Yiddishist movement
However, many maskilim, particularly in the Russian Empire, expanded the Yiddish press to use it as a tool to spread their enlightenment ideas, thereby building a platform for future Yiddishists.
[6] In a subsequent essay published in the same periodical, he also proposed Yiddish as a bridge linking Jewish and European cultures.
[6] Scholar Mordkhe Schaechter characterizes Lifshitz as "[t]he first conscious, goal-oriented language reformer" in the field of Yiddish, and highlights his pivotal role in countering the negative attitudes toward the language propagated within the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment movement: Although an adherent of the Enlightenment, [Lifshitz] broke with its sterile anti-Yiddish philosophy, to become an early ideologue of Yiddishism and of Yiddish-language planning.
The organizers of this gathering (Benno Straucher, Nathan Birnbaum, Chaim Zhitlowsky, David Pinski, and Jacob Gordin) expressed a sense of urgency to the delegates that Yiddish as a language and as the binding glue of Jews throughout Eastern Europe needed help.
"[10][11] Zionist activists were, however, not opposed to this decision; Yiddish was seen as the realistic choice of a language to organize the Jews of Eastern Europe for Jewish nationalism.
He characterized his advocacy of Yiddish as "realistic" Jewish nationalism, contrasted to the "visionary" Hebraists and the "self-hating" assimilationists who adopted Russian or Polish.
Simultaneously, the Division of History, originally headed by Elias Tcherikower, translated major works from Russian to Yiddish and conducted further research on historical topics.
Stalin ordered the execution of twenty-four prominent Yiddish scholars and artists in the Soviet Union all in a single night.
[5][16] In 1928, the Soviet Union created the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (Yiddish: ייִדישע אווטאָנאָמע געגנט, romanized: Yidishe Avtonome Gegnt[b]).
[21] The Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews that came to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were also often underpaid and overworked in unsafe conditions, resulting in the creation of many Jewish unions.
[22] Owing in a large part to the efforts of the Yiddishist movement, Yiddish, before World War II, was becoming a major language, spoken by over 11,000,000 people.
[26] Di Goldene Keyt was a literary journal started by Avrom Sutzkever in 1949 in an attempt to bridge the gap between Yiddish and Hebrew literature.
[27] In this journal, Yiddish and Hebrew poems and pieces of literature were published but much of Sutzkever’s work went unrecognized until the 1980s because of the fierce rivalry between Hebraists and Yiddishists.
[28] Particularly in the United States, the use of Yiddish has become a part of the identity of young Jewish Americans ranging from queer to orthodox individuals.
[1] Scholars including Uriel Weinreich, Mordkhe Schaechter, and Marvin Herzog were especially influential in establishing American academic Yiddish programs.
