Fordham-NYPL Lecture Lecture Series: Chaya Nove, “Making It (T)here: New York Hasidic Yiddish”

This talk traces how Yiddish, brought to New York by Hasidic Holocaust survivors after World War II, was maintained as a thriving language of everyday life. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic research, it examines how these communities leveraged New York’s unique urban conditions—demographic scale, neighborhood density, economic niches, and legal pluralism—to establish schools, newspapers, and self-sustaining social worlds where Hasidic Yiddish could function as a primary vernacular. The talk, delivered by Chaya Nove, a Fordham-NYPL Research Fellow in Jewish Studies, offers a contemporary case study of successful minority language maintenance in a major metropolitan center.