– Bloom, sophomore at Mount Holyoke College

I knew A “Trip the Yiddishland” was going to be life changing when I found myself onstage with a friend I’d made only days before, singing a duet of one of my favorite Yiddish songs for an intergenerational crowd of Yiddishists. While I heard people clapping along and watched an older couple dancing to our singing, I realized that these people had become my classmates, roommates, castmates, duet partners, and friends, all within the span of a week.

The “Trip to Yiddishland,” held every summer by the Workers Circle, is a week-long retreat focused on Yiddish language, culture, and community. The Workers Circle, first established in 1900 as a mutual aid organization, has been at the intersection of Yiddish and social justice for over a century. The organization was established to provide support and community for working-class, mostly Yiddish-speaking Jews who had found themselves facing discrimination and poor working conditions upon their arrival in America. Now a non-profit, the Workers Circle continues to be a leading force in Jewish activism, and they offer a large catalog of Yiddish language and culture classes. As someone who has been looking for ways to get involved with Yiddishism in leftist spaces, I was thrilled at the opportunity to engage with this organization, and Yiddishland did not disappoint.

Bloom on right in red top

On my first day at Yiddishland, I was approached during breakfast by an older woman who seemed equal parts delighted and confused by the number of college students at the retreat. She asked me what I was doing at “a place like this,” and how so many young people had come to be interested in such a program. While our difference in age seemed at first to be the possible cause of a disconnect, my reasons for being there ended up being pretty similar to hers: Both of us, like many other attendees, were there because our families had a history of speaking Yiddish, we wanted to connect with our culture, and we were seeking a community of people invested in Yiddish and all the ways that it connected to social justice work historically and today. This interaction also marked the first Yiddish conversation I ever had outside of an academic setting, a detail which is quite telling of some of the major generational differences in engagement with Yiddishist spaces.

I couldn’t think of a better way to end my summer than through a week of radical Yiddish-based community and learning. The recent influx of young people engaging with Yiddishism and the steadily growing nature of the Trip to Yiddishland program was reflected in this year’s attendance, which included a group of fifteen college students that I had the opportunity to be a part of. The most interesting and rewarding aspect of the trip for me was being in such a welcoming intergenerational space and being able to witness the ways that people of different generations view Yiddish, its connection to activism, and the Workers Circle. This felt most prominent at mealtimes, enjoying a bowl of matzo ball soup by the lake after my daily “Secrets of a Gentle Diva” singing class and listening to the chorus of people chatting in both Yiddish and English.

For me, learning Yiddish has been radical in and of itself because my family stopped speaking Yiddish in an effort to assimilate into mainstream American culture. I never heard a word of Yiddish in my childhood. For the woman I talked to on the first day and for most of the older attendees, Yiddish has always been a part of their lives. Their original exposure to and learning of Yiddish was through childhood interactions and listening to their parents speak– worlds apart from my experience first learning about Yiddish through classrooms and textbooks. Nevertheless, the very act of learning Yiddish feels like a reclamation and embracement of a part of Jewish culture that has been both downplayed and overlooked. It is an embracement of a beautiful tradition built in Diaspora, and it is a way to stay connected to the everyday cultural aspects of Judaism. For me, discovering Yiddishism felt like finally arriving at a destination I didn’t even know I was trying to reach — it felt like finding home.

For many of us, Yiddishism is a way to engage in activism and social justice work through a Jewish lens that is separate from modern-day Zionism and is focused on making a homeland and building a community wherever we are, as well as working to make that possible for everyone. The term “Jewish social justice” sounds broad because it is broad — different people focus on different issues, and not everybody stands for the same things. The principles and ideals of Judaism as a religion and as a culture, mixed with the experiences that people bring from lives spent trying to find belonging in antisemitic and hostile places, have led to a unique Jewish perspective on activism. The Workers Circle in particular has a long history of working-class immigrant members fighting for equity. In places like Yiddishland, the impact of this can be seen spanning generations, and intergenerational conversations are an incredible opportunity to understand different perspectives and priorities within a broader movement. At Yiddishland, generational differences are not an obstacle to overcome but rather a place to explore different perspectives. The common goals that we share can be celebrated and worked towards together.