Yiddish is the vernacular language of the Ashkenazi people, the Jewish diasporic minority of northern Europe to whom 75% of the world's Jewry now traces its ancestry. In this wonderful book, Jewish studies scholar Jeffrey Shandler provides a social history of the language in terms which one would use to describe a person. In a series of synthetic, stimulating, readable chapters, Yiddish is described as having been born at a particular place and time and as having a name, appearance, gender, life expectancy, and so on. At no point does the anthropomorphic metaphor interfere with the author's goal of offering a clear and comprehensive view of what the Yiddish language is, and above all what it means, to readers who come to the subject with little or no background. The book starts by exploring what is known about the geographic and genealogical origins of Yiddish, and ends by projecting possible futures for the language, which now has a radically different profile than the one it had just a century ago, before the language lost half its speakers to the Holocaust, before Hebrew was secularized and revernacularized in the modern state of Israel, and before Yiddish came to be closely associated with stringently observant Jews holding themselves apart from the non-Jewish, or Jewish but non-observant, communities that surround them.

Shandler's emphasis on symbolic meanings makes the book an excellent introduction to Yiddish for those interested in social approaches to the study of language. Throughout the book the reader learns not only what scholars from various academic traditions (linguistics, history, cultural studies, etc.) have concluded about Yiddish, but what those perspectives imply about the language's speakers. So, for example, when exploring where Yiddish ‘resides’, we find that it was concentrated throughout its history in towns and cities, sometimes with a speaker base comparable to that of a small European country, but never with any official status. We also learn that the placelessness this implies of European Jews has been a prominent theme in European Jewish history, with some modern political activists arguing that where Jews truly belong is to an abstract homeland called yidishland, and others insisting that Ashkenazim needed a physical territory of their own on which to settle. When exploring the Yiddish language's ‘family background’ we are introduced to the debates over whether it is a variety of German, a fusion language that cannot be properly affiliated with any linguistic family, or something else. Each of these proposals comes with associated questions about the language's speakers. Are Ashkenazi Jews fundamentally a European people? How has their identity been shaped by contact with various non-Jewish neighbors? When exploring Yiddish's ‘gender’, we learn of the language's long association with women by virtue of its contrast with Hebrew, the Jewish language men used for prayer and religious study. Here, as with virtually every person-like characteristic, ‘what is at stake ultimately, if often tacitly, are extralinguistic considerations about cultural legitimacy, demographic integrity, social and political status, and the construction of a Jewish authenticity’ (30).