Welcome to the Saturday edition of The Conversation U.S.’s Daily newsletter.
If you’ve called yourself a “klutz,” praised someone as a “mensch” or complained about having to “schlep” somewhere, you might know that those words are Yiddish: the language spoken for centuries by Jews in central and eastern Europe. For many American Jews, Yiddish summons up nostalgia. It’s a bridge to a world gone by – societies uprooted by immigration and the Holocaust.
But Yiddish’s horizons went far beyond those geographic borders. Jewish communities used the language from South Africa to Mexico, where author Ilan Stavans’ father was a Yiddish actor. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been a surge of interest in studying Yiddish.
And Stavans, a professor at Amherst College, argues that the tongue’s global reach is finally getting its due. Over time, he writes, Yiddish “became a portable homeland for people in countless diasporas” – and its history “is anything but a straight line.”
This week we also liked stories on how Pennsylvania is using environmental protections to push back against data center development, the history of Stars and Stripes in the wake of the Pentagon’s recent firing of top staffers, and why AI technology is getting better at detecting skin cancer, but only for light-skinned people.
Did somebody forward this email to you? Subscribe to our daily and weekly newsletters here.
