Last week, a short article in the Wall Street Journal snagged my eye.

On April 9th, Mike Cherney wrote a piece called A Bagel on a Flag, Ideas for Yiddish Symbols

Sparkfetching.

It turned out that one of the most popular, perhaps the most popular language learning app for your smartphone, Duolingo, was about to launch or had just launched a new language for its users to study, Yiddish.

But there was a problem.

The app displays languages on its menu with use of a flag from the nation where that language

is spoken.

So if you want to learn Japanese, you click on the Japanese flag.

You want to learn Hindi, you click on the flag of India.

What flag do you use for Yiddish?

The language of Eastern European Jewish civilization that over the course of roughly a thousand years

became the main carrier of modern Jewish culture.

Well, it turns out that the team of Yiddishists who developed the language curriculum for the app

were caught up in a world of social media controversy over that very question.

And not only the question of how to depict Yiddish as a visual symbol,

but controversy also surrounded the question of which Yiddish dialect should govern the pronunciation

in the audio elements of the app.

Now, I myself don't know Yiddish, but intrigued by that Wall Street Journal article,

I went on social media myself, and I saw that Yiddish Twitter's passions were engaged by both

of these questions. Accusations flew this way and that, it became clear to me as an outsider,

that something deeper than Yiddish orthography and regional

locution was at stake. Yiddish was being argued about as a proxy for deeper cultural and

...