I received some feedback recently from a translation workshop I’ll attend virtually at the end of the month, for a piece I’m working on by the satirist, humorist, cartoonist and puppeteer Yosel Cutler. Most of the comments were very helpful, but one statement rubbed me slightly the wrong way, a note that I was “lucky that Anglophone readers already associate Yiddish with humor.” While the remark was not mean-spirited or necessarily wrong, it annoyed me. Like many languages—perhaps all languages— Yiddish labors under numerous myths and associations. Probably the largest and most sinister of these is that Yiddish is dead or moribund, and its corollary, that Yiddish is being “revived”; both have been thoroughly exposed for the tired cliche that they are.

But the idea that Yiddish is a uniquely comic language is not far behind. I must admit, I can’t think about this history without thinking of Homer Simpson pointing at Krusty The Klown praying in Hebrew and giggling, “He’s talking funny talk!” There is something aggressively, oppressively monolingual and American in saying a language “sounds funny.” When one laughs at a language, one is often laughing up one’s sleeve, the joke is on the native speakers, and we snicker quietly as they speak their gibberish. Of course, much of this sense of humor with Yiddish as a punchline was honed by Jewish comedians, none of them particularly far from Yiddish being their mamaloshn, or that of their parents. Consider Sid Caesar’s double-speak “German” or the stories of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten, him of the jocular classic “The Joys of Yiddish,” gifted to me throughout my adolescence whenever I expressed an interest in the language. Indeed, a great deal of my bitterness at the myth of Comic Yiddish might be traceable back to my disappointment in this book, and its refusal to teach me anything really useful in Yiddish.

But putting aside my own frustrated teenaged scholarship, I don’t think it’s particularly interesting or important to point out what’s wrong with calling an entire 1000 year culture of art, poetry, prayers, riddles, drama, lived experience and fables, fictions, fantasies and political organization “funny talk.” Yiddish, of course, is no more or less funny than any other language in which words can be punned on, rhymed, or constructed into humorous stories. Essentializing it into comedy not only ignores its poetry and pathos, it ignores the very real talents of its humorists and comedians, claiming they are only living out their language’s destiny as the talk of clowns.

Then again, there is what the Yiddish historian Simon Dubnow called “The Lachrymose view of Jewish history,” and with it, of Yiddish. The immense blow dealt to the Yiddish speaking world, the genocidal destruction of its speakers, its writers, its poets by the Nazi regimes campaign against the entirety of Jewry, Yiddish-speaking and otherwise, colors our approach to the language. Indeed, all three of these myths are related. We might say the timeline went: Yiddish WAS uniquely warm and funny, THEN it was murdered and is now dead, MEANING any encounter with Yiddish is sad, DESPITE efforts at revival. A poet friend, who dabbles in Yiddish translation, told me once he got stuck on the question of how far he could stretch the word shmutz, meaning dirt, and whether he could get it to something as obviously resonant with the destruction of the European Jews as “Ash.” But of course, the poem predated the crematoriums’ construction, and he ended up condemning his poetic urge as willful anachronism. What are we to do with all this grief? Well, fortunately, it doesn’t translate into English, it’s Yiddish’s grief to bear, and we don’t speak it anymore.

But there IS Yiddish on both sides of the war, and Jewish cultural work that invokes it, even if it does not speak it. The Yiddish poet Malka Lee, who lived and died safe in New York while consuming the news of the death of her family in Europe, perhaps should have the final word on Yiddish’s relationship to the Holocaust. “Yiddish, sanctified by Jewish tears, will shine like seven suns.”

And perhaps we could leave it there, but it is impossible to ignore that the Jewish people, Yiddish-speaking and otherwise, spent the last century, as it were, in the middle of two genocides. That committed against them by the Nazis in Europe, and that committed by them by the Zionists in Palestine. How can Jewish tears sanctify anything when they are shed in hysterical self-defense at the mere suggestion that it might conceivably be wrong to starve and murder Palestinians? In the age of Hasbara, Jewish tears are a way from deflecting from the screams and blood and smoke and rubble. What does that mean for Yiddish?

Equally defiled is the famous Jewish sense of humor. Israelis label themselves “Sabras,” after the Hebrew for the cactus pear. Prickly on the outside, soft within. That softness is difficult to see these days, outside of the infamous “Shoot and cry” coverage of occupying soldier’s PTSD from the horrors they have witnessed-perpetrated. When I spent time there, Israelis were quick to excuse Holocaust jokes as an example of that “prickliness.” They’d laugh about how many Jews you could fit in an oven, or excuse farts as hereditary, after all, his grandfather died from gas. But now I can see, Zionism is the ultimate Holocaust joke. It renders irrelevant and ridiculous the suffering of millions of Jews, in pursuit of the suffering of millions of Palestinians.

As for Yiddish, it seems to be undergoing a wave of interest as a potential form of resistance to the Zionist status quo. We talk pointedly about the War of the Languages, the conflict in the late Yishuv period of Zionism in Palestine, where a truly revived Hebrew overtook German and Yiddish to eventually become the language of instruction at the Technion, leading to backlash and suppression of the other two languages once the State was founded. There is even some speculation if the horrors of Zionism and occupation would have been possible with Mamaloshn on the tongues of the Palestinian Jews.

At the end of the day, Yiddish is a language, even if it lacks an army or fleet, as Max Weinreich would have it. In Yiddish, men beat their wives and people rob from and kill one another. In Yiddish you can be cruel, avaricious, arrogant, ignorant, and all the other crimes and affects of Fascism. The international human traffickers of the notorious Zwi Migdal spoke Yiddish. It is not for its inherent goodness that we read it, translate it, love it. But we do love it.

I’ll end here with my translation of the writer Lamed Shapiro’s essay, The Writer Goes To School, about why, when he could have written in Russian, German, Polish, and here, specifically, Hebrew, he chose Yiddish.

As for the relationship between Yiddish and Hebrew, for me, they always had an adulterous affair. Lust meddles in both languages with such flirtations and dirty tricks that simple flesh and blood would not be able to resist. The Hebrew elements are spice and fragrant oil to my Yiddish. But— why should I deny it? The Yiddish language has worked a spell on me. She is, after all is said and done, my most beautiful love, and I hope to die at her feet.