Introduction Both confessional and non-religious Jewish worlds were shattered by the confrontation of Yiddish and Hebrew as the 20th century began, and the problem is still pressing, to-date. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and upon the foundation of the modern Jewish State, it is largely due to the Zionist project success that Hebrew was adopted by Israeli Jewry, as opposed to Yiddish. The Bund made Yiddish a focus of their propagation, regarding it as the language of the people; Hebrew was mocked as a visionary lingo, a rabbi lingo. The secular Zionists, on the other hand, made it their goal to produce – or reproduce – the homeland, rejecting the language of ghetto dwellers and prisoners, as they regarded Yiddish. 1 True, the contest was not entirely about “the Yiddishists” and “the Hebraists,” which presented a great social diversity. That is to say, the stigma that Zionism put on Yiddish was not solely prerequisite by its linguistic qualities but, rather, by what it represented. Yiddish from the Zionist perspective Up to the end of the 19th century, Jews all over the globe have been speaking a multitude of languages they had adopted and adjusted for their daily activities, e.g., Arabic, Russian, German, French, Yiddish, etc. 2 The latter in particular served as a vernacular in wherever the Jewry resided. With the emergence of Zionism, a new way of thinking emerged. This new thinking set it as a goal to recreate a homeland for Jews, emphasizing that the very concept of “homeland” did not solely involve territory. Rather, it encompassed the ideas of historic – or mythic – Zion with its memory and culture, and was, therefore, aimed at creating a new Jew. Such an approach would mean the suppression of the Exile in favor of the new Jews, which were imaged as valorous and manly, an archetypal embodiment of the notions of “citizenship” and “belonging.” 3 The ideas that Yiddish represented as a vernacular, thus, disgusted Zionists primarily because it was a language of the Exile and was regarded as a major obstacle on the way to the formation of a renewed identity. In this respect, Zionism was practically modernist. It required a serious paradigm shift in the way Jewry thinks of themselves; the ethnicity’s self-perception as a victim had to be done away with. Reviving Hebrew fitted this paradigm beatifically. Yiddish in the Jewish State After World War II, and once the Jewish State was founded, the Jewish community proved itself extremely resistant to cultural and linguistic influences. First, business within the State facilitated the resurrection and maintenance of the civic religion which takes its root from Israel. 4 Apart from the practical side of it, the symbolic meaning that Israel has is exceptional, reflecting Jewish native solidarity and pride. Hebrew as a language of the sacred texts strengthens the ties between the diaspora and the sensation of belonging as associated with religious commonality. Yiddish, thus, was viewed as a lingo that had to be eradicated from culture whatsoever. As a result, the more or less contemporary Israeli culture – literature, poetry, etc. – emerges largely in Hebrew. 5 Anti-Zionism, diaspora, and nativity