Why do I spend so much time creating free high quality printable materials of old Yiddish texts and music, using open source tools?
Because I think that such materials and tools must be available to everyone—not just those privileged with academic access—if we want to bridge the chasm created between us and our ancestors by the Holocaust and the era of assimilation, and effect a Yiddish cultural revival in our Diaspora.
This is not to erase the existence of contemporary Yiddish speaking communities, but those communities are so isolated from even the rest of the Jewish people, and so conservative, that despite the fact that those traits enabled them to keep Yiddish as a living language—that the rest of us must take the initiative if we want to be a part of Yiddish culture.
@kittybecca That's a good point. Let's say "we have to take initiative too"
@kittybecca I just looked at the Yiddish Farm summer program application and holy Moses, they don't have scholarships and I will probably never be able to afford it even if they let me bring the kids at all, not to mention for free
@derpayatz i didn't look into it in that much detail... that sucks. i'm sure i wouldn't either
@kittybecca $2950, plus $20 refundable application fee, payable by check
@kittybecca This is for two and a half weeks.
@kittybecca And you work the whole time
@kittybecca we should find some native speakers who want to do better, like it's just a house, you pay rent like normal, pay in to the food budget, do the dishes, you work at the workshop in the basement or whatever and get paid. But everything is in Yiddish and you can only stay for 2 months unless you're a permanent collective member
@kittybecca now to find native/fluent speakers who are Communist, total fanatics, and time on their hands. And good credit. lmao
@kittybecca btw IDK about you but I had persistent intrusive antisemitic thoughts while I was looking this up and I feel pretty gross
@derpayatz you alright? it happens. i've learned to let a lot of those thoughts go through DBT. they have as much power as i give them. it's possible to learn to just let them float away.
@derpayatz but it's hard and i'm not always the best at it
@derpayatz + it's genuinely horrible and a shande the way large parts of mainstream Judaism are inaccessible to working-class Jews, disabled Jews, etc..
@kittybecca I'm ok, thank you. I just wanted to voice it
@derpayatz i think there are gestures by some part of those communities toward a goodwilled outreach to us. i'm especially thinking of the Yiddish Farm. conservative doesn't have to mean conservative politics or closed-mindedness, and for most of American Jewish history, it really hasn't