The Zionist War on Yiddish in Palestine

My 2016 Master's Thesis: "Jewish Identity and Language Politics: Hebrew, Yiddish and the contemporary debates on Zionism" in Full

Wounded Yiddishists after an attack by Hebrew language fanatics, Tel Aviv, 1928. Credit: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Included in Judy Maltz's article for Haaretz: “When Speaking Yiddish Could Get You Beaten Up by Jews in Tel Aviv”

The following is my 2016 MA thesis which I received with distinction from SOAS University of London.¹

Introduction

In January of 1945, a well-known heroine of the anti-Nazi resistance in the Vilna ghetto, Ruzhka Korchack, was invited to a conference in what would become Israel to speak about her experience fighting the Nazis. Being a Jew from Lithuania, she spoke the language of Eastern European Jews: Yiddish. While her speech was well-received by the audience, another speaker came after her and complained of the language she spoke in, calling it “a foreign, grating language” in Hebrew (Harshav, 1993). So shocked were members of the audience, that that speaker was “prevented from finishing his speech by outrage in the auditorium” (Nelsen, 2006, p.145). This becomes all the more surprising when it is revealed that the man who seemed obsessed with an anti-Nazi Jewish partisan fighter’s choice of language, her native language and that of millions of Ashkenazi (of European origins) Jews, was none other than David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister. Even more troubling is the fact that Ben Gurion, born David Grün in Płońsk, Poland, was himself a native Yiddish speaker.

Ben Gurion wasn’t the only Zionist to have held such a negative view of the Yiddish language, or indeed even an exception.

Outline

• The Great Kulturkampf: Linguistic Fascism in the Land of Zion

• The Bund’s Diasporism versus the Zionists’ Nationalism

• Zionism: A Nationalism Unlike Any Other?

• Erasing Palestine and ‘Hebraizing’ the Land: Building an ‘Image of Antiquity’ with the ‘Old-New’ Language

• A New Kulturkampf? Zionism versus Diasporism Today

• The Growing Rift between Israel and American Jews

• Diasporism and the Potential for Radical Politics

  • The Case of ‘Birthwrong’

  • The Case of Alternative Hebrew Schools incl. interview with This is Not An Ulpan

• Conclusion

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