Yiddish Enjoys a Revival in Stories and Songs : Education: Berkeley and other universities offer courses in the language, which has contributed words, even appetites.

Ever wondered why a schmoozer isn’t a nebbish? Why a yenta should become a mensch? Why a klutz needs some mazal?

Oy vey!

The answers, like the questions, come from Yiddish.

At the University of California and a handful of other schools around the country, students are learning just that.

“I love the sound of Yiddish,” said 69-year-old Jesse Rabinowitz, a retired professor of biochemistry at Berkeley. “It’s the expressiveness, but it’s also a view of the world and individuals and their feeling for other people.”

Rabinowitz is one of 10 students enrolled in the first Yiddish course at Berkeley in five years, said Eli Katz, a professor emeritus of linguistics at Sonoma State University who teaches the class.

Cal has joined about 50 universities around the world that offer Yiddish, said Philip (Fishl) Kutner, who publishes a monthly Yiddish newsletter in San Mateo, Calif. Those universities include Harvard, Columbia, Ohio State, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, McGill, the University of Toronto and Oxford University in England.

“There is certainly a huge resurgence of interest in Yiddish culture,” said Aaron Lansky, director of the National Yiddish Book Center in South Hadley, Mass.

When Lansky began preserving donated Yiddish books 10 years ago, only about six universities in North America held significant Yiddish collections. Since then, the center has established collections at 207 universities, colleges and research centers worldwide.

“The reason that Yiddish has appeal is that it helps to explain an immediate social connection: ‘Where do we come from?’ ” Lansky said. “Yiddish had been the spoken language of more than three-quarters of the world’s Jews for the past 1,000 years.”

Yiddish began 1,000 years ago along Germany’s Rhine River. It grew from German dialects of the Middle Ages and includes words from Hebrew and Aramaic, two ancient Semitic languages. Other elements come from Romance languages, such as Old French and Italian, and Slavic tongues, such as Polish, Czech and Ukrainian.

By the 1500s, Yiddish was well established as a language in Eastern Europe, where 80% of world Jewry lived by the 19th Century, Lansky said.

When persecution prompted vast numbers of Eastern European Jews to emigrate to the United States in the late 1800s, Yiddish words and idioms slowly became American expressions.

The Yiddish word schmooze is synonymous with chatting. A nebbish became a common description for a pathetic person. A yenta--a gossip--contrasts with a mensch, a person of great kindness and humanity. A klutz needs mazal--luck--to deal with his clumsiness.

The common expressions “Thanks for nothing” and “Go jump in a lake” come from the Yiddish, “Many thanks in your belly button,” and, “Go whistle in the ocean.”

Yiddish was the “mame loshen,” or mother tongue, of many international figures, including Yiddish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won a Nobel Prize for literature in 1978; Golda Meir, Israel’s only female prime minister; artist Marc Chagall, and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

Despite perceptions that it is merely slang or bastardized German, Yiddish once flourished in newspapers and the theater. Its rich body of literature, songs and poetry is written in Hebrew characters with Yiddish grammar.

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What Yiddish lacks most today is speakers. Yiddish is rarely spoken outside communities of extremely Orthodox Jews or pockets of Eastern European immigrants.

What prompted the near death of Yiddish? “There is no question the Holocaust was the catalyst,” Lansky said.

Before World War II, about 11 million people spoke Yiddish, but only half that number survived Adolf Hitler’s efforts to exterminate the Jews of Europe, he said.

Josef Stalin dealt the language another blow when he ordered the execution of 24 major Yiddish writers in 1952.

“It took a generation after the Holocaust to catch our breath and move on from here,” said Lansky.

“We’re really the last generation with firsthand knowledge of Jews who were born and grew up in Eastern Europe. As a result, we are the ones who have this opportunity to make this historical connection.”

For Rabinowitz and other students at Berkeley, studying Yiddish is a way to reclaim the culture of their ancestors.

“My mom speaks Yiddish. My whole family speaks Yiddish. I want to speak it already,” said 18-year-old Jennifer Kaufman.

For students who are not Jewish, Yiddish is a professional concern or an exotic hobby.

“When I saw that this was offered, then I thought this was a good way to overcome the death of a language,” said Mary Bucholtz, 27, who is earning a doctorate in linguistics.

“I think that’s the responsibility of all linguists, and anybody who is concerned with the loss of cultural diversity.”

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Lisa Alcalay Klug’s father is a native Yiddish speaker from Poland; Klug is Yiddish for clever.