly publishing feel-good articles for elderly Eastern European immigrants. As the new millennium dawned, they seemed to be on borrowed time.
Except they weren’t.
Today, in New York’s Boro Park and Williamsburg neighborhoods, or in upstate New York towns such as New Square and Palm Tree, newsstands are filled with Yiddish media of every shape and format.
While Yiddish has indeed declined among the world’s Ashkenazi Jews, the Haredi Jews arrived after the Holocaust as refugees, not as immigrants wanting to become Americans. Fighting assimilation, they have clung to Yiddish as their everyday language. “People came here from Eastern Europe and they resettled together with other people who were like minded, and they kept speaking their language,” said Meyer Labin, a Hasidic journalist.
The birth rate among Haredi couples, at six to seven children, according to a 2023 study, far outpaces the rate of other Jewish groups or just about any other demographic in the United States, boosting a community of a few thousand in the 1950s to hundreds of thousands today.
Clinging to Yiddish certainly preserves a culture but it also insulates a population from outside influences, something that has its costs alongside its benefits. In 2022, a New York Times report argued that Haredi yeshivas in metro New York were failing to educate their students in English, leaving them unprepared for life outside their enclaves.
A variety of past Moment Magazine weekly issues. (Images courtesy Moment Magazine)
Even if Yiddish has bounced back as a vital language, that’s no guarantee of a thriving media scene. (If so, the world’s adoption of English might have stopped the evaporation of newspapers by the thousands since 2000.) Since that year, the circulation of English-language print media has been cut in half, according to a Pew study.
But other facets of Haredi life — including its self-induced cultural isolation — have made print a necessity. “With Orthodox communities, we don’t do digital, up to a certain extent,” said Yoel Krausz, a Satmar Hasid who in 2014 co-founded Moment Magazine, the largest Yiddish weekly magazine in the U.S. “Especially with our youth, our youth don’t have any web and of course no television.”
A little more than a decade ago, Haredi leaders drew as many as 40,000 members of various traditions to New York’s Citi Field to rally against the encroachment of the internet. Opposition has softened since, especially among businessmen, but many Hasidim still don’t use the internet at home and largely forbid it for their children.
“Our youth is growing up only with print publications for their learning and for their education and for entertainment,” said Krausz, and advertisers can only dependably reach the 700,000 or so American Hasidic Jews in print. Even those who do use the internet are invariably offline on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, when Orthodox Jews refrain from using electricity.
“S’iz farbunden alle tzuzamen” — it’s all tied together, said Krausz in Yiddish. “It’s a domino effect. Because our readers are only reading in print, they will buy the magazine, they will pay for the magazine, pay for subscription for a print magazine, and then the advertisers will appreciate it as a place to advertise.”
Krausz’s Moment, with a circulation of 25,000, estimates it reaches 150,000 readers weekly, given the size of Haredi households, the overwhelming majority of which are in and around New York. It also finds its way to other Hasidic enclaves around the world, such as in London, Antwerp and parts of Israel. Moment prides itself on its independence, Krausz said, and is not affiliated with any one Hasidic sect.
“Journalism in the Haredi world started, actually, as something somewhat revolutionary in its inception,” said Labin. It sounded like a contradiction, “that the Haredi world would produce newspapers on its own, because newspapers were seen as something foreign, and something that is too worldly,” said Labin.
Past Der Yid newspaper issues. (Image courtesy Der Yid)
Der Yid, founded in 1953, delivered Yiddish speakers the news they might need for business but with little cultural or community coverage. “One of the main aspects of Haredi ideology is that the only culture we have is our religion, Judaism,” Labin explained.
“In Orthodox Judaism, you know, we listen to our rebbes,” Krausz said, referring to the grand rabbis who lead many Hasidic sects. “They have the last (word) on what to do, how to do it and how to go about things.”
Media might distract from direct Torah and Talmudic study, the ideal pursuit for Hasidic men.
“But you know many people need their reading. I can tell you from personal experience it recharges me and allows me to focus on my work,” Krausz said, lamenting that when he was a child there were far fewer options in his own language to satisfy him.
Slowly however, the rebbes’ views began to change. They feared that if they did not provide their own options, their youth would find their media elsewhere. Now, in Hasidic areas, one can find magazines affiliated with different Hasidic sects, editions targeted at children and on special topics such as mental health or parenting.
“We started seeing a proliferation of specialized niche content,” Labin said. “It’s a very vibrant landscape of media.”
Technology has changed things as well; while designing the layout for a magazine was once a laborious process requiring special equipment, nowadays it can be done quickly by anyone with a laptop.
Krausz noted that while much of Moment’s content is journalistic, covering the goings-on of Hasidic communities, it doesn’t report on crime and generally eschews topics that cast a negative light on the community. All of their content is approved by a rabbinic board.
A parallel landscape of grassroots media by and for Haredi women has also seen an explosion in recent years, countering Haredi media that has been blasted for its practice of removing photos of women or doctoring photos to remove the women.
The explosion of Yiddish media interest has also impacted the last remnants of Yiddish publications outside of it. The Forward long since shifted the vast majority of its content to English but still dedicates part of its website to publishing in Yiddish, and even for a time published a special section targeting Haredi readers.
Though the Forward has retired the special section due to changes to the website, said Schaechter, its Yiddish-language editor, “I’m very happy to see how prolific the Haredi and Hasidic world has become.
Similar to the advances in publishing tech, advances in videography and recording technology — as well as a new-found forum to share content in — has resulted in a boom in the Hasidic music scene, with it sometimes seeming like artists are dropping new Yiddish albums or singles weekly.
“You know, Yiddish used to be something that was just a way of communicating. But (in the Hasidic world) it had never become this kind of thing like now, where there is this need to create in Yiddish,” she said.
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