Rachmiel Peltz, From immigrant to ethnic culture: American Yiddish in South Philadelphia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xix, 263. Hb $49.50, pb $18.95.

Abstract

South Philadelphia can be added to the littered landscape of Jewish geography, in which Chelm, Belz, Odessa, Boiberik, and Brownsville are terrain abandoned by Jews. They are romanticized in folk songs, but they make poor real estate investments. Similarly, Yiddish cultural life may be seen as a landscape of outmoded lifeways. The Yiddish language and its dialects have been cast off, but at the same time they remain cherished in memory. Peltz's ethnography explores Yiddish as it survives among what is left of a Yiddish-speaking community in Philadelphia. The story of Yiddish is one of powerlessness; Peltz takes us to the seemingly marginal Jews, the yidelekh – working-class, elderly women and men who are marginalized as a function of their old age, their accents, and their lack of higher education.