“YidLife Crisis” and “Jewbellish”: Yiddish Ethnolinguistic Infusion on YouTube

• In Event: 21st Century Yiddish Popular Culture: Quotations, Translations, Reverberations

Abstract

In North America in the 21st century, people outside of Yiddish-speaking circles engage with Yiddish in multiple ways, including through loanwords used within English, through classes and language-learning platforms like Duolingo, and through material and audiovisual culture, such as books, music, films, and videos. This talk analyzes one aspect of this cultural production: comedic YouTube videos. First, I offer theoretical framing, focusing on language ideologies, postvernacularity (Shandler 2005), metalinguistic community (Avineri 2012), ethnolinguistic infusion (Benor 2020), and created language spaces (Margolis 2023). Then I analyze two videos, one by YidLife Crisis and one by Jewbellish, which highlight different types of Yiddish (klal-shprakh and khsidish) and their different communities of use. My analysis focuses on language mixing, metalinguistic orientation, and visual representation. I analyze viewers' comments on those videos and interviews with two of the creators, Jamie Elman and Mendy Pellin. My research questions are: What happens when Yiddish is infused beyond the Jewish community in a public venue like YouTube? What language ideologies are expressed or implied by the creators and the consumers?

The primarily English videos incorporate significant amounts of Yiddish and have a metalinguistic orientation. They use code switching, with some sections in English and some in Yiddish, in contrast to the translanguaging of English-Yiddish cultural products with a bilingual orientation, like recordings by Mickey Katz and Lipa Schmeltzer. I argue that this postvernacular language use creates metalinguistic communities with asynchronous participation and serves a pedagogical function. The videos and the discussion in the comments socialize viewers to particular ideologies about Yiddish, such as links between types of Jews and Yiddish, components of Yiddish, dialects of Yiddish, and similarities and differences between Yiddish and German. Commenters emphasize their personal connections to Yiddish, and some state that the videos have inspired them to pursue Yiddish studies. The videos hold different layers of meaning and comedy for viewers with different levels of linguistic and cultural knowledge. Video clips are shown, and the analysis is situated in historical context.

Author

• Sarah Bunin Benor, Hebrew Union College