On Sunday, Nov. 2, the 13th edition of the “What’s not to like?” concert took place at Beth El Synagogue, just a short walk from East Campus. The event, which covered the theme of “Resistance and Freedom,” featured a variety of classic Yiddish songs (as well as several newer ones) performed by the What’s Not To Like? Choir, various members of the Durham community, student group Out of the Blue and several Duke alumni.
Yiddish is a West Germanic language that developed among Jewish communities in Germany, a place whose Hebrew name of Ashkenaz would lend the Ashkenazi Jewish community their name. It is a hybrid of German and Hebrew, written in the Hebrew alphabet and featuring grammatical rules pulled from both. While much of the community later left Ashkenaz, they’d take their Yiddish with them throughout Europe and beyond, where it absorbed other influences and rules from various languages. The language would remain the lingua franca of the European Ashkenazim until the Shoah, which, combined with Jewish immigration to the US and Israel, would greatly reduce the number of Yiddish speakers. Yet after those events, Yiddish is far from dead.
Today, Yiddish-speaking Jews fall broadly into two categories. The first is more academic and secular, including Bundists, members of various old Yiddish organizations and the YIVO Institute. The second group is the Ashkenazi Haredim, certain subsets of which still speak Yiddish as a first language or learn it for the purpose of reading certain texts and among whom there are a wide variety of dialects and accents. Indeed, walk the streets of places like Boro Park and Monsey, in New York, and you’ll see that Yiddish is alive and well. Beyond this, Yiddish and Yiddish culture has influenced English, Hebrew (and Hebrew pronunciations) as well as other languages…