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In his superb study of Yiddish, Words on Fire, Professor Dovid Katz tells of an incident that troubles me. The Israeli government hosted a reception in the early years of the Jewish state for Rozka Korczak, a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto who organized partisan units in the forests to fight the Germans. Korczak, according to Katz’s account, was one of the first partisans in the nascent Jewish state to speak about her experiences and her heroism in the Shoah.At the reception, she told her story in Yiddish.David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, became visibly upset as the survivor told her tale. Eventually and abruptly, he stormed out of the reception, claiming – in Hebrew – “the language grates on my ears.”Yiddish was Ben-Gurion’s first language, as it was for every Israeli leader at that reception. Zionists had even published exhortations in Yiddish to convince young Jews in Eastern Europe to join the movement and make aliya. […] Yiddish was not a “jargon” or a “dialect” – it was a powerhouse that could have undermined the Zionist project.

destroying the strength of jewish diaspora culture was necessary to creating the “jewish state”

NEW YORK – The nearly 100-year-old photo features half a dozen young Jewish men all bandaged up. They appear to be victims of a pogrom.

Except, as the caption reveals, this photo was not taken in Eastern Europe. Nor were the attackers non-Jews.

In fact, these young men were beaten up in Tel Aviv by fellow Jews. Their crime? Speaking Yiddish in public.

Published in a Jewish weekly in Warsaw, this black-and-white photo, taken in 1928, is part of an exhibit that opened this week at New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, dedicated to “Palestinian Yiddish.” That is, Yiddish spoken before 1948 in the territory that encompasses the modern State of Israel.

A major focus of the exhibit is the outright hostility and disdain shown by many of the early Jewish settlers toward the Yiddish language. In creating a “new Jew” in what they called the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel), these fervent, Hebrew-speaking Zionists were determined to break away from anything that smacked of the Diaspora – first and foremost the language widely spoken by European Jews.

“Negating the Diaspora was a core part of the ideology of early 20th-century Zionism, and for this reason Yiddish had to be suppressed,” says YIVO academic adviser Eddy Portnoy, who curated the exhibit. “It was almost like a Jewish self-hatred.”

Life kills!