My wife spent her youth at Mosh. The director, Jen Silber, quoted in the article is a very close friend of ours. Great to see this making the front page!
posted by OmieWise at 4:10 AM on August 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

I find it kind of fascinating that an article that can correctly use gender neutral pronouns without making a fuss, but the last paragraph suggests a boy wearing a "Bill for First Lady" T-shirt is "subverting the gender binary". The whole last paragraph is fascinating really.

(Also, is German really that odd for having tried to tackle the issue of using gendered plurals for groups of people, at least in writing?)
posted by hoyland at 4:18 AM on August 12, 2016

I can only imagine that people who come from places with two-gender languages, where every noun is either male or female, either "he" or "she," must have an especially difficult time wrapping their heads around the idea of non-binary gender and transgenderism. I feel like English speakers are actually somewhat lucky in that regard, that we don't have to deal with reprogramming our thoughts and speech to quite the same extent, that we have an advantage in accepting that traditional gender conceptions might not be so universal and self-evident as we were raised to believe. If literally everything in my speech was either male or female, I imagine that (misguided) belief would be even more deeply internalized.

For folks here who live in places where such languages are the norm, does your experience bear out my speculation? Do you find that having a binary male/female language makes it harder for the people around you to accept non-binary people, or transgender people? I'd be very curious to hear your perspectives.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:52 AM on August 12, 2016 [5 favorites]

And some camp alumni have criticized Habonim Dror¡¯s move, complaining that the camps are teaching the children fake Hebrew that they won¡¯t be able to use in the outside world.

It's funny; they tried to tell me much the same thing in middle school when I wanted to speak Hebrew with an Ashkenazi pronunciation like my grandfather instead of abiding by modern Israeli pronunciation.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:54 AM on August 12, 2016 [13 favorites]

For folks here who live in places where such languages are the norm, does your experience bear out my speculation? Do you find that having a binary male/female language makes it harder for the people around you to accept non-binary people, or transgender people? I'd be very curious to hear your perspectives.

Well, I don't think language is the real barrier. It does make for cheap yucks though, and facile "what are we supposed to call them" arguments.
posted by Dr Dracator at 5:00 AM on August 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

For folks here who live in places where such languages are the norm, does your experience bear out my speculation? Do you find that having a binary male/female language makes it harder for the people around you to accept non-binary people, or transgender people? I'd be very curious to hear your perspectives.

Nope. Many Indian and Pakistani languages have binary genders and we are also the home of one of the most robust transgender communities in the world. The hijras I've met referred to themselves using feminine forms but were very clear they were a third gender (and are recognised as such officially in Pakistan).
posted by tavegyl at 5:02 AM on August 12, 2016 [11 favorites]

And some camp alumni have criticized Habonim Dror¡¯s move, complaining that the camps are teaching the children fake Hebrew that they won¡¯t be able to use in the outside world.

One of the (secular, progressive) arguments for supporting Israel has been that it is the most tolerant/progressive society in the Middle East, at least as far as LGBTQ+ issues go (though, granted, by that reasoning, the bar isn't a very high one). Adding gender-neutral grammar to modern Hebrew (itself a partially artificial language, reengineered from an ancient language, until then used only for liturgical purposes, to fit the needs of a 20th-century society) jibes well with that.
posted by acb at 5:09 AM on August 12, 2016 [12 favorites]

Many Indian and Pakistani languages have binary genders

They'd be Indo-European languages, and from what I understand, a masculine/feminine/neuter linguistic-gender system is a default of sorts in Indo-European languages (some languages, such as French, drop the neuter; some, like Scandinavian, combine masculine and feminine into one gender and neuter into the other, and some, like English, say that everything's neuter other than people, and, if you're old-fashioned, seafaring ships). Other languages' gender systems differ widely (Finnish, for example, doesn't have masculine or feminine genders)

From what I understand, Hebrew is a Semitic language, and thus not Indo-European; are masculine/feminine noun genders also typical in Semitic languages, or did Hebrew absorb it from contact with Indo-European languages?
posted by acb at 5:15 AM on August 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

For anybody who wants to know more about the linguistic side of things and has access to an academic library, this book (Queer Excursions) has a chapter on trans/non-binary speakers of Hebrew. The author goes over one of the strategies talked about in the article (combining masculine and feminine endings, like -imot); other people will just switch back and forth between using masculine and feminine endings; finally, (I think? I don't have the book handy), somebody who, e.g., presents as masculine but identifies as non-binary might exclusively use feminine endings.

Note also that speakers not only have to deal with nouns, but also verbs, as unlike, say, German (but sort of like Polish, at least in some tenses), you need to mark gender on verbs, in some persons, as well.
posted by damayanti at 5:20 AM on August 12, 2016 [6 favorites]

My spousal dude attended Moshava several summers in the early '90s. I've been hearing stories about it forever--yes, his best childhood stories are from Labor Zionist summer camp. It's fun to see that it's still the same weird, awesome place as ever.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:33 AM on August 12, 2016

This is a question I've been wondering about for some time - not necessarily with regard to Hebrew in specific, but to languages where everything is gender marked. Thanks so much for posting!
posted by bile and syntax at 5:38 AM on August 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

Dr Detractor: It does make for cheap yucks though, and facile "what are we supposed to call them" arguments.

That's actually part of what I was thinking of, though I don't think I expressed it very well in my comment. When language is so gendered and so binary, it seems to me that it would set up the accompanying culture to resist the idea of a non-binary society, one in which being transgender is fully normalized and accepted. Cheap transphobic jokes and facile arguments are absolutely a part of that resistance, and if the language helps enable them then it seems like it must present an additional barrier to transgender equality.

Obviously it's not a universal or insurmountable barrier, and tavegyl's example certainly carries a lot of weight; India and Pakistan are big places with many languages and many people. I think it would be hard, bordering on impossible, to isolate a linguistic bias from other cultural factors surrounding gender. Even if you could, I'm not sure how you would establish a causal relationship. But I guess I still feel like it's well established that gendered language can be used to transphobic ends, and having more gender in the grammar might¡ªall else being equal, which it never is in reality¡ªlead to more resistance to transgender acceptance. That's a lot weaker than my original position, of course. I've been meaning to read more about gender on the subcontinent; maybe I should get on that.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:39 AM on August 12, 2016

I feel like English speakers are actually somewhat lucky in that regard, that we don't have to deal with reprogramming our thoughts and speech to quite the same extent

I'd imagine the opposite TBH. In English, linguistic gender and sex are essentially identical so are hard to separate. In those other languages, linguistic gender is basically arbitrary but maps onto sex when talking about things that have sexes (like people). So separating them might well be that bit easier.
posted by merlynkline at 5:54 AM on August 12, 2016 [7 favorites]

The term 'gender' was originally a purely grammatical one as I understand it. It was borrowed in English for other purposes and fits the bill relatively comfortably just because English has 'rational gender' - ie with few exceptions grammatical gender corresponds to sex.

But I believe this is not the case in most languages. In fact, aren't there a number in which grammatical gender has nothing to do with sex?

Now the unfortunate side of this is that borrowing the word 'gender' stamps all the relevant concepts as Anglo-Saxon ones to some degree. In languages that don't have rational gender, the presumption that grammatical gender must reflect sex (or 'gender' in the new sense) is weaker or even non-existent.

Now in the case quoted Hebrew evidently does contain such a presumption, so some reform is needed. However, I find a slightly uncomfortable sense here of an unconscious expectation that all languages are, or ought to be, like English.
posted by Segundus at 6:00 AM on August 12, 2016 [6 favorites]

Adding gender-neutral grammar to modern Hebrew (itself a partially artificial language, reengineered from an ancient language, until then used only for liturgical purposes, to fit the needs of a 20th-century society) jibes well with that.

That's what I liked best about this. Modern Hebrew is one of the youngest successful languages out there right now - whole swaths of it were outright created when linguists decided to try to make Biblical Hebrew speakable. So 'linguistic tradition' doesn't hold as much water as an argument against it as it would in, say, French. And languages are one of the few places where facts on the ground can create change from the bottom up -- if enough people say something, it goes from slang to collopquial to accepted within a generation.
posted by Mchelly at 6:14 AM on August 12, 2016 [5 favorites]

I can only imagine that people who come from places with two-gender languages, where every noun is either male or female, either "he" or "she," must have an especially difficult time wrapping their heads around the idea of non-binary gender and transgenderism.

Native Hebrew speaker here.

Non-binary gender identity is an easy thing to grasp. What is mind boggling is the idea that having to select a gendered conjugation for verbs and nouns is somehow an affront to one's dignity. Just use the default conjugation and say your piece.
posted by ocschwar at 7:11 AM on August 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

I had thought that the gender-neutral title "Mx" originated in a binary-language culture, but I am completely wrong. It is a legal option in the UK and has been added to the Oxford English dictionary. It's also been used in India.
posted by AFABulous at 7:13 AM on August 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

That's what I liked best about this. Modern Hebrew is one of the youngest successful languages out there right now - whole swaths of it were outright created when linguists decided to try to make Biblical Hebrew speakable.

*ahem*

Sorry, but that is not an accurate of how Modern Hebrew emerged, and there's an easy proof of it. If you speak Hebrew, take a gander at Professor Franz Delitch's translation of the New Testament into Hebrew. Not easy to find a copy, but if you're Israeli, you've already read portions of it in your grade school history textbook, in the chapter on early Christianity.

What's significant is that his translation, written as part of a missionary effort, PREDATES the revival and modernization of Hebrew, and yet many portions are perfectly readable and modern Hebrew. The grammar and syntax was already waiting to be dusted and used. It had gone unused because of traditions limiting Hebrew to liturgical use, but it was a consistently Semitic grammar, and could be, and was, revived independently. That makes it inappropriate to classify Modern Hebrew in the same set as Lojban.
posted by ocschwar at 7:19 AM on August 12, 2016 [10 favorites]

Are masculine/feminine noun genders also typical in Semitic languages, or did Hebrew absorb it from contact with Indo-European languages?

Gender is even more deeply ingrained in Semitic languages. Most languages in the Afroasiatic family --- which includes the Semitic languages, Egyptian, Cushitic languages like Somali, and others --- have separate verb conjugations for masculine and feminine, not just declensions.
posted by likethemagician at 7:20 AM on August 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

Non-binary gender identity is an easy thing to grasp. What is mind boggling is the idea that having to select a gendered conjugation for verbs and nouns is somehow an affront to one's dignity.

It's not just a pronoun or a verb or a noun. Transgender children routinely face harassment, threats and even violence from other children, as well as harassment and disrespect (and worse) from adults simply for being themselves. The use of language defines who they are in their own eyes, in the eyes of others and in the eyes of people who have authority over their lives, including whether they can use bathrooms appropriate to them.

The language used to describe people often defines how they are treated by their peers and society.

Just use the default conjugation and say your piece.

What's the Hebrew (or Yiddish) idiom for walking in another's shoes before judging them?
posted by zarq at 7:25 AM on August 12, 2016 [17 favorites]

It's not just a pronoun or a verb or a noun. Transgender children routinely face harassment, threats and even violence from other children, as well as harassment and disrespect (and worse) from adults simply for being themselves.

And I'll re-iterate: what is mind boggling to a native speaker of Hebrew is the notion that that the one issue has anything whatsoever to do with the other.

English is a relatively un-gendered language because the Normans, having had to go from one gendered language to another gendered language when they conquered Normandy, were not inclined to do that yet again after 1066. Meanwhile, both French and German remained much more gendered than English. Are France or Germany more hostile to trans people than England or the US?

Turkish, meanwhile, has been un-gendered all along. Is Turkey friendlier to trans people?
posted by ocschwar at 7:37 AM on August 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

Do you find that having a binary male/female language makes it harder for the people around you to accept non-binary people, or transgender people?

My mother tongue is gendered and I can't say it's made anything like that any more difficult than I see among native English-speakers. As merlynkline said above, in certain languages with gender (certainly the one I grew up speaking) the gender of objects is often completely arbitrary. Often an object that you would think would be gendered masculine because it is, for instance, phallic, is not.

I think in Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris, writing about learning French, complains about the arbitrariness making it difficult for him to learn the language. Rather than being able to look at an object and divine the gender of the noun, it's just rote memorization.

I mean, the culture in which my mother tongue exists is extremely intolerant toward anything but binary heterosexuality, but the effects of language on that would be a deep-dive Sapir-Whorf sort of thing, not a plainly obvious on the surface sort of thing.
posted by griphus at 7:40 AM on August 12, 2016 [9 favorites]

When I started learning French, I was advised that "word gender is completely arbitrary and you're going to have a much harder time if you continue to believe it has anything to do with human gender". So, for example, "breast" is masculine, as is "vagina". It was good advice.
posted by sneebler at 8:07 AM on August 12, 2016 [6 favorites]

Meanwhile, both French and German remained much more gendered than English. Are France or Germany more hostile to trans people than England or the US?

Turkish, meanwhile, has been un-gendered all along. Is Turkey friendlier to trans people?

Wouldn't religion have a lot more to do with this than language? From the outside, France and Germany seem more secular than the U.S. (not sure about England). France is 40% atheist, Germany 27%, compared with 1% of Turks and 2-10% in the US (depending on source). In the US, the primary objection to trans people is definitely religiously based.
posted by AFABulous at 8:29 AM on August 12, 2016

It's mind-boggling to you, but apparently not to everyone. Perhaps you needn't determine other people's needs based on your own sense of logic.


I'm the only native Hebrew speaker in this thread so far, and I am accurately reporting how this discussion appears to native speakers.

You'll note the idea of adding a neutral gender to the grammar comes from an American Jewish summer camp, not from any trans-people or their advocates in Israel.


Wouldn't religion have a lot more to do with this than language?

Precisely my point.
posted by ocschwar at 8:47 AM on August 12, 2016 [5 favorites]

I can only imagine that people who come from places with two-gender languages, where every noun is either male or female, either "he" or "she," must have an especially difficult time wrapping their heads around the idea of non-binary gender and transgenderism

Another vote for these languages not treating grammatical gender as similar to human gender so it's already pretty easy to separate "this word is masculine" from "the thing referred to is associated with being male."
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:52 AM on August 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

And some camp alumni have criticized Habonim Dror¡¯s move, complaining that the camps are teaching the children fake Hebrew that they won¡¯t be able to use in the outside world.

I studied Hebrew for eight years and have only used in it conversation maybe a handful of times. The primary usage of Hebrew in the United States is as the language of prayer, of the Torah, and of study, not conversational Hebrew, and this usage is what is focused on in most Hebrew schools, since a lot of the teaching there is to prepare students to be active members of the synagogue.

The movement I came up in, Reform, has done an awful lot of make Judaism gender neutral, and there is no reason not to extend that to the Hebrew used in prayers.

What we are seeing here is one of the more subterranean and unaddressed elements of Judaism, that the development of the State of Israel was connected to something called shlilat ha'galut, the Negation of the Diaspora. At its start, this was the philosophy that said that Jews outside Israel would never be on equal footing, would never be without antisemitism, and left European Jews neurotic, pale, sickly, unable to defend themselves, and a host of other self-loathing attributes. This heavily influenced the development of modern Hebrew, which coupled a genuine contempt for Jews in the Pale of Settlement with a Middle European obsession with Spanish Jews, which is part of the reason the Spanish Jewish accent was chosen over the European, and, frankly, a large part of the reason Yiddish was rejected as being the language of modern Israel, or even a language in the country -- there were aggressive efforts to suppress it.

Nowadays it posits Israel as the spiritual center of Judaism. And so, of course, the actual, day-to-day needs of Diaspora Jews -- to have a synagogue Hebrew that reflects our ethics of inclusivity -- are disregarded, because Hebrew must be the Hebrew that Israelis speak, and anything else is just confounding.

I also ran into the problem described above when I took Hebrew in college and insisted on using an Ashkenazi accent and spelling my Yiddish name using a Yiddish spelling. The teacher couldn't stand it, even though this was the Hebrew used by the ancestors of a majority of American Jews for millennia, and I would be using it the way they did, as a Hebrew of prayer, study, and the bible. No, it would sound weird to Israelis, and so centuries of European experience were disregarded.
posted by maxsparber at 8:54 AM on August 12, 2016 [17 favorites]

You'll note the idea of adding a neutral gender to the grammar comes from an American Jewish summer camp, not from any trans-people or their advocates in Israel.

Case in point. Apparently we just don't count.
posted by maxsparber at 8:56 AM on August 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

...That makes it inappropriate to classify Modern Hebrew in the same set as Lojban.

Totally agree, and that's not what I said or meant. The grammar and all words that exist in Biblical Hebrew and its offshoots were the basis of the language. But any words that weren't - and there's a lot of them, from easy stuff like technology and animals (there was no differentiation between any species of fish, for example), to verbs we take for granted now, that didn't exist already had to be pulled from Yiddish or made from scratch.

Anyway, my point was that because it's a language that has some incredibly young components and is still evolving, it could be seen as more easily open to change. Not that it's all made up anyway so it doesn't matter. Sure, it could all die when these kids leave camp -- or they and the counselors could be the start of a movement that goes with them to Israel. /derail.

The whole thing about the genderedness of language doesn't feel like it should make a difference to this - there's nothing inherently male or female about a chair, and no move to change its status. It's when a noun like mailman comes up -- taking the ending off to make it gender-neutral is about respecting the fact that the person who fills the role may be either (or nonbinary). That's where this comes into play.
posted by Mchelly at 8:59 AM on August 12, 2016 [5 favorites]

Degendering language is a hard problem. I really like the -ol suffix; it's very pronounceable.

Unlike "x". Please, please, please stop trying to shoehorn "x" into everything. It sticks out like a sore thumb and only serves to marginalize gender-neutral speech as a sort of gutteral, throat-kicking shibboleth.
posted by phooky at 9:05 AM on August 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

So... Latinol? Mr, Ms, and Mol?

I'll stick with x, thanks
posted by AFABulous at 11:09 AM on August 12, 2016

... is there a specific problem with just "Latin"? Especially when we're speaking English?
posted by phooky at 11:24 AM on August 12, 2016

You'll note the idea of adding a neutral gender to the grammar comes from an American Jewish summer camp, not from any trans-people or their advocates in Israel.

Case in point. Apparently we just don't count.

Your influence on the Hebrew language is directly proportional to the frequency at which you use it to criticize a driver's competence on Ibn Gavirol Street. That's how it is, and at least to some degree that is how it ought to be, unless you also want to give more leverage to fanatics in Brooklyn who try to affect other affairs in Israel.

This heavily influenced the development of modern Hebrew, which coupled a genuine contempt for Jews in the Pale of Settlement with a Middle European obsession with Spanish Jews, which is part of the reason the Spanish Jewish accent was chosen over the European, and, frankly, a large part of the reason Yiddish was rejected as being the language of modern Israel, or even a language in the country -- there were aggressive efforts to suppress it.


Of course. Nothing at all to do with a pressing need to build inter communal links in Israel rather than have linguistic barriers maintained between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. It was all just a snub aimed at Bundists and traditionalists.



Unlike "x". Please, please, please stop trying to shoehorn "x" into everything. It sticks out like a sore thumb and only serves to marginalize gender-neutral speech as a sort of gutteral, throat-kicking shibboleth.

It's 2016, and it's pronounced shiBOLet. Remember that when you need to ford a river.

(Oh, and shibbolet is feminine)
posted by ocschwar at 11:26 AM on August 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

That's how it is, and at least to some degree that is how it ought to be, unless you also want to give more leverage to fanatics in Brooklyn who try to affect other affairs in Israel.

Um, no. I want to give leverage to the five and a half million American Jews who use Hebrew in synagogues, as I said. Our use of Hebrew is not yours to dictate, especially when you are arguing against inclusion from a considerable position of privilege and unconsciously dismissing or minimizing the experience of Jews outside Israel.
posted by maxsparber at 11:35 AM on August 12, 2016 [9 favorites]

It was all just a snub aimed at Bundists and traditionalists.

By "traditionalists" do you mean "the entire surviving community of Eastern European Jews?" And how does deliberately suppressing their language build a bridge to Mizrahim?
posted by maxsparber at 11:37 AM on August 12, 2016 [4 favorites]

So... Latinol? Mr, Ms, and Mol?

I'll stick with x, thanks

Why not another vowel (for Spanish, at least) to make it a little more pronounceable (especially with the plural articles) ? Like "u": latinu, latinus, lus chicus, yo lu veo?
posted by MikeKD at 11:43 AM on August 12, 2016

ocschwar, ????????? is a Hebrew word, but shibboleth is an English word.

I grew up a minute's walk from Ibn Gvirol Street, but I'm aware that during the vast majority of the history of Hebrew it did not exist. We Israelis tend to have the idea that Israeli Hebrew is the Hebrew, when in fact it's only one variety of a millennia-old language, and there's no particular reason to expect non-Israelis to adhere to it.
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 12:14 PM on August 12, 2016 [7 favorites]

Wikipedia: Tumtum is a term that appears in Jewish Rabbinic literature and usually refers to a person whose sex is unknown, because their genitalia are covered or "hidden."
posted by larrybob at 12:28 PM on August 12, 2016

Wow. I've never heard of shlilat ha'galut before, but it really does explain a lot of the things I questioned, but could never articulate, in my childhood Jewish education. We were taught a very exclusive, Israel-centric form of Judaism, and that was part of what drove me away from organized religion altogether in later life.

Frankly I'm furious. This isn't some antisemitic conspiracy theory; this is real erasure perpetrated by Jews against other Jews. The Zionists think we Ashkenazim are good enough to be incorporated into their national mythos when we're being murdered by the millions, but to allow our culture and language a place in their pure Jewish homeland? No way, Yussel.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:11 AM on August 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

Surely that rage is misdirected; we all know who was responsible for the erasure of European Jewish culture, and it wasn't Israel. For what it's worth, though, there are plenty of Yiddish speakers in Israel, plenty of synagogues that daven nusach Ashkenaz with an Ashkenazi accent, plenty of places serving goulash and schnitzel and apfelstrudel. Nothing has been erased.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:20 AM on August 15, 2016 [2 favorites]

If only I had a penguin...: "Another vote for these languages not treating grammatical gender as similar to human gender so it's already pretty easy to separate "this word is masculine" from "the thing referred to is associated with being male.""

I mostly agree. But it gets more complex when referring to people in languages with gendered articles (like French) or gendered verbs (like Hebrew). In English it's very natural to say "The doctor prescribed penicillin" without specifying the gender of the doctor in question, but not in those languages.

I've had a couple of weird experiences when speaking to native (Qu¨¦becois-)French speakers in English about a member of a stereotypically male profession, without using a gendered pronoun right away. When I finally said "she", the French speakers became angry that I'd "misled" them about the person's gender. I don't think this has ever happened to me with non-French speakers¡ªbut it also doesn't usually happen with French speakers, so maybe it's just coincidence.
posted by vasi at 6:05 AM on August 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

Nothing has been erased.

Amazing that you can say this given what's happening in this very thread.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:38 AM on August 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

Nothing has been erased.

There were genuine and aggressive efforts to discourage the use of Yiddish in Israel. Read Yiddish and Power by D. Katz and Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley, among other sources.

The reason it still appears in Israel is because there has been an ongoing influx of Jews from Russian and east Europe, some of whom are native Yiddish speakers, not because Israel has been friendly to Yiddish. This is true of the US as well, where American Jewish institutions, many started by German Jews, either actively squashed the use of Yiddish or passively allowed it to fade.
posted by maxsparber at 8:44 AM on August 15, 2016 [3 favorites]

explain a lot of the things I questioned, but could never articulate, in my childhood Jewish education. We were taught a very exclusive, Israel-centric form of Judaism,

This was true of me as well. I was a Jewish Studies major in college. The major was part of the Classical Studies department, although it was also possible to take classes about modern Israel.

Yiddish was not available, and most of what was formally available about the Jews of Europe were classes about the Holocaust, which was consistent with my education through my synagogue. I focuses on the history of East European Jews, and, for the most part, had to invent my own classes and study independently, as there was very little offered through the formal program. Again, a Jewish studies program. Because Yiddish was not offered, it made it extremely difficult to investigate too deeply the story of the Jews of Eastern Europe, since they spoke Yiddish and recorded their experiences in Yiddish.

This is erasure. This is what it looks like.
posted by maxsparber at 9:17 AM on August 15, 2016 [5 favorites]

I started to worry that maybe things have changed. After all, this was the mid-90s. Nope, program's still the same! Three classes on ancient Israel, one on modern Israel, the rest on the Holocaust. Language classes: All Hebrew.
posted by maxsparber at 9:49 AM on August 15, 2016 [3 favorites]

I think this is a really important turn that the conversation here has taken, and at the same time it brings to mind how often, in conversations about modern Israel, someone condemns the country as a bunch of [white] Europeans taking over the Middle East, with no awareness that Israel is over 50% Sephardic / Middle Eastern. Askenazi culture is fully a part of Israeli culture, and Yiddish isn't going anywhere - a lot of its history is lost, but so much of it is recoverable, and I know people are actively engaged in trying to make that happen.

Before the Holocaust, there absolutely was a movement by "modern" Zionists to distance themselves from and erase Yiddish culture. But afterwards, I'm not sure it's fair to point to the lack of resources as a continuation of the shilat hagalut as it was a case of so many, many missing people. Haskala advocates who could, went to Israel before the 30's and survived. A lot of Yiddishists didn't (not to mention the bulk of Eastern European Jews who weren't interested or couldn't afford to go). But the Yiddish theater in America died out with the coming of TV, along with most of vaudeville, not because of Zionism. There were enough Yiddish speakers right in New York to keep the language and literature thriving, and it wasn't replaced with Hebrew - it became Tin Pan Alley and Broadway and Hollywood. Philip Roth and Barbra Streisand and Woody Allen. So I think it was more a case of natural advocates (wrongly) not being interested coinciding with people literally not existing in sufficient numbers to do the teaching.

There's also the fact that in the 50's and 60's a lot of upper-end anti-Semitic barriers were being broken down in America (country clubs, Ivy League quotas, etc), and assimilation was suddenly even more possible than ever. People weren't distancing themselves from Yiddish because of Israel, they were doing it because it represented Judaism, which was considered backwards and not aspirational. Sephardic culture didn't even come onto most American Jews' radar until fairly recently.

There seems to be a Yiddish revival happening now, and I think that's more about the Jewish population increasing again. But we're still less than 2% of the US population, mostly concentrated on the coasts. So your example at the University of Minnesota is surprising to me but I don't know enough about the program or demographics there to know if it's angrymaking vs something that simply needs addressing (or, more likely, funding) - I know Yiddish language and literature courses were offered as part of Judaic Studies at my East Coast college course, and that was back in the late 80s. Erasure sounds like a strong word to be leveling at ourselves, when Jews are only now reaching the population numbers we had in 1939.
posted by Mchelly at 11:01 AM on August 15, 2016 [2 favorites]

just realized I mis-edited - I meant to say "So I think it was more a case of people (wrongly) not being interested coinciding with natural advocates literally not existing in sufficient numbers to do the teaching."
posted by Mchelly at 11:10 AM on August 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've been looking into this a lot, and I don't think erasure is too strong a word. Look, I assumed, like everyone else, that Yiddish just had a natural decline. It tends to happen with immigrant languages in the third generation.

But Jews are not everyone else. We kept Hebrew going as a religious language and Aramaic as a sort-of academic language going for literally thousands of years past when they were a spoken language. There may be no group in history with more experience in post-vernacular language than the Jews -- in fact, the phrase post-vernacular language was specifically invented to discuss Jews.

And it's not just Yiddish. The history of the Jews of Europe is largely reduced to a few events culminating in the Holocaust. And this was happening long before the Holocaust. Eastern European Jews who came to America, especially if they came in somewhere outside of New York, were strongly encouraged to assimilate. Their use of Yiddish was strongly discouraged -- the first professional production of a Yiddish play was literally shut down by German Jews bribing the actress not to perform. Assimilation was far more important to German and Middle-European Jews that it was to Eastern European Jews, but the Germans and Middle-European Jews had started and controlled a lot of the organizations that supported new immigrants. And so they pushed the importance of assimilation onto new immigrants, and refused to support institutions that they saw as anti-assimilationist.

As to this being a conversation about modern Israel, well, the original story is about summer camps in North America. I don't really want to spend a lot of time discussing whether or not Yiddish was supported in Israel, because, as far as I am concerned, this thread is actually about the experience of Jews in America, and the only reason it turned into a discussion of Israel is because an Israeli insisted that the discussion was largely irrelevant because it wasn't happening among Israeli Jews.
posted by maxsparber at 11:14 AM on August 15, 2016 [4 favorites]

Okay, got it, thanks. I thought you were making a completely different argument.

So how in your opinion is the pro-assimilationist push by Jews in America different from the beginnings of Reform Judaism in Germany? Jews telling other Jews not to be so, you know, Jewy goes back at least as far as Hellenism.
posted by Mchelly at 2:31 PM on August 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

I thought this was worth reading.

Jewish summer camp: A safe space to encounter ¡®Hebrew¡¯

Some highlights:

The study, ¡°Connection, not Proficiency: Survey of Hebrew at North American Jewish Summer Camps,¡± reports initial findings of broader research to be presented in a 2017 book by scholars Sharon Avni, Sarah Bunin Benor and Jonathan Krasner.

and

¡°Wherever you turn in Hebrew, there is gender ¡ª the nouns, the verbs, the numbers. With this solution, what do you do with it in command form?¡± asked [Academy of the Hebrew Language scientific secretary, Ronit] Gadish.

¡°At the academy, our job is to guide the language according to its nature, and its nature is innately gendered. We would need to invent a whole new grammar to accommodate a new gender-neutral form,¡± Gadish said. If, however, a grassroots solution could be found gathering huge critical mass, she indicated the academy would be potentially open in the future to discussing the issue.

and

The idea of Hebrew at camp is not to achieve fluency, said the study¡¯s researchers, but to promote encounters with the language as a connector to Israel and the Jewish people in general.

As such, wrote the researchers in an eJewishPhilanthropy op-ed, ¡°Hebrew can be more purposefully used as a tool for promoting Jewish unity and cultural vitality. When Hebrew is infused into the camp¡¯s soundscape and visual landscape, it inspires cultural expression and serves as a group marker, conferring insider status even as it sidesteps potentially divisive religious or ideological differences.¡±

posted by Joe in Australia at 10:26 PM on August 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

How English Words Get Entrenched in Israeli Speech, and How to Get Them Out

Why the Hebrew word for ¡°shaming¡± (as in ¡°Facebook shaming¡±) should not be sheyming.

posted by Joe in Australia at 6:12 PM on August 29, 2016