University of Maryland may cut Yiddish from course offerings

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By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 8, 2010; B01

Yiddish might be on its way out as a language offering at the University of Maryland, and its supporters are positively farklempt.

Funding will be cut after the 2010-11 academic year at Maryland's flagship public university for the sole professor of Yiddish, the evocative language of Eastern European Jews. That's the end of regular Yiddish instruction at U-Md., barring the intervention of a private donor, said Hayim Lapin, director of the school's Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies. The reduction comes as many colleges are cutting back on full-time foreign language instruction to lower their costs.

"I think it's a tragedy," said Lapin, who appeals to the community for help in an open letter on the center's Web site.

Proponents of Yiddish study say its elimination at U-Md. would deal a grave blow to the discipline, because the university hosts the oldest and strongest Yiddish program among the handful in the region. A 2006 survey by the Modern Language Association found 969 college students learning Yiddish at 28 institutions nationwide. Locally, Yiddish is taught at George Washington University in the District and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

At stake is the recorded history of the Ashkenazi Jews, whose historic tongue endures among Holocaust survivors, within Orthodox communities from Brooklyn to Jerusalem and in the original writings of Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer.

"Yiddish has a major, major written record," said Miriam Isaacs, a visiting professor who has taught Yiddish at U-Md. for 15 years. "The University of Maryland has bought up an enormous number of books. The [U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum] has an enormous collection. Who is going to read them?"

Her position is being cut, along with three others, as the center trims about 10 percent of its $700,000 budget for the next fiscal year and more in coming years, Lapin said. He has found sufficient funds to sustain her position for one more year. Thereafter, Lapin said, Yiddish will likely be taught on a "course-by-course" basis. The announcement prompted a strenuous letter-writing campaign by the cultural group Yiddish of Greater Washington.

"We raised hell. And we don't do that, generally," said Harvey Spiro, president of the group.

The population of Yiddish speakers has declined from more than 10 million at the start of the 20th century to perhaps a half-million today, according to scholarly estimates, diminished in Hitler's genocide and further eroded when Israel chose Hebrew as an official language.

"Yiddish has been dying for a thousand years," Singer once said, "and I'm sure it will go on dying for another thousand."

Hebrew is the language of prayer in Judaism. Yiddish, although rendered in Hebrew characters, is the everyday language. Irreverent, colorful and consonant-heavy, Yiddish passed from the lips of borscht belt comedians to the ears of the goyim, and thence into the Queen's English, introducing such priceless verbs as schlep, plotz, kvetch and utz.

Most assimilated American Jews have limited knowledge of Yiddish; the younger generation might hear it only on visits to bubbe.

"Yiddish was just the language that my grandparents would speak amongst themselves at family gatherings. That's pretty much all I heard of Yiddish before I took this class," said Seth Salver, 21, a U-Md. senior from Miami, who has one set of Ashkenazi grandparents. "I thought it was my duty as a young Jewish student at a university to pay my respect to this language that so many people think is dying."

His grandparents were "tickled pink," Salver said, "when I called them and started saying 'vos makhstu,' " a Yiddish salutation he has learned to read and write.

The introductory Yiddish course taught by Isaacs each fall has been consistently full at 18 students, she said, although it is down to seven this year because of a scheduling change. Enrollment tends to dwindle in the intermediate course she teaches in spring, as students turn their attention to Hebrew, a language more central to the Jewish studies major. There is no major in Yiddish.

The rollback at U-Md. illustrates a larger trend in language instruction across higher education: Full-time, permanent teaching positions are being cut, and professors replaced with temporary or part-time instructors, said Rosemary Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association.

The number of students studying foreign languages continues to grow, Feal said. But "you might see a reduced range of courses offered, you might see larger class sizes, and you might see fewer permanent professors."

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Yiddish Resurfaces as City’s 2nd Political Language

By SAM ROBERTS

In 1897, Isaac Fromme, an office-seeker from the largely Jewish Lower East Side, punctuated his campaign palaver with Yiddishisms to refute insinuations that he was Irish. In 1922, Fiorello H. La Guardia was re-elected to Congress from East Harlem after he rebutted charges of anti-Semitism by challenging a rival to debate in Yiddish. La Guardia, a son of Jewish and Italian parents, was fluent in Yiddish. His Jewish rival was not.

That Yiddish remains the second language of New York politics was demonstrated yet again over the weekend in the disembodied debate between Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the State Senate.

On Friday, Mr. Bloomberg said that for the Senate to adjourn for the summer without voting to extend his control over New York City’s school system was “meshugeneh.”

To which State Senator Hiram Monserrate replied on Sunday: “We believe it would be meshugeneh not to include parents in the education of our children. As opposed to loosely using the word ‘meshugeneh,’ we would also say we don’t need a yenta on the other side of this argument and this debate.”

Neither Mr. Monserrate, who is Hispanic, nor Mr. Bloomberg, who is Jewish, was surgically precise with his Yiddishism.

But their casual embrace of an onomatopoetic language is a reminder of how universal Yiddish has become. Not only in New York, where Jews now constitute fewer than one in five mayoral election voters, but even beyond. Meshuga and yenta both appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The last Jewish mayor, Edward I. Koch, suggested as much on Monday when he offered an obvious reason why New York politicians drift into Yiddish. “They all want to sound like citizens of the world,” Mr. Koch said.

The comedian Jackie Mason said Mr. Bloomberg would have felt more self-conscious about using Yiddish 10 or 15 years ago. “It’s now hip to be Jewish,” he said. “A Jew used to be embarrassed at saying a Jewish word.”

Twenty years ago, Mr. Mason himself regretted being quoted as describing David N. Dinkins, the Democratic mayoral candidate, as “a fancy schvartze,” invoking a Yiddish word, often used derogatorily, for a black man. Mr. Mason later apologized. “I’m a comedian,” he said then, “not a politician.” He was criticized for calling President Obama the same word during a show this year, but told the entertainment Web site tmz.com that it was no longer a pejorative term.

In 1998, Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato referred to his Democratic opponent, Charles E. Schumer, as a “putzhead.” The backlash to Mr. D’Amato’s reference resonated because of his own reputation for crudity and because he at first denied using the slur.

“I think that Mayor Bloomberg probably used Yiddish as a way of having his kugel and eating it, too,” said Michael Wex, the author of “Born to Kvetch” and “Just Say Nu.”

“His use of meshugeneh — a not uncommon solecism, incidentally; the adverb should be meshuga — seems intended to strengthen his point at the same time as it gives his expression of it a heartfelt, rather than denunciatory, feel,” Mr. Wex said. “The idea that ‘this is crazy, pure and simple’ comes across all the more strongly by implying that English simply lacks the words to describe what he’s feeling — that in his guts, as they used to say, he knows it’s nuts.

“Rather than crossing ethnic lines here, Mayor Bloomberg seems to be presenting himself as an Everyman who, since he happens to be Jewish, expresses himself in the idiom that’s supposed to be closest to his heart,” Mr. Wex said.

“Senator Monserrate raises the stakes, though, by calling the mayor a yenta —‘a female motormouth,’ ” Mr. Wex continued. “If the senator’s earlier uses of meshugeneh were meant to show that he could play the mayor’s game, yenta is his way of proving that he can even play it better.”

Whatever the mayor’s motivation in resorting to Yiddish, the debate with some of the Democratic senators, who want to loosen mayoral control of the schools, was degenerating well beyond meshugas into a very English digression. When Mr. Bloomberg invoked Neville Chamberlain on Friday in defending his version of mayoral control over education against any compromise, was he suggesting that the senators were comparable to Adolf Hitler?

“It wasn’t an analogy at all — the mayor was talking about endless negotiations in general,” Stu Loeser, Mr. Bloomberg’s chief spokesman, explained on Monday. “The former prime minister’s name is now synonymous in the American lexicon with appeasement and endless negotiations. Since it wasn’t an analogy, the mayor wasn’t comparing anyone to anyone else.”