PREDICTIONS 02.20.08

Surprisingly, Yiddish will enjoy a major revival in 2009. Adults will begin to study the language in small groups and at retreats, and many will send their children to Yiddish-speaking summer camps. Yiddish theaters will spring up throughout the United States, and new feature length-films will be made entirely in Yiddish. The cause of this revival: A pop song that becomes a national hit, recorded in Yiddish, and based on the old Yiddish standard “Rozhinkes mit Mandlen.” The language, which currently had about 50,000 speakers worldwide, down from 11 million before World War II, with soon have more than a million people boasting a degree of fluency in the tongue, most in the United States. More interestingly, many of these new speakers will not be Jewish, even though the language evolved in the Jewish community of Europe and, for most of its history, was almost exclusively spoken by Jews.