Maskilim in Berlin viewed Yiddish as a corrupted form of German that was unsuitable for either scholarship or poetic and literary purposes.
[8][9] According to the Yiddish linguist Nochum Shtif, the Yiddishist movement came into being as a backlash to anti-Yiddish sentiment.
[10] Some Ashkenazi anti-Zionists and non-Zionists have championed the Yiddish language for religious or political reasons, in opposition to Zionist movement's support of Hebrew in Israel.
Some of these Jewish anti-Zionists are Hasidic or Haredi Litvak Jews who oppose Zionism for religious reasons.
[11] During the late 2010s and early 2020s, young Jewish leftists in Melbourne, Australia, began to champion the Yiddish language as an alternative to Hebrew and Zionism.