- February 18, 2026
- 12:09 pm
- Ukraine, Video
In early February 2026, Ukraїner released a conversation about the Yiddish language as part of the podcast “Language Issue” — a Ukrainian project about languages considered vulnerable and in need of support. The guest of the episode is Tetiana Nepypenko, a researcher and teacher of Yiddish, translator, and literary scholar; the conversation is led by Bohdana Romantsova. The episode was made in collaboration with House of Europe with the support of the European Union.
Key points from the conversation in text version (Ukr.): https://www.ukrainer.net/tetiana-nepypenko-idysh/
The key framework of the conversation is formulated simply and strictly: Yiddish is not a “language somewhere alongside Ukrainian history,” but part of the fabric of this history, because before World War II, millions spoke Yiddish in Europe, and in the territory of modern Ukraine, there were towns and villages where Yiddish was not a marginal code but an ordinary everyday reality — the language of family, trade, press, theater, and literature. Nepypenko separately articulates the scale of the loss: the Yiddish-speaking community in Ukraine sharply decreased due to the Holocaust and Soviet repressions, and after the creation of Israel, Yiddish in the state project was pushed aside as “diasporic” — in favor of Hebrew.
Yiddish and Hebrew are not “two variants of one,” but two different language systems
One of Nepypenko’s first specific theses sounds like a “reality check”: before arguing whether “it is one literature or two,” one must acknowledge the basic fact — these are two different languages. She distinguishes them not by emotion or politics, but by linguistics: Hebrew is Semitic, Yiddish is Germanic. Yiddish, even being a Jewish language, is structurally closer to Germanic languages like English or German than to Hebrew. From this, she draws a direct conclusion: if the languages are different and belong to different families, then their literary traditions are independent, with their own periods of development and internal disputes.
A typical doubt arises separately in the conversation: “Is Yiddish alive today?” Nepypenko responds with a figure she emphasizes as her verified estimate: about 700,000 people worldwide actively use Yiddish, teach it to children, and produce content — including children’s books. This is not “revival at the club level,” but the life of the language in the community.
“There is academic Yiddish and there is Hasidic Yiddish” — and these are really two different conversational realities
She then introduces an important distinction, without which it is easy to make a mistake: conditionally, there are two large zones — Yiddish of the ‘Yiddishists’ (academic, cultural, educational environment) and Yiddish of Hasidic communities. They are mutually intelligible but noticeably differ in phonetics and speech habits; within Hasidic Yiddish, there are also dialects.
The most specific place here is the explanation of linguistic changes “live.” Nepypenko gives an example with grammar: in Yiddish, as in German, there are articles by gender, but in one of the variants of Hasidic Yiddish, articles gradually lose their semantic load, and she associates this with the influence of English, which tends towards simplification and analyticity. Meanwhile, YIVO teaches standard Yiddish with a literary norm — and the question of how the “norm” and “living dialects” will diverge remains open: time will tell.
Why Yiddish was long called a “jargon” and a “women’s language” — and why this was not a linguistic but a social label
The conversation contains a lot of specifics about how Yiddish was denied the status of “full-fledged” for years. Nepypenko says: the transition to recognizing Yiddish as a language of culture dates back to the early 20th century — a period when marginalized languages in Europe generally “came to light,” which were previously denied high status.
But the main thing is that she argues against the myth that Yiddish “was always just a spoken jargon without literature.” Nepypenko explains: there were translations and retellings of religious texts in Yiddish; the practice of retelling the Tanakh and adaptations of the Pentateuch into Yiddish, which were made, among other things, for women — because women often did not have access to formal religious education and knowledge of biblical Hebrew. From this arises an entire genre — women’s prayers in Yiddish, sometimes composed by the women themselves, in a more “earthly,” colloquial language. Nepypenko adds an important detail of meaning: this “grassroots” form gave greater freedom — to speak with God not only formulaically but humanly, in one’s own words.
Where Yiddish came from and why “it’s not just a dialect of German”
Nepypenko separately articulates what is often simplified: “Yiddish = German, just funny.” She calls such a formula erroneous. Yes, in the history of Yiddish, there is a stage when it looks like a “Judeo-German” language: Jewish communities took the Germanic base and recorded it in Jewish script. But then begins an independent history.
She describes one of the most recognized hypotheses of origin: the formation of Yiddish is associated with the Rhine region, i.e., the territory of modern North Rhine-Westphalia; over time, Yiddish separates, and by the 12th–13th centuries, it can be considered a separate language, not just “rewritten German.”
To show that Yiddish has a “long writing tradition,” Nepypenko provides specific examples of medieval texts: among literary samples, there are, for example, adaptations of Arthurian plots, where Talmudic motifs are layered, as well as Yiddish tales where Aesopian and Talmudic lines intertwine. Her logic here is very clear: this is not “translation for the sake of translation,” but the birth of new literature from the layering of different cultural sources.
Ukrainian trace in Yiddish: Slavicisms, Hebraisms, and the “plasticity” of the language
One of the most substantive parts of the conversation is about the mutual influences of languages and why Yiddish is “rooted” in specific lands. Nepypenko explains that the vocabulary of Yiddish is largely built on two major layers:
Hebraisms — words related to religious life, ethnographic realities, holidays, what she calls “holy speech”;
Slavicisms — the result of contact between the Ashkenazi community and the local population of Eastern Europe.
And very importantly: she does not reduce Slavicisms only to Ukrainian, noting that borrowings also came from Polish and Belarusian, and later the influence of Russian increased. That is, Yiddish in her description is a language that “knows how to absorb” and live at the intersection, while remaining itself.
There, it is also discussed how Yiddish copes with modernity: Nepypenko talks about the constant replenishment of dictionaries with new words and the debate on what a dictionary should be — descriptive or prescriptive. For Yiddish, in her view, the prescriptive role is especially important today: previously, the norm was formed by schools and the everyday educational environment, and when this environment is scarce, dictionaries partially take on the function of “suggesting how to speak and where to find a new word.”
Why “Hebrew was revived, not Yiddish”: Zionism, Galut, and doikayt — “hereness” as a language ideology
Another specific node of the conversation is the explanation of the choice of Hebrew as the language of the future state. Nepypenko names the ideology directly: it is Zionism, for which Hebrew as a revived language was to become the language of the state that was yet to be created.
And Yiddish, in her words, carries a different perspective: life in the diaspora, in exile (Galut), and from this grows the idea of doikayt — “hereness.” Nepypenko deciphers doikayt not as romance but as a politico-cultural principle: to live and organize “where you were born and where generations lived,” to achieve visibility, voice, active participation, and improvement of one’s position on the spot, rather than abandoning local reality for the sake of a single “correct” geography.
Why specifically Chernivtsi and Ukraine: the 1908 conference and the debate on the “Jewish language”
When it comes to the status of Yiddish, Nepypenko brings out a very specific historical marker: the Chernivtsi Conference of 1908, which became an important milestone in the history of Yiddish and Yiddishism. In her retelling, it was a platform where cultural and political Jewish figures of different views gathered — supporters of Hebrew, supporters of Yiddish, and those who believed that one “Jewish” speech was not enough. There, they debated what to consider the Jewish language and its status, and as a result, Yiddish was recognized as one of the Jewish languages and full-fledged.
Nepypenko connects this topic with the name of Yitzhok Leibush Peretz: she mentions his reflections on what Yiddish literature lacks, and the key word there is “tradition”: tradition needs to be built and supported.
To the question “how Ukraine became a cultural center,” her answer is grounded: these are historical and geographical factors, the division of Ukrainian territories between empires, the different status of languages and communities in different political regimes, and — very practically — the biographies of many authors originating from towns and villages in the territory of modern Ukraine. At the same time, she honestly speaks about competition: in Austria-Hungary, Yiddish often yielded to German, which was the language of education and high culture, and this influenced the trajectories of writers who had to “break through” the German environment.
Shtetl as a “closed world” and why the youth moved to big cities
A separate specific part of the conversation is what a shtetl is and why it is so important for Yiddish culture. Nepypenko explains the shtetl not as a “cozy place from postcards,” but as a form of community life — closed, with a centuries-old established order.
She provides an important historical fact about legal restrictions in the Russian Empire: until 1905, Jews were prohibited from settling in large cities (except for certain categories, like certain merchants), so in general, the Jewish population concentrated in small towns. Against this backdrop, she describes the “great exodus” of Jewish youth in the early 20th century: the movement to cities is explained by both pragmatism (education, work, the opportunity to “be in civilization”) and internal rejection of an overly closed world.
In her formulation, the shtetl is not just geography, but a social shell that, in times of upheaval, begins to press on the younger generation.
Ukrainian-Jewish cooperation during the years of the Ukrainian People’s Republic: language status and institutions
For the audience in Israel, this fragment is especially important because it breaks the usual “black-and-white” set of clichés about the early 20th century. Nepypenko discusses the period of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and talks about specific institutional steps: under the government of Symon Petliura, there was a separate Ministry of Jewish Affairs, and in one of the universals of the UPR, national autonomy was mentioned; the Jewish population was proclaimed autonomous, and rights were granted to it.
And another very precise moment: Nepypenko notes that Yiddish was recognized as one of the officially recognized language lines of the UPR — along with Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian (she adds “if I’m not mistaken,” and this is important as a tone: she does not pretend to read from a paper, but speaks as a researcher who remembers the structure but does not play at absolute infallibility). She directly uses this example as an argument in the debate that the UPR cannot be described only through accusations of anti-Semitism: at the level of law and cultural initiatives, there were forms of cooperation and recognition. At the same time, she does not idealize the period: she emphasizes that the window was short — about a year, and already from 1918, the expanded rights were gradually curtailed.
And here is a remark important for our editorial logic: NAnews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency in recent years regularly returns to stories where “Ukrainian” and “Jewish” cannot be separated onto different shelves. The conversation about Yiddish makes this especially clear: language is not a symbol, but a testimony of shared history on specific land.
“Kyiv Group” and translations: how cultural exchange worked in the 1920s
When Nepypenko moves on to literature, she does not limit herself to general words “there were poets.” She names the “Kyiv Group” of Yiddish authors as a primarily territorial phenomenon: at a certain period, these writers lived and worked in Kyiv, communicated, and were acquainted with each other, but at the same time remained very different stylistically.
She provides specific connections and routes: an important point becomes Berlin during the Weimar Republic, where Lev Kvitko and David Bergelson worked and lived for several years, and Berlin itself is described as one of the centers of Jewish book publishing — both in Yiddish and Hebrew. There also emerges a specific example of a “bridge” between Ukrainian and Yiddish: Kvitko publishes a translation of Ukrainian folk tales, and they are illustrated by El Lissitzky, associated with Kultur-Lige.
Speaking of translations, Nepypenko emphasizes: the initial steps were taken by Ivan Franko, but the truly active process unfolds in the 1920s — before Soviet unification and socialist realism “ground down” cultural diversity. As specific names of translators, she mentions Pavlo Tychyna, Maksym Rylsky, and others; she separately recalls Vasyl Atamaniuk, who in 1923 in Kyiv releases a small anthology of “new Jewish poetry,” and around this remains intrigue: it is not entirely clear where and how he learned Yiddish and how exactly he worked with texts. Nepypenko shows the “human mechanics” of translations: much relied on personal contacts, friendship, mutual assistance.
She provides an especially illustrative example of editorial “assembly” of a translation: there are cases when one person made a literal translation, and another refined the poetic form. In this context, the connection between Mykola Zerov and Alexander Her is mentioned: Her made the “literal translation,” and Zerov polished the translation.
Soviet repressions and the disappearance of public Yiddish
The conversation then becomes harsher — and again with specifics. Nepypenko answers the question about censorship and speaks directly: what unites many authors of this environment is censorship, repression, and silence, and then a situation where Yiddish ceases to be heard and published.
She describes several blows to Yiddish literature: the first round of repressions in the early 1930s, then the war and the Holocaust, and then — a new, “decisive” blow, associated with the history of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee: mass repressions, exiles, and murders. Nepypenko formulates the outcome without embellishments: for most of the authors discussed, the professional and life trajectory ends by the 1950s. As a specific name of a repressed writer, she mentions Der Nister, who was persecuted, among other things, for accusations of a “too symbolist” manner.
What exists today: grassroots initiatives and the example of Sweden
When the conversation returns to modernity, Nepypenko does not paint “instant revival.” She talks about the real situation: there are programs, summer schools, and various initiatives — but more often as internal efforts of universities, cultural centers, or small communities of Yiddishists; there are only a few periodicals, and they rely on the resources of the community itself.
And to show what state support might look like, she gives the example of Sweden, where Yiddish is recognized as an official minority language line; there is a Yiddish publishing house, and translations of large mass texts — like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings — have been published in Yiddish. For her, this is not a “curiosity,” but proof of viability: the language can be present in both high culture and popular culture — if there is an institutional environment for it.
Why this episode is important for the Israeli audience — without slogans
In the conversation, Nepypenko constantly returns the topic to a simple thought: Yiddish is not the language of an abstract “diaspora in general,” but of specific places and specific people. It is rooted in cities and towns where generations lived side by side, argued, learned, traded, translated, and built cultural institutions. And when today in Israel Yiddish sometimes sounds like a “language of the past,” this episode offers a different perspective: the past here is not museum-like, but human — and directly connected to Ukrainian history, including its complex political periods, short windows of recognition, and long stretches of suppression.
The most precise conclusion of the episode is not about “nostalgia” and not about “identity for the sake of identity.” But about infrastructure: a language lives when it has schools, books, a stage, translation, the right to publicity — and when society recognizes it as part of a common history, not a foreign whisper “in the kitchen.”
Key points from the conversation in text version (Ukr.): https://www.ukrainer.net/tetiana-nepypenko-idysh/
