I grew up in Mexico City, and when people find out that one of my native languages is Yiddish, they think I am pulling their leg. Isn’t that a Jewish language? Mexico? Impossible. Maybe you should write a science fiction novel that imagines Yiddish on Mars.
Actually, there is one already. In the 1950s, Ukrainian Argentine writer Velvl Tshernovetski published “,” which translates as “On the Eve of the Fourth World War: Hines, the Queen of Mars.”
This isn’t surprising. American Jews often associate Yiddish with Eastern Europe, but it has long gone beyond those boundaries. From the beginning, some Jews imagined Yiddish as a Jewish lingua franca, a common language. Yet it is just in the past few decades in which that universal drive .
Bridge between worlds
A Germanic language written in Hebrew letters, Yiddish is known as the . For centuries, Jews in Central and Eastern Europe spoke it within their communities, from the Netherlands to Russia.
At the end of the 19th century, Yiddish was indeed that different Jewish groups used to communicate with each other. When a Polish and Lithuanian Jew would meet on the road, they spoke in Yiddish, albeit each of them with their respective accent. Neither would know the other’s national language.
Hebrew, meanwhile, was the principal language of the Bible and rabbis. Until in the modern state of Israel, it was mostly reserved for prayers and religious writings.
By the dawn of the 20th century, though, Yiddish was being uprooted. Countless speakers – where Jews had been granted permission to live under an edict of the Russian czars. Most relocated to the region of Palestine or the United States. And during the Holocaust, the language faced extinction. The vast majority of the 6 million Jews murdered .
For Holocaust survivors and their descendants, as well as for the Jewish immigrants and their children, Yiddish became – the link to a world that vanished painfully in a short period of time. Today, many Americans pepper their speech with Yiddish words like “schlep,” to lug something; or “schmooze,” to chat and work the room.
Global tongue
Yet the language, always extraordinarily resilient, is again sailing toward new horizons in the 21st century.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of students enrolled in exploded – not only in the United States but also in Canada, , . With time on their hands, students of all ages wanted something different than sheer nostalgia expressed in a few recognizable coined words. They wanted fluency.
At the same time, organizations like the and the have pushed for a new perception of Yiddish. Through exhibits, classes and other venues, they argue that it is far more than the tongue of Ashkenazim, circumscribed by its geographical origin. Instead, it has always been a global means of communication, used in places as diverse as , and .
Yiddish thrived, for example, in parts of Latin America – , which was a magnet for immigrants at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. , the grasslands home of Argentina’s “gaucho” cowboys, set up communities with Yiddish schools, newspapers and theaters – institutions they recreated after moving to Buenos Aires and other cities.
Countries like Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico and Cuba also had lively, though smaller, Yiddish scenes. My father was a Yiddish actor in Mexico, and I started my literary career writing a futuristic Yiddish play, “Genesis 2000.”
In 2025, the Yiddish Book Center launched an exhibit through cookbooks, dime novels, literary magazines and translations of all kinds of books, from Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” to “Harry Potter.” The language became a portable homeland for people in countless diasporas.
Many people discovering Yiddish today – and its universal reach – find it through klezmer, of Jews in Eastern Europe. Like jazz and cumbia, the genre has proved extraordinarily versatile. Today, there are klezmer groups combining , , , and more.
Yidstock, in Amherst, Massachusetts, attracts crowds every year; there are also klezmer festivals in , , . My own film, “My Mexican Shiva” – about the death of a patriarch in a dysfunctional Mexican Jewish family – mixes klezmer with mariachi.
‘Language of exile’
Let enthusiasm not hide the truth, though.
The number of Yiddish speakers worldwide remains relatively small: by one estimation, . The majority are ultra-Orthodox Jews, concentrated in . The “new” speakers, mostly secular, constitute but a fraction of the total.
Yiddish’s history is anything but a straight line; the path of Yiddish twists and turns. All to say that this is not its first “revival.” In the Pale of Settlement, it was as a language of women, children and the illiterate. It would take a long time for Yiddish to become the main language of politics, business and education.
In the second half of the 19th century, writers like Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Peretz began writing novels in Yiddish in order to reach the masses and give Yiddish a sense of legitimacy. In 1978, , the only Yiddish writer so far to win the Nobel Prize, described it as “a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics.”
I am convinced that the current revival has much to do with that last point. Yiddish is just one of dozens of Jewish languages, , and . The two most prominent, Hebrew and Yiddish, have always been unlikely bedfellows, frequently fighting with each other. And amid the Israel-Hamas war, as many diaspora Jews , some see .
No matter where today’s revival goes, Yiddish is far from dead. But even if it were, as : “The deader the language, the more alive is the ghost.”
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