Shtetl is the word for small town, referring to the towns of Eastern Europe where Yiddish was the predominantly spoken language by its Jewish residents. Shtetlakh (plural) were incubators of Yiddish language and culture, linked by travelling Yiddish-speaking merchants, scholars, and musicians—effectively creating a cultural network that nurtured a sense of peoplehood among its users.
The Shtetl is now gone, and Yiddish is adapting to life without the shtetl—but with the massive influx of technological innovations. My research aims to study new ways in which Yiddish is thriving in today’s technology-driven world. As a part of my project, I created a modern shtetl: a podcast called The Meta Shtetl that aims to create a virtual global network by providing a platform for Yiddish speakers I interview, from a young American farmer to an octogenarian Russian academic. By learning about personal experiences of guests, the podcast grapples with the larger task of preserving a dying culture and asks what it means to reclaim a language not only as a communicative tool but also as an ethical and historical imperative.
The second part of my project is to analyze these podcast interviews to assess the effects of technology on today’s proliferation of Yiddish and, more broadly, to consider the extent to which Yiddish can serve as a valuable case study for assessing the relationships of cultural minorities to the majority culture. Besides creating an invaluable archive of individual voices, taken together, these interviews broach broader questions about how to consider influences of minority groups on a majority culture. Alongside relevant secondary materials, my interview-based data seeks to demonstrate that the model for detecting minority influences of Yiddish on the majority culture might also be a valuable tool for examining other minority languages.
I use the case study of Yiddish within its host cultures, such as mainstream American and Russian literature, to track how minority cultures’ deep influences on mainstream cultures often go unnoticed or ignored. Other relevant case studies that have been brought to the fore in the podcast so far include Irish-Gaelic, and Tamil. The interviews and my ongoing accompanying research underscore the resilience of Yiddish, despite marginalization, and seek to discover how minority languages can serve as powerful tools for creative resistance and cultural continuity.