Who'd Have Guessed--Matthew Yglesias Is A Big Fan Of Yiddish!

I've posted before about Matthew Yglesias's arrival in Israel, and his surprise to discover that there are Christians in Israel.

Now Yaacov Lozowick has filled in another hole in Yglesias's knowledge.


Yglesias writes:

Since I’ve got Israel on the brain, it strikes me in this regard that it’s perhaps unfortunate that the early Zionist leaders decided to revive Hebrew rather than use the Jewish state to ensure the continued existence of Yiddish and Ladino. The successful revival is enormously impressive as a pure example of clear ideological vision but that’s a lot of lost literature and such.

Who would have thought that Yglesias was such a maven!

The truth is--he's not, as Lozowick points out:

Umm, Matthew: Yiddish literature didn't really start until the 2nd half of the 19th century, and Ladino, so far as I know, never created much literature at all. This means that modern Hebrew literature was born at roughly the exact same moment in time as Yiddish literature; not to mention everything else that was ever created in Hebrew, all along.

Perhaps Yglesias should stick to the topics he really knows, like the modern history of Zionism, 19th century to present.

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