Kvell – Local Spotlight Exporing Yiddish LA
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Exploring Yiddish LA
By Debra Eckerling
Yiddish is experiencing a vibrant resurgence! Whether Yiddish is a way to connect to your roots and/or the arts – music, literature and theater – or you are simply curious about it, the desire for education and yiddish experiences is on the rise, including and especially in Los Angeles.
Traditionally spoken by Ashkenazi Jews, Yiddish originated in the 9th century among Jewish communities in Central Europe. It evolved from a combination of medieval German dialects, Hebrew, and Aramaic with influences from Slavic languages.
Sure you can learn Yiddish on the Duolingo app or take a course online through Workers Circle (www.circle.org/yiddish). However, Yiddish learning is as much about community as it is about our history.
JLiving spoke with just some of the vibrant Los Angeles Yiddish resources, many of which offer programming online. These are some of the people who are leading the charge to educate and connect people to the language, ensuring Yiddish remains vibrant and alive.
Rabbi Zach Golden,
Executive Director/Cantorial Soloist
Der Nister Synagogue & Cultural Center
DerNister.org
Der Nister Downtown Jewish Center is a synagogue and cultural center on the 14th floor of the century-old Spring Tower Lofts, formerly the Barclay Bank Building, on Spring St. between 6th and 7th in Downtown LA. From religious services to hosting plays, concerts, readings, and gatherings, Der Nister serves as home for the Downtown and Greater Los Angeles Jewish community and its supporters.
Der Nister (Yiddish: The Hidden) is the brainchild of Rabbi Henry Hollander, a Jewish bookseller and rabbinical student, and Rabbi Zach Golden, Deputy Editor of the Yiddish publication Forverts. They were later joined by Rabbi Ye’ela Rosenfeld. Located in Rabbi Hollander’s antiquarian bookstore, visitors are surrounded by treasures of Jewish civilization – Jewish books that span the centuries, along beautiful skyline views, deep learning and musical prayer.
Highlighted Event
The Der Nister New Moon Cabaret is styled off of Weimar-era cabarets, offering music, plays, and performances that evoke a Jewish culture lost to time. With Yiddish poetry, a rotating cast of actors, and visiting musicians, the New Moon Cabaret is a page out of history and something altogether new. Each month brings something new to the table and is well worth the visit.
Why do you love Yiddish?
Yiddish is the soul of European Jewry, inflected in the everyday speech of not just Jews but everyone, from schmaltz to schlep. We want to keep Yiddish alive as a connection to our heritage and to Jewish culture more broadly. Yiddish is a reflection of our past and holds the potential for the Jewish future. It is a language quickly growing and changing both in the Hasidic community and outside of it and we want to be a part of that. With our Yiddish classes and programming, we want to see Yiddish through the next century.
Yiddish in LA
In our recent classes on Yiddish and California we explored Yiddish in the making of Los Angeles – connecting the Jewish community to social justice and community building efforts. From Sholem Asch to Elie Weisel, Yiddish was an instrumental part in shaping Jewish life in California and in connecting Jews to immigrants from around the world. While many Jews dropped their language to assimilate into American society, other cultures did not readily do so. Yiddish remains a tie to our past, even as we keep an eye on its potential for the future.
Aaron Lloyd Castillo-White
Executive Director
Kultur Mercado
KulturMercado.org
Kultur Mercado is a cultural bridge-building organization that produces events and programs to connect communities through shared values, histories, and languages. Informed by Jewish values, much of the current work is focused on connecting diasporic Jewish culture with non-Jewish audiences to strengthen civil society and improve inter-community relations.
Highlighted Event
The Historical, Culinary, and Linguistic Walking Tour of Pico-Robertson, developed with the Jewish Language Project, and scholars, Alan Niku and Sarah Benor deserve extra mention. By putting so many elements of Jewish life and culture together in one event, we are able to reach across many walks of life and ages, connecting the Los Angeles Jewish community to part of its history and investigating all it has to offer. Our initial event attracted attendees from 18 to 85 for a walking tour that sampled Jewish foods from five countries, brought history to life, and introduced attendees to several endangered Jewish languages spoken in the community today.
Why do you love Yiddish?
Yiddish was the first of several languages spoken by my mother’s parents. It is both a language and a window into the soul of much of Ashkenazi Jewry. For me, it’s important to keep Yiddish alive, to celebrate part of my roots, and to be able to keep the “golden chain” of my history alive. Yiddish has much to offer that continues to color my understanding and pepper the speech of everyday life.
Yiddish in LA
Yiddish is one of several anchors to Los Angeles’s Jewish past. Yiddish newspapers and cultural journals nourished a generation of immigrants, alongside Ladino and Yevanic (Jewish-Greek), giving voice to Jewish communities while allowing them to retain our cultures, even as we integrated with broader society.
Many of the figures who shaped Los Angeles—whether in Hollywood or mid-century architecture—spoke Yiddish. Learning the language offers a direct connection to those who built the city’s Jewish community, both figuratively and literally.
Gelya Frank and Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak
Co-Founders
Yiddish Shmoozers (In Translation)
Yidlit.org
Yiddish Shmoozers (In Translation) is the place to find intelligent discussions and lively writing about Yiddish literature and culture. Their motto is mir hobn kultur (We got culture!). The online group meets about 12 times a year, with a widening portfolio of contemporary and historical Yiddish, Yiddish-inflected, and Yiddish-adjacent content. Discussions and readings are conducted in English.
The “syllabus” for 2025 focuses on the three classic Yiddish writers – Abramovitsh, Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem through their original works, films, and workshops with leading scholars. Other events mine the ways that 20th and 21st-century Yiddish activists and artists inspire, strengthen, and inform our choices at this challenging political moment. Access on Zoom is free to subscribers at Yidlit.com.
Highlighted Event
On March 2 we presented the new opera, The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, in Los Angeles. The acclaimed writing team, composer Alex Weiser (Pulitzer Prize music finalist), and librettist Ben Kaplan walked us through excerpts from their powerful work about linguists Max Weinreich and Yudel Mark’s struggle to save the Yiddish language following the Shoah. The program was deeply moving, uplifting, and prophetic. The recording is available on the Yiddish Shmoozers YouTube channel.
Why do you love Yiddish?
Some people approach Yiddish as a salvage operation, but despite a thousand years of predictions that Yiddish is dying, young and old are studying the language today and loving it in record numbers! Yiddish is alive in our family traditions, our Ashkenazi-inflected speech, our influence on public thought and entertainment, and in our political, ethical, and social values. I love the Yiddish Shmoozers because it puts us in touch with this kind of source material and allows us to understand who we are and what we are striving for.
Yiddish in LA
Los Angeles is home to a diverse Jewish community, representing multiple racial, economic, and cultural backgrounds. It’s really a gift to partake of the amazing Yiddish civilization of Eastern Europe. We need to know its writers and artists, their solutions to the problems of living as minorities. As Zionism became functionally the central religious commitment of so many American Jews, Yiddish civilization in America was often dismissed with a joke and a shrug. But in Yiddish, there is so much more that we can explore and, at this point in history, we need that knowledge in order to live, survive, and thrive.
Miri Koral
Founding Director & CEO
California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language (CIYCL)
YiddishInstitute.org
The California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language (CIYCL) founded in 1999, is a nonprofit organization with the goal of safeguarding and promoting Yiddish heritage. CIYCL’s motto is Preservation Through Innovation and its educational and cultural offerings have indeed been cutting-edge, beginning with the first Yiddish intensive program on the West Coast, the landmark Art of Yiddish. The program ran for eight consecutive winters and brought together the finest Yiddish instructors and learning participants from all over the nation and the world. CIYCL then pioneered the annual Showcase of Contemporary Yiddish Culture which featured monthly programs highlighting the multi-faceted aspects of the culture. To add to its seminal endeavors, CIYCL initiated and ran for many years an International Yiddish Poetry Translation Contest named in honor of legendary performer Theodore Bikel; and, with the help of UCLA and the Mellon Foundation, produced the first-ever digitization of a complete Yiddish literary journal, all 150 issues of the LA-based Kheshbn/ Reckoning. The other major groundbreaking effort to date is CIYCL’s Last Golden Links project which was the first in-depth video interview series in Yiddish of native Yiddish speakers. The ten featured individuals, included Theo Bikel and Holocaust survivor and LA Yiddish Culture Club President Lilke Majzner.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, CIYCL has moved its cultural programming online, which enables it to engage speakers from afar and reach an even wider (international) audience. These programs are recorded and available on CIYCL’s Art of Yiddish YouTube channel.
Highlighted Event
CIYCL frequently partners with the Museum of the Holocaust L A, conceiving and producing programs to showcase the spiritual resistance exemplified by remarkable poetry and song created during the darkest times. “To Witness, Console, and Lament” premiered on April 9, 2023, with a dramatic reading of Yitskhak Katzenelson’s epic powerful eye-witness ode about the Warsaw Ghetto, Song of the Massacred Jewish People. I was joined onstage with Mike Burstyn and a cast of young actors is available for the standing-room-only event. The performance is available on Holocaust Museum LA’s YouTube Channel.
Why do you love Yiddish?
While Yiddish has been my second career since the late 1990s, it has always been a part of my life. I was born to parents who had escaped the Holocaust only to lose years of their lives to the Soviet Gulag and most of their family to Hitler. But their language and culture, their Jewish heritage could not be taken away from them. Unlike my peers growing up, Yiddish was an every day, not-a-“secret” language. After my parents died, I realized I didn’t want to lose my native tongue and was shocked that the post-war immigrant Yiddish civilization I had grown up with had so little left to it. It seemed to have skipped my Baby Boomer generation entirely. It was sheer curiosity and happenstance that led me to some folks whose enthusiasm kept it alive for themselves here in LA. I also encountered the vast beauty of Yiddish literature in the original and the new ways in which Yiddish music was being created, as well as my own sheer paucity of Yiddish language skills.
The path upon which I embarked to simply educate myself in my mameloshn, my mother tongue, brought me untold joy and delight. This “following one’s bliss” that Joseph Campbell spoke about kept bringing me to more and more incentives and opportunities to not only educate myself but also to help ensure that this joy and delight is available to anyone. It’s that simple: encountering Yiddish in a meaningful way (not through silly words and jokes) brings with it a deep joy in one’s soul because it’s connected with the best and most enduring parts of what our ancestors created for their own delight.
Yiddish in LA
Not only does LA have the third largest Jewish population in the world, after Israel and NYC, but it has a history of more than a century of Yiddish cultural activism and Yiddish learning. UCLA, where I teach Yiddish language, film, and literature, is the first university in the country to have had a formal course in Yiddish and where Yiddish has been taught for over 50 years. While I was among those who took up the helm of Yiddish cultural activism in the mid-1990s from the folks who were then already in their 70s and 80s and were witnessing a steep decline in engagement with Yiddish, I’m gratified to see that there’s a new wave of activists bringing new ideas and visions and who are no less enthusiastic. In turbulent, uncertain and dismaying times like today, it especially behooves us to learn how to get in touch with and draw strength and inspiration from the enduring values and creativity of our Yiddish-speaking ancestors.
