babies and bathwaters

Going to Israel made me want to learn Yiddish.

Not because people speak Yiddish in Israel, but because they mostly don't! They speak modern Hebrew, which, y'know, wasn't anybody's native language for centuries and centuries. Dropping Yiddish, over the past hundred years or so, seems like a needless loss. Although not everybody showing up in Israel was, or is, a Yiddish speaker -- other common native languages included Ladino, Arabic, Russian, English...

... so I guess a common language did have to be worked out, if they're going to have a country over there or whatever.

Pretty questionable.