Language ideology in American Jewish thought

This article establishes the existence of an American Jewish tradition of metalinguistic thought that stretches from the mid-twentieth century to our time. It demonstrates how American Jewish thinkers’ reflections on language implied a response to the claims made on their Jewish identity by their symbolic homeland, Israel. In particular, thinkers rejected the questioning approach of Israeli intellectuals towards English as a medium for Jewish cultivation, and Israel’s fundamentally secular conception of Hebrew as a language and culture. The earlier, postwar thinkers challenged Israeli Hebraist assumptions by framing language as a ‘communicative tool’ that conveys (rather than embodies) religious identity. More recent thinkers took a different approach by suggesting that English is at present already a Jewish language, as it incorporates features based on Hebrew or Yiddish. Earlier and later metalinguistic thought implies continuity, but also a shift of emphasis, in how Jewish particularism could and should be expressed in America.