I grew up in Mexico City, and when people find out that one of my native languages is Yiddish, they think I am pulling their leg. Isn’t that a Jewish language? Mexico? Impossible. Maybe you should write a science fiction novel that imagines Yiddish on Mars.
Actually, there is one already. In the 1950s, Ukrainian Argentine writer Velvl Tshernovetski published “Erev der Ferter Velt-Milkhome: Hines, di Kenign fun Mars,” which translates as “On the Eve of the Fourth World War: Hines, the Queen of Mars.”
This isn’t surprising. American Jews often associate Yiddish with Eastern Europe, but it has long gone beyond those boundaries. From the beginning, some Jews imagined Yiddish as a Jewish lingua franca, a common language. Yet it is just in the past few decades in which that universal drive is finally being acknowledged.
A Germanic language written in Hebrew letters, Yiddish is known as the tongue of Ashkenazic Jews. For centuries, Jews in Central and Eastern Europe spoke it within their communities, from the Netherlands to Russia.
At the end of the 19th century, Yiddish was indeed a “bridge” language that different Jewish groups used to communicate with each other. When a Polish and Lithuanian Jew would meet on the road, they spoke in Yiddish, albeit each of them with their respective accent. Neither would know the other’s national language.
Hebrew, meanwhile, was the principal language of the Bible and rabbis. Until its revival as an everyday, spoken language in the modern state of Israel, it was mostly reserved for prayers and religious writings.
By the dawn of the 20th century, though, Yiddish was being uprooted. Countless speakers left the Pale of Settlement – the territory in Eastern Europe where Jews had been granted permission to live under an edict of the Russian czars. Most relocated to the region of Palestine or the United States. And during the Holocaust, the language faced extinction. The vast majority of the 6 million Jews murdered spoke Yiddish.
For Holocaust survivors and their descendants, as well as for the Jewish immigrants and their children, Yiddish became a source of nostalgia – the link to a world that vanished painfully in a short period of time. Today, many Americans pepper their speech with Yiddish words like “schlep,” to lug something; or “schmooze,” to chat and work the room.
Yet the language, always extraordinarily resilient, is again sailing toward new horizons in the 21st century.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of students enrolled in Yiddish-language online courses exploded – not only in the United States but also in Canada, Mexico and Latin America, Europe and elsewhere. With time on their hands, students of all ages wanted something different than sheer nostalgia expressed in a few recognizable coined words. They wanted fluency.
At the same time, organizations like the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Yiddish Book Center have pushed for a new perception of Yiddish. Through exhibits, classes and other venues, they argue that it is far more than the tongue of Ashkenazim, circumscribed by its geographical origin. Instead, it has always been a global means of communication, used in places as diverse as Mexico, Egypt and South Africa.
Yiddish thrived, for example, in parts of Latin America – starting with Argentina, which was a magnet for immigrants at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Jewish settlers in the Pampas, the grasslands home of Argentina’s “gaucho” cowboys, set up communities with Yiddish schools, newspapers and theaters – institutions they recreated after moving to Buenos Aires and other cities.
Countries like Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico and Cuba also had lively, though smaller, Yiddish scenes. My father was a Yiddish actor in Mexico, and I started my literary career writing a futuristic Yiddish play, “Genesis 2000.”
In 2025, the Yiddish Book Center launched an exhibit showcasing this planetary reach through cookbooks, dime novels, literary magazines and translations of all kinds of books, from Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” to “Harry Potter.” The language became a portable homeland for people in countless diasporas.
Many people discovering Yiddish today – and its universal reach – find it through klezmer, the traditional folk music of Jews in Eastern Europe. Like jazz and cumbia, the genre has proved extraordinarily versatile. Today, there are klezmer groups combining Cuban and tango rhythms, activist songs, Black spirituals, classical music and more.
Yidstock, the festival of new Yiddish music in Amherst, Massachusetts, attracts crowds every year; there are also klezmer festivals in Canada, Germany, Poland and Israel. My own film, “My Mexican Shiva” – about the death of a patriarch in a dysfunctional Mexican Jewish family – mixes klezmer with mariachi.
Let enthusiasm not hide the truth, though.
The number of Yiddish speakers worldwide remains relatively small: by one estimation, between 500,000 and 1 million. The majority are ultra-Orthodox Jews, concentrated in New York and Jerusalem. The “new” speakers, mostly secular, constitute but a fraction of the total.
Yiddish’s history is anything but a straight line; the path of Yiddish twists and turns. All to say that this is not its first “revival.” In the Pale of Settlement, it was often looked down on as a language of women, children and the illiterate. It would take a long time for Yiddish to become the main language of politics, business and education.
In the second half of the 19th century, writers like Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Peretz began writing novels in Yiddish in order to reach the masses and give Yiddish a sense of legitimacy. In 1978, Isaac Bashevis Singer, the only Yiddish writer so far to win the Nobel Prize, described it as “a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics.”
I am convinced that the current revival has much to do with that last point. Yiddish is just one of dozens of Jewish languages, including Ladino, Judeo-Italian and Judeo-Persian. The two most prominent, Hebrew and Yiddish, have always been unlikely bedfellows, frequently fighting with each other. And amid the Israel-Hamas war, as many diaspora Jews struggle with their views of Israel, some see Yiddish as offering a degree of impartiality.
No matter where today’s revival goes, Yiddish is far from dead. But even if it were, as Singer said in his Nobel speech: “The deader the language, the more alive is the ghost.”
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Ilan Stavans, Amherst College
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Ilan Stavans frequently lectures and teaches at the 92nd Street Y, the Yiddish Book Center, YIVO, and other Jewish organizations. On dozens of occasions, he has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment of the Arts, and other government organizations for programs that explore Jewish language and culture. 
