After Yiddish suffered enormous losses in the 20th century, Yiddish cultural activists were obsessed with the problem of transmitting its cultural values to a younger generation.
At the beginning of the 21st century, we observe a most peculiar situation: on the one hand, the language is very alive amongst the Chassidim, who use it as a means to isolate themselves from the modern world. Yiddish artists, on the other hand, still want to confront modernity through their language.
The efforts to keep Yiddish alive or revive it have given rise to many cultural cultural phenomena of Yiddish culture today, which I want do define through the term "secondary Yiddish culture".
Since much of it is concerned with research and teaching, it is a culture of academics (some of them not of Jewish descent) who learned that language at universities. But I would also see the interest towards Yiddish translations, Yiddish music and film and a thirst for general information about East European Jewry as factors which set the framework for this "secondary Yiddish culture". But a crucial question of this cultural process is still to be answered: how much of the Yiddish language itself will be transmitted, and to whom?