Yiddish Renaissance - Further Developments

Further Developments

The Bund (The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia; Yiddish: אַלגעמײנער ייִדישער אַרבעטער בונד אין ליטע פּוילין און רוסלאַנד, Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland), a secular Jewish socialist party in the Russian Empire, founded in Vilnius, Poland in 1897 and active through 1920, promoted the use of Yiddish as a Jewish national language, and to some extent opposed the Zionist project of reviving Hebrew.

In 1925 YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute; ייִוואָ: ייִדישער װיסנשאַפֿטלעכער אינסטיטוט Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) was established in Wilno, Poland (Vilnius, now part of Lithuania). YIVO was initially proposed by Yiddish linguist and writer Nochum Shtif (1879–1933). He characterized his advocacy of Yiddish as "realistic" Jewish nationalism, contrasted to the "visionary" Hebraists and the "self-hating" assimilationists who adopted Russian or Polish.

In the Soviet Union during the 1920s, Yiddish was promoted as the language of the Jewish proletariat. It became one of the official languages in some of the Soviet republics, such as the Ukrainian People's Republic, the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Galician Soviet Socialist Republic. A public educational system entirely based on the Yiddish language was established and comprised kindergartens, schools, and higher educational institutions. At the same time, Hebrew was considered a bourgeois language and its use was generally discouraged. In 1928, the Soviet Union created the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (Yiddish: ייִדישע אווטאָנאָמע געגנט, yidishe avtonome gegnt). Located in the Russian Far East and bordering on China, its administrative center was the town of Birobidzhan. There, the Soviets envisaged setting up a new "Soviet Zion", where a proletarian Jewish culture could be developed. Yiddish, rather than Hebrew, would be the national language. Although the vast majority of the Yiddish-language cultural institutions in the Soviet Union were closed in the late 1930s, Yiddish continued to maintain a strong presence in some areas.

As many Eastern European Jews began to emigrate to the United States, the movement became very active there, especially in New York City. One aspect of this became known as Yiddish Theatre, and involved authors such as Ben Hecht and Clifford Odets. Another aspect was the huge Yiddish press, exemplified in the United States by Yiddish publications such as the Yiddish newspaper Forverts.

Owing in a large part to the efforts of the Yiddish movement, Yiddish, before the Nazi era, was becoming one of the great languages of the world, spoken by over 11,000,000 people.

The Holocaust, however, led to a dramatic, sudden decline in the use of Yiddish, as the extensive European Jewish communities, both secular and religious, that used Yiddish in their day-to-day life were largely destroyed. Around 5 million, or 85%, of the victims of the Holocaust, were speakers of Yiddish. This, coupled with the Revival of the Hebrew language as the national language of Israel, essentially extinguished the dynamic momentum Yiddish had been gaining in the early decades of the 20th century.