For leftist American Jews displaced from Europe by the Diaspora and the Holocaust, their opposition to Israel poses a conflict regarding any reconciliation between American Jewish culture and the Hebrew language. In fact, in American politics, it’s most often the Christian Evangelical right that advocates for Israeli nationalism. I do not personally know a single American Jew who supports Israeli nationalism, after all, why would we? We’re American. It’s a heavily used antisemitic stereotype - called the “dual loyalty stereotype” - that we are double agents, out to subvert the American agenda for the Israeli one.
I cannot speak for all American Jews, but as one who is surrounded by this discourse, I can confidently say many American Jews feel no connection to Israel at all. Why then, is it so important that Duolingo released a Yiddish course, and so disappointing that it took them so long?Īs Gen Z continues to age up, the American Jewish stance on Israeli-Palestine relationships has further liberalized. Yiddish today is largely spoken by small Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish communities in New York and Quebec. Meanwhile, it cannot be calculated how many Yiddish speakers were lost in that time the native Yiddish-speaking population is a rapidly aging group that has been decimated by the Holocaust, or the shoah, remembered by Jews on Yom Hashoah, the day after Duolingo released their Yiddish course.
Duo lingo yiddish free#
While this is most certainly a net positive - a free language learning option to make an endangered language more accessible to students - it’s important to remember that praise towards the Duolingo corporation itself is wholly unwarranted.Įven though Duolingo is a company worth billions of dollars, many of its language courses are created in the same way: through unpaid volunteers, creating language courses in the “Incubator.” For the last five years, a Yiddish course has been crawling like molasses through the Incubator by the sheer goodwill of volunteers.
To the delight of Yiddishists and language-lovers everywhere, on April 6 the free language learning app Duolingo finally released a Yiddish course for English speakers.
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