I sense that Yiddish is pretty much irrelevant to almost all Jews today. While in the 19th Century it was useful for many East European Jews who were not allowed to become citizens or integrate into the national culture, large portions of the world's Jews never spoke Yiddish. It is a Judeo-Germanic dialect with a scattering of words from other languages. The decision of Ahad Ha Am and other cultural Zionists in the 1800's to opt for a revival of Hebrew as a Jewish language to be expanded and eventually used in Palestine as Jews settled there, was a big step to marginalizing Yiddish. At the same time, emancipation of Jews in many country made the local languages like English, French, Spanish, Russian the must have knowledge to get a good job, education, and just to speak to their neighbors. With no ghettos, it wasn't of much use to know Yiddish in America, so even those immigrants who came here fluent in Yiddish used it less and less and their children, often hardly at all. By the third generation, it was gone.
We see many young Jews learning as a second or third language Spanish or French or even Chinese for business or travel. But what motivation do they have to learn a dead language other than to read some Isaac B. Singer books in the origianal?

Twenty-four hours before reading Jane's homage to the impact of Yiddish on American English, I was having lunch at a restaurant called Tzimmes, in Kiev. The name of the restaurant was spelled in Cyrillic. None of the six of us actually ordered tzimmes -- I had varnishkes, my wife had chicken soup with mandeln, several of us had a chopped herring appetizer called Farshmak, one of our friends ate borsht -- the background music was Yiddish songs, the decor included matzo plates, menorahs, etc. -- all this Yiddish nostalgia in a city of three million that was once heavily Jewish, and today probably has a Jewish population in the high four figures.

Then today I flew home after two weeks in Romania and Ukraine, and was amazed to find the matter-of-fact unexplained, unitalicized, untranslated use of the word chutzpah in an article in the very Anglo Financial Times.

This was my sixth trip to Eastern Europe, but the first under totally secular academic auspices. One of the lectures in our academic program dealt with the linguistic tension in Ukraine between the speakers of Ukrainian (predominant in the rural areas, especially in Western Ukraine), and the speakers of Russian (predominant in the cities and in Eastern Ukraine, closer to Russia itself). The learned professor, a specialist in Slavic dialects, had acknowledged the way the ethnic mix in any society influences its language, and equally acknowledged the diminution of a once thriving Jewish community. She said that there had been a significant contribution of Yiddish vocabulary into pre-Soviet Ukrainian and Russian -- and a very concerted effort during Ukraine's Soviet era to erase all those Jewish influences. Fortunately we have no language commissars to inhibit the language from enriching itself with Yiddishisms which have no direct English equivalents.

MB "senses" that Yiddish is irrelevant to almost all Jews today. Obviously he ignores the Chasidic enclaves where it remains the language of choice, and he ignores the substantial number of Yiddish words, like chutzpah, that have made their way into American English, and as I learned today, international English as well.

I do not expect the revival of Yiddish as the primary tongue of Jews anywhere in the world who choose to live in the mainstream culture -- but it remains a cherished cultural artifact which has influenced the language of America, which made its way into Gates of Prayer-- my, how the Pittsburgh Platofrm boys must have rolled over in their graves when that happened -- and which generated a lot more literature than just Bashevis Singer.

In a changing world, we find a contingent of Reform Jews who pray for the restoration of the glorious purity of Pittsburgh Platform Reform. Unfortunately for them, those of us with Yiddish in our bloodstreams even if not on our tongues represent the mainstream of American Jewish life in the Reform movement and beyond.

As Jane and DCC have shown, the time is not yet to say Kaddish for Yiddish or for its relevance in the Jewish and American worlds.

Check this out: The Post-Gazette has a story on the survey.

Sorry for the typo in my comment above:

I did NOT realize those phrases came from a separate language.