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by Ross Perlin
If Max Weinreich were here to add a chapter to his magisterial History of the Yiddish Language, what would he say about YouTube videos of mameloshn hip hop, haredi chatrooms, and the instant accessibility of so much of the Yiddish literary canon on the Internet?
Every few days, for example, Zackary Sholem Berger, a Yiddish-language writer and physician from New York, types out a new post for his Yiddish-language blog, dedicated to “language, words, discussion, and chatter.” Recent entries have discussed healthcare reform, dissected Mexico City slang, and touched on his new Yiddish translation of Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat. In the vast, imponderable blogosphere, efforts like Berger’s serve as a sketch pad for new ideas, a source of news and debate, and a node in a virtual community.
In the right-hand column of his blog, following accepted practice, Berger provides links to over a dozen of the most prominent Yiddish-language sites on the Internet, including familiar names like the Yiddish Forverts but also new online-only resources. These sites, in turn, provide links to an array of other sites in and about Yiddish. Although Google itself is now available in mameloshn, the best way to surf the Yiddish web is to follow links from vebzaytl to vebzaytl.
Historic Yiddish radio rubs shoulders with khasidic blogs. Sectarian battles are acted out in the entries of a sizable Yiddish-language Wikipedia. One discussion group brings together Yiddish-language teachers from around the world, while an e-mail list is maintained by parents raising their children in Yiddish. Online academic and literary materials are wide-ranging and often of high quality: from a complete version of Harkavy’s famous Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary to the hundreds of yizkor books, poignant testaments to communities destroyed in the Holocaust, which have been digitized by the New York Public Library.
Two of the largest groups of Yiddish-speakers — elderly people and khasidim — were relatively slow in the migration at first, yet Yiddish now has an outsized presence online, with as much activity as languages much more widely spoken. Many popular and well-known Yiddish sites and communities have been the work of persistent individuals in their spare hours, whereas Yiddish-related organizations have primarily used the Internet as an English-language gateway to their offerings.
Despite its riches, the Yiddish web can be a confusing place to navigate. There is little e-commerce at these sites so far, and a distinctly archival accent to some of the most notable efforts, such as Henry Sapoznik’s Yiddish Radio Project, which airs broadcasts from the golden age of Yiddish radio. The project’s English-language website accompanied a 2002 series of National Public Radio documentaries, live events, and CD releases — and now extends the life of those efforts. Particularly significant is the real-time translating capability of the project’s Yid-O-Matic program, designed with the Real Player software that plays the broadcasts. Henry Sapoznik told me that “the website also allowed us to show many of the visual graphics and ephemera we had collected and better contextualize the radio materials.”
Unlike the Yiddish Radio Project, where archival treasures are parked for the duration, most websites, Yiddish and otherwise, are works in progress, demanding regular updates for a whole range of technical and aesthetic reasons. As a result, many Yiddish websites, with their homespun charm, appear as ruins left along the information superhighway, or confusing fragments of some forgotten project. Even the best-known sites are not immune to the powerful forces of web neglect: As of this writing, months have passed since the last open-ended meditation from Katle Kanye, the best-known khasidic blogger writing in Yiddish.
No one knows Katle Kanye’s real identity, but his “ruminations and hesitations, observations and experiences” are of an unusual literary caliber, evincing indifference to the clipped, hyperlinked style of most blogs. According to Zackary Berger, an enthusiastic reader, Katle Kanye covers “the whole spectrum of day-to-day khasidic life — a lot about the ‘hidden’ aspects of life that we don’t speak about much on the bima or in newspaper columns: boredom, depression, family problems, the worries of living an entirely frum life in the modern world, doubts and unbelief.”
Another significant site, Idishe Velt, has lately been a bisl farshlofn (a little bit asleep), according to Pinchus Glauber, a real-estate appraiser from Rockland County who is one of its moving forces. He hopes to build IVelt into a Yahoo-like portal for Yiddish-speaking khasidim, to serve a “readership that is continually growing.” At present, what one finds is an attractively designed site with current news stories, busy discussion forums (on topics such as what cars to lease, and India’s response to piracy), and a “This Day in History” section, complete with yortsayts, world history, and events of significance to khasidim.
With sites like IVelt, Glauber argues, khasidim “use the Internet to be in touch with friends and acquaintances, exactly like people in the rest of the world.” Zackary Berger, whose blog receives many khasidic visitors, agrees, but “with one addition: To a certain extent, they are learning about an outside world that is not permitted to them.”
While the use of Yiddish to some extent makes the Internet “safer” for khasidim — Yiddish spam and Yiddish porn are still rare, kinahora — it has “enabled contact between frum [observant] and fray [secular] Yiddish speakers, who otherwise would almost not know each other,” observes Leizer Burko, a graduate student in New York who writes frequently for the Yiddish Forverts and runs the e-mail group called Yiddishland. At the same time, khasidim are as multilingual online as offline; Glauber points out that some use English for business, while others “write in Yiddish with English spelling, or a mix of Yinglish.”
Some uncertainty and controversy have attended khasidic use of the Internet, especially since 2000, when a number of prominent haredi rabbis in Israel banned its use for purposes other than business. “The Internet is a danger one thousand times greater [than television, also banned],” according to the rabbis, “and is liable to bring ruin and destruction upon all of Israel.” Such an interdiction by no means covers all haredi and khasidic groups — and dissent from and indifference to the ban have been strong. Especially in Israel, web-filtering services, aiming to make the Internet halakhic and heymish by blocking certain content, have found a serious business opportunity.
Far from these battles, Philip “Fishl” Kutner runs Der Bay (“The International Anglo-Yiddish Newsletter”) from his home in Northern California, and launched an online version this year. “A website is easily accessed and is free,” he wrote to me in an e-mail. “Its greatest asset,” he stressed, “is that it is updated.”
Kutner, 82, is legally blind. He spends six to eight hours a day poised three inches away from his computer screen, constantly honing a database of seventeen hundred Yiddish teachers, translators, language clubs, klezmer groups and others. He’s proudest of his site’s Internatsyonaler Kalendar, which has become a central clearinghouse for Yiddish language and culture events worldwide. From a one-page newsletter started in 1991 for Sholem Aleichem’s 75th yortsayt, Der Bay now instantly reaches a global audience through its comprehensive, user-friendly website.
The flourishing of a language on-line is far from inevitable. In the Internet’s earliest stages, English was dominant, reflecting the origins of computer networking in the U.S. Everything from physical keyboards to the domain name system (which governs the addresses, or URLs, of different websites) was designed with the Latin alphabet and American English in mind.
The work of getting the alef-beys onto computers and websites was undertaken by a group of tech-savvy Yiddish enthusiasts, including Refoyl Finkel, a computer scientist from the University of Kentucky, and Meyer David of Boston’s “Yiddish Voice” radio. Their goal was to ensure that the alef-beys would be properly and speedily integrated into Unicode, a technical standard that enables people to use computers in any language.
As global Internet use has boomed, the imbalance in favor of English has gradually corrected itself. Not surprisingly, Mandarin Chinese is set soon to overtake English as the most widely-used language on the Internet (usually measured by the default language people set on their computers or web browsers). Language use on the Internet is beginning to more closely resemble language use in the real world: the more speakers, the larger a language’s online presence.
Important exceptions come usually from developing countries that are impoverished or living under restrictive regimes, where Internet access is too rare for people to build websites or author pages in their own languages. At the extreme end, many hundreds of languages, typically spoken by very marginalized groups, remain without accepted writing systems, and thus go almost entirely unrepresented online.
By contrast, some smaller, stateless languages in the developed world have flourished online. Revival movements for languages such as Welsh and Catalan, gaining momentum since the 1960s, have provided an impetus — and these movements have themselves drawn strength from the Internet.
As Leizer Burko puts it, “The situation of Yiddish on the Internet is good, or at least better than in the world of printed books and newspapers — because the Internet is free or cheap, and Yiddishists and khasidim don’t have much money. Anyone can create a blog, but to publish a book is hard. For Yiddishists, the Internet comes in handy, because there aren’t a lot of us in the world, and we’re dispersed in different cities and countries.”
He might have added that the Internet also gives special prominence to the written word, vital for a language that boasts an unusually high ratio of poets to everyday speakers.
Judgments about a language’s vitality online should be undertaken carefully, for a variety of measures may apply. For example, the Yiddish version of Wikipedia contains over fifty-three hundred articles, yet its base of users and contributors remains small. Nevertheless, its scale exceeds that of Wikipedias for major regional languages like Gujarati, with forty-six million speakers.
In any case, websites only tell part of the story: Yiddish-friendly technology, personal e-mail use, organized listservs (moderated e-mail lists), and social networks all need to be accounted for.
In 1991, Noyekh Miller, a professor at Trinity College in Connecticut, pioneered a multi-faceted forum for academics concerned with things Yiddish. The result, “Mendele”, includes a website, a Yiddish theater forum, and a superb online journal called The Mendele Review — but you can best take the project’s pulse by subscribing to its heavily-trafficked e-mail list.
Approximately seventeen hundred and thirty subscribers write, respond, or simply listen in on questions of etymology, Ashkenazi folk customs, song lyrics, and so on, with the moderating influence of one of a troika of shamosim (“moderators”). “Most of the traffic is in English, often with Yiddish citations,” says Kalman Weiser, a Mendele shames and professor of Jewish Studies at Toronto’s York University.
Another shames, Victor Bers, a classicist at Yale, says that “paradoxically” Mendele’s success and endurance reflect “the precarious state of the language.” In recent years, the traffic is less academic: “With few exceptions, people turn to us, faute de mieux, because of the dwindling number of speakers,” says Bers.
Still, the origins of the Mendele listserv show in the quality control exercised by its academic shamosim and by the generally high level of discussion. Bers reported the community’s most intense debate concerned Tel Aviv University’s Paul Wexler’s “theory that Yiddish is a Slavic language hidden by Germanic relexification,” while Weiser mentioned the considerable controversy “over the ‘death’ of Yiddish and the question of whether a viable virtual community is a substitute for a more conventional one.”
The Mendele Review, which had been edited by Leonard Prager at the University of Haifa until his recent death, showcases the research agenda of today’s most prominent academic Yiddishists. Prager also curates Di Velt fun Yiddish, a separate site that includes a substantial archive of Yiddish literature, freely downloadable in text and sound files (read by the Vilna-born nurse and actor Sara Blacher-Retter). Included is everything from Yehoyesh’s translation of Tanakh to stories by Mendele Moykher Sforim (after whose famous book-selling hero, by the way, the Mendele project is named).
After reading through this list of waxing and waning initiatives, with their blizzard of unfamiliar URLs, it may come as a relief to know that established institutions — newspapers such as the Yiddish Forverts and the Algemeiner Zhurnal, organizations like YIVO and the National Yiddish Book Center — have followed their adherents online with useful and innovative sites. (YIVO and NYBC do not have yet Yiddish translations of their sites, but their English sites are invaluable gateways to Yiddish-language materials.)
Nevertheless, appreciating the Yiddish web means taking in the upstarts along with the established players, the flashes of brilliance along with the dependable information sources. The efforts mentioned here, which one could enjoy and critique for weeks and months on end, represent only the slimmest sampling. For the moment, der yidisher veb holds up an exciting and wonderfully idiosyncratic mirror to di yidishe gas (street). Cyberspace rings with the the various and struggling sounds of an undaunted hypertext Yiddish.
Ross Perlin writes on issues of language endangerment and cultural survival in China, the U.S., and the Jewish Diaspora. His academic research, associated with the Himalayan Languages Project, is focused on undocumented minority languages of western China. Perlin studied Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in 2008.
