Yiddishist movement

Yiddishism is a cultural and linguistic movement that advocates and promotes the use of Yiddish, the traditional vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, which was spoken by over 11 million people before World War II. It began in Eastern Europe during the latter part of the 19th century. Some of the leading founders of this movement were Mendele Mocher Sforim, I. L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem. The Yiddishist movement gained popularity alongside the growth of the Jewish Labor Bund and other Jewish political movements, particularly in the Russian Empire and United States.

The movement sharply lost momentum in the course of the 20th century, hampered by the language's low prestige in a context of both Jewish assimilation and Hebrew revival, the physical annihilation of most European Yiddish speakers in the Holocaust, followed by the linguistic assimilation of remaining communities, including in Israel, where Yiddish would wind up largely supplanted by Modern Hebrew.