>>>If you mean me, I don't have that much more Yiddish than most middle-class folks from the East Coast. I come from the one Jewish family in America where no one spoke Yiddish. <g>
>>>
>>Tamar,
>>
>>Yes, I did mean you.< s > You mean there was more spoken in my house (and we're not Jewish) than your's? C'mon, give a "goy" a break.:-P
>
>Could be. I have a lot more Hebrew than Yiddish.
>
>My father's father's family has been in this country since the early 1800's and were Sephardic, not Ashkenazic, Jews. So Yiddish was never spoken by that branch. His mother did come from the Ukraine and probably knew Yiddish, but never spoke it in my presence. My mother was born in Germany and her family used German, not Yiddish.
>
>OTOH, I did grow up in the big city where words like "schmooze" and "shtick" and so forth were widely used.
>
>However, it used to drive my husband's grandmother nuts that I could't understand the Yiddish phrases with which she sprinkled her conversation. She'd never heard of Jews who didn't speak Yiddish. (She was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants.)
>
Tamar,

As I mentioned earlier, my Godmother was a converted Jew. Plus growing up on the South Side of Chicago, there were a good number of Jews in the area, most of whom, spoke Yiddish. I think that there were at least three synagogs in the neighborhood (Hyde Park). My high school graduating class (a small private high school) was 40% Jewish. On top of that, I dated a number of Jewish girls while in high school.

In fact, I'm married to a semite, albeit a non-Jewish one. My wife is of Assyrian descent. If you've ever heard Assyrian, it sounds a lot like Yiddish.