The Cockney Yiddish Podcast

Yiddish was the language spoken by Eastern European Jewish immigrants to Britain from the early 1880s. By the 1950s this working-class community was dispersed, communities of origin had been destroyed and Yiddish largely disappeared. Today, the literary and cultural heritage of Yiddish has been lost. As part of the AHRC-funded project 'Making and Remaking the Jewish East End', London Yiddish literary sources from archives across the world were collected, translated and analysed, and the project researchers built a picture of East End working-class Jewish life. Our follow-on project arises from the unforeseen public enthusiasm generated by our stagings of Yiddish performance. It aims to use these texts in Yiddish and English translation to engage a range of public audiences with the history of Jewish immigrants to London's East End, including people with an ancestral connection to this history and those interested in migration history or London cultures. Secondly we aim to stimulate and support the teaching and learning of the Yiddish language, which remains an endangered language in Britain.



The project will produce 'The Cockney Yiddish Podcast', a series of podcasts and linked website about the history of Yiddish culture in London. The series celebrates the richness of Cockney Yiddish culture, and its close intertwinement with British culture and literature, as an integral part of British migration history. The podcasts will be presented by the project team with guest scholars, writers and actors and will explore the experience of immigration and acculturation through the medium of popular culture, especially fiction and song. These lively texts from London's popular Yiddish press will also be made available on the website as teaching and learning resources for intermediate-level Yiddish language, in order to serve the learning needs of the growing Yiddish language learning community. Interactivity among learners and listeners will be fostered through an online discussion forum and live events.



Our UK community partners the Jewish Museum, the Jewish Music Institute, the Holocaust Survivors' Centre and Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives will facilitate the involvement of a number of different audiences in the project, including both younger learners of Yiddish language and elderly native speakers. In turn the project will enable our community partner organisations to expand their provision of Yiddish-focused cultural programming. In addition, the team will use their existing connections to Yiddish language centres in the US and Israel to reach wider international audiences. At the same time, through making texts available in English translation in the podcast and website, the project also addresses people with no knowledge of Yiddish or Jewish culture. By generating engagement with these several audiences through informative, entertaining and provocative content, the project aims to expand knowledge of working-class Jewish history in Britain and to engage more people with Yiddish culture.