Inside Der Nister Downtown Jewish Center, a hybrid bookstore and synagogue on the 14th floor of an old bank building in Downtown Los Angeles, a small crowd focuses on the space’s co-founder, Zach Golden, 33. He stands at a podium between ceiling-high shelves of Jewish books, and begins to read a poem penned nearly a century ago, by a Jewish immigrant from modern-day Ukraine. It’s titled “California.”
He reads first in Yiddish — a linguistic blend of German with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic, and other European influences — and then in English.
“The waves will cradle me and whisper ‘peace, shalom,’” he translates. “I drift into sleep, becoming a desert dream.”
Soon, audience members, mostly Jews in their 20s and 30s, begin to share observations and ask questions about the Yiddish translation. Some are fluent in Yiddish or learning the language. Others are just curious to hear it spoken aloud.
What’s happening in this room is actually quite radical.
Yiddish, the historic language of Jews in Europe and Russia, was once nearly extinguished. But now, a disparate coalition of strictly religious Jews, progressive, secular, and young Jews — drawn to the language for different reasons — are keeping Yiddish alive. In fact, some scholars say it’s experiencing a revival.
“I think we are definitely in a period of resurgence,” says Jonathan Brent, director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. He says his organization has expanded its Yiddish language offerings in recent years to accommodate increased demand, and noted that young people in particular are taking an interest.
Data from the language learning platform Duolingo seems to confirm: There are currently 361,000 Yiddish learners on the app worldwide, and roughly half of them are under 30, according to Duolingo PR director Monica Earle. Further, Earle says Duolingo saw a 37% increase in Yiddish learners under 13 last year.
Zach Golden co-founded Der Nister, which means “the hidden,” in 2020. The space is filled with Jewish books written in Hebrew, English, German, Russian and Yiddish. “I call it Jewish civilization in a room,” he says. Photo by Robin Estrin.
Here at Der Nister and in other parts of Los Angeles, young Yiddish enthusiasts are screening Yiddish horror films, hosting Yiddish cabarets and klezmer bands, starting Yiddish conversation groups, and translating works of Yiddish literature into English.
They are building on a lineage of Yiddish cultural contributions in Los Angeles that began with a wave of Jewish immigration from Europe around 1900. A prominent secular and progressive Yiddish mutual aid and social justice organization started at that time, called the Workers Circle, still operates in Pico-Robertson, offering Yiddish language classes as well as cultural programming, for a mostly older crowd.
In the 1990s, an organization called Yiddishkayt picked up the torch, hosting Yiddish language classes, festivals, music and film programming for a new generation.
Now, Angelenos in their 20s and 30s are the keepers of Yiddish culture.
“The goal of this event, and I hope to have more like it, is to keep these poems alive, keep them spoken, keep them in the air, keep them in living memory,” says poetry reading organizer Iris Malka Morrell, 25.
Spoken by approximately 11 million Jews worldwide on the eve of World War II, the language tied strongly to Ashkenazi history, culture and identity took a major hit in the mid-20th century.
Most of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers, says Aaron Paley, who founded the Los Angeles cultural organization Yiddishkayt in 1994.
That severely diminished the global Yiddish-speaking population — and had profound psychological repercussions.
“Yiddish then becomes associated with death,” Paley says, explaining why many Jews chose not to pass the language along. “It’s not something the Jews are proud of. They're not proud of the Yiddish culture, the Yiddish accent, the Yiddish contributions.
“They're looking to the future, which is the new movement of Hebrew language and Hebrew culture that's being revived and created in Israel.”
Yiddishkayt founder Aaron Paley started the organization in 1994. “We started by producing arts and cultural events and festivals that put Yiddish back into the mosaic of Los Angeles cultures,” he says. Photo by Robin Estrin.
Israel, established in 1948, adopted Hebrew, not Yiddish, as a national language. Some in the state even worked to suppress and ban Yiddish. Paley says some early Zionists viewed Hebrew as a symbol of strength, and Yiddish as a symbol of weakness.
But it wasn’t just the Holocaust and persecution of Jews in Europe that chipped away at the Yiddish language.
Assimilation in the United States was also a factor.
“We chose English because it was convenient,” says Paley.
Generations later, most Jews of European descent have not inherited the Yiddish language, and with it, the keys to accessing Jewish history and culture. Instead, some inherited feelings of shame about Yiddish, says Golden.
“I distinctly remember saying I was going to go learn Yiddish in the middle of rabbinical school and being told it was a waste of time,” Golden says. “Can you imagine? A waste of time?”
For Golden — who learned the language in part to reclaim what Nazis and assimilation had “scrubbed” away — Yiddish is the way to access his culture in the language it was lived in for hundreds of years.
“We don't have to look behind and feel ashamed or think that the Jewish ghetto or shtetl is all that there was, and forget about all these beautiful works of [Yiddish] modernism or these advanced, beautiful melodies that people would sing in synagogues,” he says. “There's no need to throw all of that behind.”
The reasons behind the resurgence in interest in Yiddish culture are even more complex.
For a growing community of ultra-Orthodox Jews in the United States, Yiddish is still the language of daily life, though “it’s not a literary language,” says Jonathan Brent.
Other Yiddish learners are less religious but “hungry to reconnect with their heritage. They wonder what they missed,” Brent says. “What was actually going on with their grandparents? What was that history all about? Where did they actually come from?”
Poetry reading attendee Aaron Castillo-White, 35, says he started learning Yiddish after the death of his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor. “Pursuing Yiddish was a means of being close with him, but it really grew also into investigating what Jewish culture — and cultures — are.”
Castillo-White works as a community archivist at the Workers Circle while running the nonprofit Kultur Mercado, which aims to keep Yiddish alive through connections with other global cultures in Los Angeles.
Yiddish, which in some ways tells the story of diasporic Jews in Europe who were often persecuted by unfriendly governments, has also piqued the interest of progressive Jews looking for ways to connect with Jewish identity outside of Zionism.
“I think Yiddish culture gives us tools against oppression,” says Robby Adler Peckerar, who took charge of Yiddishkayt in 2011. “It shows us how to live through fascism. It shows us how we struggle alongside other marginalized and oppressed groups.”
That was the case for poetry reading organizer Iris Malka Morrell.
“Originally, it had to do with a political possibility of being Jewish in a way that didn't involve Israel,” she says. “Growing up in the U.S., we're really raised to believe that if you're Jewish, the place you go is Israel, and the culture you go to is there now. Yiddish really is a different alternative to that.”
Experts point out that there were always multiple views on Zionism in Yiddish.
“Yiddish language and Yiddish culture can offer Jews in the diaspora in the United States a way of being Jewish that does not exclude, but does not necessarily require a strict religious observance on the one hand, or a full endorsement of the State of Israel,” says Brent. “It gives you a way of being human, a way of being Jewish.”
Back at the poetry reading, Golden is sitting on a couch at the front of Der Nister, joking with a friend about starting a Yiddish rap career.
Long gone are the days of alienation. Golden, who teaches and translates Yiddish for a living, has built a life in the language. There are more young people in this room celebrating the culture with him than he’s seen in years.
Without a cultural mass able to produce and appreciate Yiddish literature, art, and music, YIVO’s Jonathan Brent says Yiddish is unlikely to become a “living” language again. Although, he says, “there are efforts to do that — among young people for the most part — and maybe they will succeed.”
Golden is up for the challenge.
“I have this dream that one day it's not just going to be a handful of people wanting to keep the torch moving,” he says. “It's going to be a lot more.”