ames, I never heard bitterness from you before. I’m sorry for the feelings I caused.
Jothar, you think she hit the nail on the head? Please!
I truly never heard anyone describe Yiddish as “another way to separate Jews”. SEPARATE JEWS??? Just the opposite – it unites Jews from all over the world. Unfortunately, not ALL Jews, but it is certainly not designed to exclude them. Read that again: Yiddish is NOT DESIGNED to EXCLUDE JEWS!!!!
Sephardim don’t natively speak Yiddish. And there’s no reason why they should have to learn it either. But I don’t understand resentment against the language. (I do understand why there is resentment against speaking Ivrit, though). Hey, we’re never going to have a universal language. We might get universal healthcare though.
The rules in the forum are now that Yiddish is forbidden. I am fine with complying with this. But please don’t take that resentment outside of these boards. And if YW wants to allow Yiddish in the future, I will have no problem traslating everything that I or some other poster types in Yiddish. In fact, I would enjoy doing so.
I myself did not grow up speaking Yiddish. Though I am a first generation American (perhaps because this), my parents never spoke to me in foreign languages. I learned it as I got older. Even now, I don’t speak Yiddish well – I can’t really keep up in conversation, but when I’m sitting at a computer you don’t know how long it takes me to come up with the words so it may seem like I’m fluent.