One of the most challenging elements of the Naomi Prawer Kadar fellowship was living in Tel Aviv while studying Yiddish. I had already lived in Israel for two years, but in a very different environment. I was used to being in a Yeshiva on a kibbutz in the middle of nowhere. Tel Aviv was the total opposite–a cosmopolitan beach city full of secular Jews.
The backdrop of Tel Aviv lent a new dimension to our study of Yiddish. What does it mean to study a language of exile in the Jewish state, the center of Zionism? Why does the language and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe matter when we have a thriving Jewish center in Israel? Indeed, those Jews and that culture are all but gone, whereas the Jews of Israel are busy creating new Jewish life. It is at times disheartening to have to constantly remind oneself of the importance of the project of keeping Yiddish alive, when the project of Zionism has been (by some standards) so successful. When reuniting with old Israeli friends, this was the question that they most frequently posed. It seemed to disappoint them that someone ready to devote energy in the Jewish future would not channel that energy into strengthening the state of Israel and its culture. One of my friends put it well when he described what he perceived as the mantra of modern Yiddishists as “galus lekhatkhila”, or exile as an ideal state. While the Zionist narrative has always understood diaspora Judaism as a suffering to be endured until the founding of the Jewish homeland, Yiddish thought celebrates the Jews’ existance outside of Israel. Believing in the intrinsic value of life in exile while living in Tel Aviv lent a counter-cultural valence to my everyday life. Instead of being awed by the trappings of the Zionist state (e.g. street signs with mini-biographies of Jewish historical figures written in Hebrew) I found myself imagining a Jewish settlement where Yiddish was the language and where the culture more closely resembled that of secular Eastern Europeans.
To further complicate things, during this summer I made the decision to outwardly present as more secular. I did not wear a yarmulke or tzitzit and I regularly ate in non-Kosher restaurants. As we learned about countless Yiddish writers and thinkers who had started their lives in traditional religious environments and then discovered the Jewish enlightenment and secular Yiddish thought and literature, I started to see myself at least partially in that tradition. It certainly augmented my understanding of Yiddish literature to be familiar with biblical and rabbinic texts, but I felt that having spent two years in Yeshiva contributed more than just a knowledge of literary references. In one of his lectures about Yiddish as a discipline, Professor Justin Cammy explained how Yiddish had historically been studied as a field which was far more expansive than just a language. The study of Yiddish was the study of one thousand years of Jews in Eastern Europe, which encapsulated culture, art, politics, and much more. So much of the language was informed by the other aspects of Jewish life, of which Torah and rabbinics were a central part. To understand Torah deeply, therefore, was to understand some of the original animating force of the language. Carrying that notion with me as I lived the life of a secular Yiddishist in Tel Aviv added a richness to my experience for which I am truly grateful.