How Yiddish became a 'foreign language' in Israel despite being spoken there since the 1400s

[Behind the Aegis]

It’s 1945, three years before the establishment of the state of Israel and at the very end of the Holocaust.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising leader Rozka Korczak-Marla comes to Tel Aviv, addressing the assembled in Yiddish about the extermination of Eastern European Jews.

David Ben-Gurion, who would soon become Israel’s first Prime Minister, then spoke to the crowd in Hebrew. “A comrade has just now spoken here in a grating, foreign language,” he declared.

Ben-Gurion’s shocking remark was part of a pattern of denigration expressed by advocates of Modern Hebrew within the Zionist movement during the pre-state years. It aimed to delegitimize the Yiddish language using violence, intimidation and propaganda.

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[elleng]

1. damn

[DFW]

2. I have never been to Israel, so I don't know the situation there

And I don't speak Yiddish anyway, but I know that quite a few people in Eastern Europe and North America (presumably Jewish) still know it, and use it as a lingua franca among each other. I have seen a film where the whole dialogue was in Yiddish. It was about Jewish immigrants in New York, and it had German subtitles, so I could follow what was being said. There was a lot that was similar to German, but without the subtitles, I would not have been able to follow the whole thing.