YIDDISH AND THE HOLOCAUST IN POSWAR AMERICAN JEWISH LIFE
YIDDISH AND THE HOLOCAUST IN POSWAR AMERICAN JEWISH LIFE

Summary/Abstract: ABSTRACT In the aftermath of the Holocaust nearly every segment of American Jewry found a way to both memorialize the tragedy and make a claim that the slaughter of Europe’s six million Jews made their own institutional and organizational agenda particularly salient. Each swathe of American Jewry, whether a religious group, a political one, or a cultural one, articulated to its own constituents and to the broad American Jewish public that its interpretation of Jewish history and the best interests of the Jewish future functioned as an, or perhaps the, best and most fitting memorial to the “martyrs.” Advocates for Yiddish made a particularly articulate and impassioned appeal to the Jewish public to support Yiddish-based education and to sustain Yiddish language cultural programs as a way to recall the six million. They claimed repeatedly as they sought community support for their cultural endeavors and as they tried to convince parents to send their children to Yiddish language schools that the six million had all been Yiddish speakers and that engaging with Yiddish constituted the most powerful way to hallow the memories of those who had perished. While these schools and other cultural institutions had been in existence since the second decade of the twentieth century, the Holocaust leant urgency to their work and gave them a new tool in their efforts to keep the language alive and vibrant.

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