(RNS and NPR) — Lindsey Bloom, a senior at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, grew up going to Hebrew school and attending a synagogue with an Israeli flag hanging near the front of the sanctuary. However, as she has sought to distance herself from Israel’s government in recent years, she said she didn’t know of other ways to engage with Jewish culture — until she learned about Yiddish.
“I’ve definitely talked to quite a few people that just stopped engaging with their Judaism because they didn’t know where to go,” Bloom told RNS and NPR. “That was the case for me. And then I got into Yiddish, and I was, like, oh, this is actually a lot better. I actually align with this a lot more.”
Bloom isn’t alone. The language app Duolingo reported that as of this year, roughly 296,000 people around the world are studying the language with 10th-century European roots. An estimated 60% of them are under 25 years old.
Mindl Cohen, the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center, an Amherst, Massachusetts-based organization that promotes Yiddish culture and literature, said the young people she teaches are engaging with the culture and language in myriad ways. They are performing new plays, making music that’s inspired by Yiddish music of the early 20th century and translating Yiddish literature, she said.
The Yiddish trend seems to be especially prominent for college students like Bloom who seek to hone a Jewish identity and culture removed from support for the state of Israel …
