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There Have been many, who, speaking glibly about American Yiddish, have predicted its disappearance in the near future. In an article entitled “Notes on American Yiddish”, George Wolfe, a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Jewish Social Work in New York, discusses the status of Yiddish in America, in the August issue of the American Mercury.

He says: “The first to pronounce the doom of Yiddish were the condescending and philanthropic German Jews. These benefactors of their less fortunate East European co-religionists had a touching faith in the ability of neighborhood settlements, Americanization programs and lectures on civics to do away with the scorned ‘Ghetto jargon’….

“Professor Leo Wiener, Slavonic scholar, Harvard professor and pioneer historian of Yiddish literature, took a similar view in 1898….

“But since that time,” writes Mr. Wolfe, “Yiddish has undergone remarkable developments in this country. The Yiddish press, to take the most striking example, has in the course of the past thirty-five years grown from an insignificant number of struggling, bitterly partisan organs, written for the most part in the kind of Yiddish known as ‘deutschmerish’, to over forty influential and intelligent publications, with a total circulation that, despite the depression and the cutting off of Jewish immigration, still reaches impressive figures. According to the 1930 Federal Census, 1,222,658 Jews gave Yiddish as their mother tongue.”

Discussing the differences in Yiddish as it is spoken in America and other parts of the world, he states that American Yiddish “differs so radically from the Yiddish spoken and written in European countries that visitors to the Old Country often have great difficulty making themselves understood.”

However, the bringing over into Yiddish of Americanisms has not gone unchallenged. The sponsors of “pure” Yiddish, known as the “Yiddishists”, have labored greatly to perpetuate Yiddish wherever Jews are. “They ridicule the indiscriminate use of English loan-words”, writes Mr. Wolfe. “From the platform, in the press and in conversation they deplore the development of a bastard Yiddish in America. They call it the potato-chicken-kitchen language, the barbaric language, the language of the streets, and so forth.”

This attitude has not found favor with all the Yiddish writers in America. There are some, like Abraham Cahan, for nearly thirty-five years the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, who either encourage or at least tolerate the introduction of English elements into Yiddish.

Whether or not Yiddish will survive in this country, Mr. Wolfe does not know, but what is needed, he says, is sound research on the various aspects of American Yiddish.

ANTI-SEMITISM IMPLIED

The anti-Semitism of the Nazis differs considerably from traditional anti-Semitism, states Angelo S. Rappoport in the English periodical, National Review, of July. The key to the situation and the explanation of the apparent contradiction between anti-Semitism and Kultur, he states, are to be found in that “sinister aberration of thought on racial questions which is known as ‘Germanism’. It is the creed in which the majority of the German nation moves and lives and has its being. This creed is not only found in the teachings of almost all German philosophers, historians and literateurs, but it is also shared by the bulk of the nation…. Germanism and anti-Semitism go hand in hand.”

Defining “Germanism”, Mr. Rappoport states that it is a doctrine of special election. “Proclaiming the superiority of the Germanic race and its absolute right to subjugate or eliminate all other races, it is the glorification of everything German, and the hatred and scorn of everything which is not German….The pivot of Germanism may thus be said to be the double belief in the supremacy of the Germanic race and in its predestination, for its ultimate triumph is both providential and determined….”

With this consideration in view, Mr. Rappoport feels that the “anti-Semitism of the Nazis is, therefore, far from being an end in itself, but a mere, curtain-raiser, easily staged. It is a prelude to a much bigger drama which the actors hope to play…It will be a drama in four acts: Revision, Restitution, Revanche and Reparation….And if the European statesmen do not watch with a jealous eye, all Pacts of Peace will serve to disguise from the world, behind the camouflage of peace, the preparation for an advance of Germanism towards the mastery of Europe.”