Miriam Isaacs, the university’s sole profressor of Yiddish, thinks of the language as far from dead.
If you’ve schlepped to class, sparred with a schmuck or schvitzed in the summer heat, chances are Yiddish is a staple in your lexicon. But after next year, it may not have a place at the university.
With just enough funding to sustain one more year of regular instruction, the university’s Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies may drop Yiddish sometime in 2011 — the latest blow to a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish language that many consider archaic.
Director Hayim Lapin said the decision, along with other cuts, is based on budget uncertainty, as the center is run largely by endowment funding.
“I am assuming … a net reduction in spendable funds over three to five years of something on the order of 25 percent,” Lapin wrote in an e-mail. “As a result, we have cut back on visiting faculty and programming.”
Among the visiting faculty is the sole professor of Yiddish at the university, Miriam Isaacs, for whom Yiddish isn’t just a dying tongue.
“For me, it was my native language. It was what I grew up speaking to my parents,” she said. “I was raised to be proud of it — not to just to speak it but to really think that, you know, I had something valuable.”
Born in a refugee camp in Germany, Isaacs — who has been teaching at the university for 15 years — said Yiddish isn’t your average language.
“A lot of people have all kind of ambivalent feelings about Yiddish,” she said. “Some people … know it as a language, literature and culture, and for a lot of people, they think of it as their grandmother’s language — it’s silly, it’s nostalgic, it’s not important. So it kind of occupies this strange space.”
But ambivalence hasn’t stopped most of Isaacs’ classes from being filled to capacity in years past. Senior accounting major Seth Salver said he enrolled because of his Yiddish-speaking grandparents.
“I had studied Hebrew in the past, but I felt like Yiddish had something intrinsically in it that made it more of a — they call it in Yiddish a mame loshn — a mother tongue, whereas Hebrew is the language of the Bible,” he said. “[Yiddish is] able to express so many things that you can’t express in English or in Hebrew.”
Only two other area schools — George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University — teach Yiddish, Lapin said. Nationally, just 969 college students study the language, according to the Modern Language Association, which also reported that only 28 institutions offer Yiddish instruction.
In an effort to harness more funds to support the center’s 15-year-old Yiddish program, Lapin wrote an open letter expressing the importance of continuing to teach the language and calling on the community to secure its future.
“I am hopeful that we will be able to get the funds to support Yiddish at its present level, but that will take community support and, to be honest, sufficient student interest to justify it,” Lapin wrote.
After next year, Yiddish will only be taught on a “course-by-course” basis — a basis Isaacs said she finds insulting and insufficient.
The Washington Post reported the 10 million or so Yiddish speakers at the start of the 20th century have depleted to maybe a half-million today — a number for which the Holocaust is largely responsible, and later, Israel’s decision to use Hebrew as its official language.
But Isaacs says Yiddish is as relevant today as it ever was.
“We have a huge Jewish population here. And for many of the Jews on this campus, it is a heritage language,” she said. “Furthermore, it is not a dead language. It’s a language that’s actively spoken by Hasidim all over the world … and I don’t think it should just be wiped away and thrown into the memory hole.”
aisaacs at umdbk dot com
