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Permalink Reply by Michael Pianko on May 10, 2011 at 12:41pm

I wouldn't mind reading an ocasional yiddish-language story, but I don't feel any need whatsover to make up new secular reasons why the old meshugas rituals and holidays are somehow still necessary to do.  The religion itself is a system of bizarre, time-wasting obsessive-compulsive behaviors and beliefs.

Permalink Reply by Ralph Dumain on May 10, 2011 at 1:03pm

The Jewish Current crowd consists of left-wing atheist Yiddishists. I don't recall what anyone's attitude is to rituals and holidays. Yiddishism, while undergoing a revival in the USA and a few other western countries, probably can't live anywhere else like it does in New York, where there is a population density that enables a certain ethos to be perpetuated. The old immigrant culture is too alien even to those who sympathize with it.

 

Some people feel the need for rituals and ceremonies. I'd rather create my own if I felt the need, but other people can't seem to dispense with this stuff, and it's fairly harmless. Hopefully people would have sufficient aesthetic standards to think up good substitutes for the originals. Observing fasts and kosher laws seems way too absurd for me.