After a long yet gratifying day of studying Yiddish, I decided I wanted to explore Tel Aviv. I went along with another fellow, Flora, to the Shuk HaCarmel (the Carmel Market) to walk around and see what the market had to offer. As we started our walk through the market, we naturally began speaking in Yiddish, and decided that we would not speak an ounce of English to each other until we left the market. We felt confident discussing the quality of the various items the market had on display, or how the man at the spice station definitely ripped us off. I\u2019m not sure how long we walked around the market for \u2013 it felt like time slowed down in our little only-speaking-in-Yiddish universe. At one point, as we admired some jewelry, two girls came up to us and asked: \u201cNot to be rude, but what language are you guys speaking? We don\u2019t recognize it.\u201d \u201cYiddish,\u201d we replied. \u201cHuh. I thought it sounded like German,\u201d one replied back, to which we said \u05f4\u05e0\u05d9\u05d9\u05df, \u05de\u05d9\u05e8 \u05e8\u05e2\u05d3\u05df \u05d3\u05d9 \u05de\u05d0\u05b7\u05de\u05e2 \u05dc\u05e9\u05d5\u05df!\u05f4 to which we got blank stares back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was the first time I had ever had a full length, continuous conversation in Yiddish outside of the classroom. I felt so amazed and proud that in such a short amount of time, I learned to really speak in Yiddish (and fill Israel with yet another Jewish language!) I felt as though I was seeing just how much my hard work was paying off. It was a lot of fun to speak Yiddish outside of the classroom, and it became our own kind of secret language at the market that no one else could understand. The best part about speaking in Yiddish at the market was that we were not obviously American tourists! –Well, that is until our English came back out when we wanted to buy something… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After a long yet gratifying day of studying Yiddish, I decided I wanted to explore Tel Aviv. I went along with another fellow, Flora, to the Shuk HaCarmel (the Carmel Market) to walk around and see what the market had to offer. As we started our walk through the market, we naturally began speaking in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":159,"featured_media":4544,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[159],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-naomi-fellowship"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s9teox-4543","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_4029-scaled.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4543"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4547,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4543\/revisions\/4547"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewishstudiescolumbia.com\/myny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}