Yiddish across borders: Interviews in the Yiddish ultra-Orthodox Jewish audio mass medium

Language & Communication 56 (2017) 69–81

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Yiddish across borders: Interviews in the Yiddish ultra-Orthodox Jewish audio mass medium Dalit Assouline a, *, Gonen Dori-Hacohen b a b

Department of Hebrew Language, University of Haifa, Eshkol Tower 1819, 199 Abba Hushi Blvd., Mount Carmel, Haifa 3498838, Israel Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 650 North Pleasant St., Amherst, 01003, MA, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:

This study analyzes phone interactions in Yiddish that are broadcast by telephone to ultraOrthodox Jewish communities through off-hook services called “hotlines”. Yiddish, a minority language, is the native tongue of most hotline speakers and marks their communal affiliation within the ultra-Orthodox world. We explore the instrumentalities of one Yiddish hotline in order to ascertain features that facilitate its role as a membering medium for its community. We show how participants use this medium to index who is – and who is not – a community member via language decisions that reflect language ideologies and maintain community boundaries; interviewees index their membership by linguistically accommodating interviewers; and hosts, on occasion, change language to ostracize an interviewee. We also explore the problematic status of Modern Hebrew for this community. Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Hasidic Yiddish Accommodation Dialect change Minority language Interviews Language ideology

This study analyzes a type of spoken communication with linguistic, interactional, and technological characteristics that challenge many generally accepted assumptions in the domain of communication studies. The language of communication at issue is Yiddish, invariably a minority language, one that by many accounts should have disappeared, but has remained alive, even serving as a first language in major groups of a particular community – that of the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Community (UOJC henceforth). The notion of a community may be elusive in this respect, as the UOJC stretches across at least three continents, America, Europe, and Asia (Israel), comprising numerous different religious streams and groups, both across and within geographic boundaries. And, while it is a highly religious community, some streams and groups are more observant than others. Moreover, the notion of a speech community is also complex, with varying degrees of Yiddish maintenance and use in different UOJC groups, as well as distinct Yiddish dialects that may even be mutually unintelligible (Isaacs, 1999b: 114; Fader, 2009: 98). At the heart of the present investigation, then, lies the unique combination of the following conflicting factors: a language that is both a first and native language yet is always secondary in the geographical and national area in which it is used, on the one hand, and a community that is almost too diverse to be regarded as a single entity, yet shares a strong ethno-religious core. The interactions we study are telephone interactions, conducted both over the phone and currently also in voice-over internet protocols (such as Skype). These phone interactions are then broadcast via phone or Skype to whoever calls the number in which these calls are stored, which allow the interactions to reach wide audiences who can listen to, but not * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (D. Assouline), [email protected] (G. Dori-Hacohen). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2017.04.001 0271-5309/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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themselves join in with them. In short, we discuss interactions that occur through an interpersonal medium used for mass broadcast purposes in a community that is transnational, far from unified, yet shares a spoken minority language. This combination of factors makes the domain of UOJC hotline communication in Yiddish an intriguing and even unique area for communication research. A simple and obvious illustration of the tensions that result from all these factors is found in the name of the communicative arena we study. In the US the arena in question is called by the loan term “hotlines”, pronounced in Yiddish as in English, indicative of the status of Yiddish as a minority language. In Israel the arena is labeled by the Hebrew-Yiddish term kavéy ha-náyes ‘the news lines’ (lit. HEBlines-of theHEB-YIDnewsYID). Thus, the same communicative arena has two different names in two different locals but among the “same” community of users. These names also illustrate the relations of this community to its surrounding languages, English (in the US and the UK) and Hebrew (in Israel), a point which is central to our discussion. Following Hymes (1972), we root our work in the theoretical tradition of the Ethnography of Communication. We define interviews as a particular speech event, based on questions and answers and uniquely formatted for mass media productions,1 and adopt Hymes’s ideas on the Ethnography of Speaking, to analyze Yiddish hotline interviews in terms of his notion of communicative competence in examining the relations between communication, talk, and community, as well as some elements of his idea of the SPEAKING mnemonic. Hymes suggested the SPEAKING mnemonic to describe speech events holistically, by describing their Settings, Participants, Ends, Action sequences, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms and Genres. After describing the settings and the participants in general terms, we delve into the instrumentalities of one hotline, since instrumentalities, according to Hymes, deal with both the code of communication and the medium used to communicate. We also take into account Philipsen’s (1989) notion of membering as “an act by which speakers themselves hear their own speech as similar to the speech of a particular group of others” (p. 82). Given that, as noted, defining the character and boundaries of the UOJC as the community under discussion here is no easy matter, notions such as communicative competence and membering, in both their wider, sociological and even ideological sense, as well as in the more specific sense of linguistic details, provide useful points of departure for the analysis undertaken in the present study. We therefore answer the question what are the features of the Yiddish hotline that facilitate its role as a membering medium for its community. In our analysis of the recorded interactions we focus on processes of linguistic accommodation performed by both interviewers and interviewees, regarding accommodation as a key mechanism in drawing community boundaries, indexing who is a community member and who is not a community member. We also use observations from Conversation Analysis (CA) to examine the sequential use of language, focusing on the actions and their achievements, together with Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), which focuses more on the relational aspects of the interaction. Thus, whereas CA focuses on actions and their constructions (Heritage, 1984; Atkinson and Heritage, 1988), CAT (Giles et al., 1991) gives us a stronger tie to the “inter” part of the interaction. The combination of the two frameworks gives us a holistic view of these dimensions in the interaction (see also Gallois et al., 2016). In addition, we take into account Bell’s concept of audience design (Bell, 1984), suggesting that, besides interpersonal accommodation between the two speakers, the interviewees may also try to accommodate their speech to the approximated speech of the hotline’s audience. Data collection was based mainly on one particular hotline, taking into account meta-communicative features of hotlines in general as discussed in various UOJC online forums and Israeli ultra-Orthodox newspapers, as well as some materials published, in Yiddish and Hebrew. The hotline analyzed here – Kol Meváser, a Yiddishized version of the Hebrew expression ‘voice heralding ¼ a voice bringing good tidings’ – provides access to more than 1500 interviews (as of February 2017). Over 100 of these, along with interviews from several other hotlines, were selected at random and monitored to identify participants and locations of the interactions, topics of discussion, and other relevant features. Interviews were also transcribed, and provide the material for illustrating our findings on both linguistic and communicative characteristics of the interactions presented below. Although we use close sequential reading of the interactions, we do not intend to contribute to the understanding of their structural elements, as is often done in conversation analytic research, but rather to the features of the speech community and its construction, following the ethnography of communication tradition. 1. Settings: one community across three continents Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities worldwide maintain a unique set of norms and conventions, which they perceive as the only genuine Jewish way of life. In the cities and countries that they live in, these communities keep to secluded neighborhoods, sustain separate education systems and public institutions, and strive to minimize the impact of the modern world (distinguishing between modern culture and values, which are forbidden, and instrumental components of modernity, which are accepted (Shilhav, 1991: 33)). The conservative nature of these communities is manifested by their old-fashioned East-European style of dress, as well as their choice to adhere to the language of traditional, now deceased, East-European

1 We do not discuss the structural features of interviews (cf. Blum-Kulka (1983) or from a conversation analytic perspective Clayman and Heritage, 2002). Weizman discusses interviews and their participants’ roles (2008) from a pragmatic perspective (see also Jucker, 1986).

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Jewish communities – Yiddish. Yiddish, a Jewish language of Germanic origin, is the historical language of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. Today, UOJ communities are the last to maintain Yiddish as a spoken language in daily use, a language that prior to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII was spoken by large groups of both traditional and secular Jews (Glinert and Isaacs, 1999; Avineri, 2014; Assouline, 2017). The linguistic situation of UOJ communities is further complicated since Yiddish is used (to various degrees) inside the community, while the majority language serves for communicating with the outside world: English in the US and Britain, Hebrew in Israel, and Flemish or French in Belgium (to name the countries with the largest UOJ communities). We refer here to the Yiddish-speaking UOJC as a single speech community (from the ethnography of communication perspective, see Hymes, 1972), despite the differences between UO Yiddish varieties (which may be substantial) and, particularly, despite the vast differences in command and use of Yiddish within the community. We consider even partial- or semi-speakers (Dorian, 1982) as members of this speech community, as well as people with only a receptive familiarity with Yiddish, so long as they share norms, attitudes, and “rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety” (Hymes, 1972, 54), namely Yiddish. What all members share is the perception of Yiddish as a highly prestigious insider UO language, functioning as a powerful symbol of a distinct ethnic and religious identity (Isaacs, 1999a; Baumel, 2003, 105). Thus, an UO Yiddish-speaker is regarded as “one of us” (Yiddish: fun unzere), and as a bona fide member of the UO elite. In addition to Yiddish as their uniquely shared means of communication, these geographically spread communities find other ways to maintain their cultural ties. The different OUJ communities maintain economic, cultural, and affinity ties between themselves. For example: the American anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic sect financially supports the Israeli so-called “zealous” (anti-Zionist) sects; young men in their teens are often sent to study in a Yeshiva (the community’s institution of higher education for men) oversea; and many matchmakers, who are responsible for creating new families in this community, offer their clientele the possibility of a transatlantic match. This international proximity and mobility is also evident in the ultra-Orthodox media. Yiddish newspapers and books are printed in the US and then distributed worldwide; and movies filmed in Israel are screened across the US and Europe. Moreover, and importantly for the present discussion, members of the European and Israeli UOJC are interviewed on American Yiddish hotlines, which are subsequently listened to throughout this global community. The shared language in these media is not without challenges, since mass media in themselves are a problematic issue in this community. All mass media, including the hotlines, need to overcome the complex tensions between strictly religious groups and new communication technologies (Deutsch, 2009; Campbell and Golan, 2011). Deutsch argues that UOJ attitudes towards technology are complicated and ambivalent, resulting often in hybrid creations, such as filtered internet service providers (the so-called “kosher internet”). Deutsch goes on to argue that, notwithstanding their suspiciousness towards new technologies, this community is at times highly savvy when it comes to adopting them. Campbell and Golan (2011) shed light on how limitation on the internet facilitates authority and specified boundaries in the UOJC. Thus, the community is, on the one hand, suspicious of new technologies and yet, on the other hand, adopts these means, adapting them rapidly to its particular needs. The debate over the accepted use of new media reflects the tension between the centralized conservative rabbinical authority and the open nature of these media for the UOJC. These conflicts are particularly evident in community discussions in regard to the hotlines we discuss here, which are harder to control, especially when compared to the internet, a medium with revolutionary powers with respect to which the UOJC appear to have come up with some, albeit limited, solutions (Campbell and Golan, 2011). Some Rabbis view the hotlines as problematic in undermining the special fabric of their conservative community, particularly since they augment the independence of their audiences. The hotlines constitute a threat to the hierarchical community structure by divulging knowledge and information that may undermine the Rabbis’ authority over the ordinary community members.2 Exposure to other voices might introduce new ways of life and ideologies that contradict those of the leadership.3 The authoritative voices in the community therefore raise various arguments against listening to the hotlines: listeners become addicts, with listening deemed an uncontrollable activity;4 wasting money on the phone; wasting of precious time, which should be devoted to the study of the Torah for men or the running of the household for women. Yet, despite this opposition from the community leaders, the hotlines blossom. People often listen to them at night, when they are alone, in a manner similar to the way the internet is used on a personal computer, or to radio’s early days (Douglass, 2004). For community members, the hotlines provide a source of information, as illustrated by the following anecdote about a UOJC member reported in a (non-Orthodox) Israeli daily paper: Chavi: “I also hear the news on the Nayes. You don’t know what Nayes is??? Want to hear?” She [Chavi – authors] dials a phone number from her home phone and puts the machine on speakers. On the line a male voice with a Yiddish accent can be heard, rapidly reading newsflashes: “a drainage pipe exploded in Tel-Aviv, General Barbivai continues an

2 A process that to some degree resembles that discussed by Livingstone and Lunt (1994) in relation to television talk shows and the relative preference given therein to the voice of the layperson over that of the experts. 3 For example, the Zionist nationalist values of the so-called “Nationalist Ultra-Orthodox” in Israel clash with ultra-Orthodox values (Pedahzur, 2002, 20), are a site of friction in certain hotlines. 4 See, for example, the article “The Nayes addicts” (in Hebrew), published in the Israeli ultra-Orthodox daily newspaper Yated Ne’eman, 8.7.2011 also published online: http://www.bhol.co.il/forums/topic.asp?cat_id¼4&topic_id¼2903099&forum_id¼771&upd¼1.

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anti-UO line. the relatives of the great Rabbi of Mir visited his tombstone today to commemorate one year of his passing”.5 In this excerpt, from a story that also illustrates how the hotlines work, an ultra-Orthodox woman tells the reporter about the hotlines, and since the reporter is unfamiliar with them, the woman connects to the hotline to hear the news, which is presented as the news relevant for the community. So far we have found over 30 unique hotlines, each with its specific features, audience, participation, and topic of discussion. Table 1 presents information for six of them: Table 1 Features of certain selected hotlines. Name

Languages

Phones

Features

Kol HaLashon – ‘Voice of the Tongue’

Yiddish, Hebrew, English (and 7 other languages) Hebrew and Yiddish Mainly English Hebrew, Russian, French

US, Israel, UK and other numbers Israel US Israel

One of the first hotlines. Broadcasts Hasidic lessons, “Page of the day”,6 sermons, obituaries, and more Mainly news Designated for women, household advice Recordings of the late Lubavitcher rebbe, sermons, children’s stories, women’s section, live broadcasts

Hebrew and Yiddish Yiddish

Israel US

News, music, live broadcasts Popular lectures, news and tips about health and nutrition

Kav HaTzibur – ‘Line of the Public’ Hakol Beseder – ‘Everything (is) in order’ Yekhi HaMelekh HaMashiakh ‘Long live the Messiah king’ [Chabad- Messianic] Kol HaTzibur – ‘Voice of the Public’ Kol Bri’im ‘Voice of the healthy’

As the table shows, some of the hotlines regard themselves as conveyers of information to their public, as in the case of Kav HaTzibur, which focuses on news for and from the different UOJ Hasidic sects, and whose name suggests a relatively democratic notion of disseminating information for public consumption – for example, offering discussions of the Israeli elections from an UOJC point of view. However, since hotlines are considered controversial and do not lead to public discussion, one cannot see them as functioning similarly to an actual public sphere (cf. Habermans, 1989). Therefore, they cannot be taken as functioning as a medium in a genuine public context. Some hotlines target a particular congregation in a specific locale, such as Kol Mevaser, which is confined mainly to the American continent, while others, such as Kol HaLashon, have a broader global reach. Kol Mevaser, the leading hotline of the UOJC in the United States, unlike other leading hotlines, such as Kol HaLashon, does not have an internet site and so can only be reached through the phone – making it more in line with the UOJC restrictions on internet use, which is another reason why we chose to focus on it. At its height, Kol Mevaser had around 25,000 listeners according to ultra-Orthodox estimations, although accurate numbers are hard to come by, since measurement of technology use in the UOJC is problematic, and admitting listening to it is to court criticism. Kol Mevaser is operated by several Satmar Hasidim, a relatively affluent and the largest Hasidic sect in the UOJC with around 150,000 members.7 The Satmar sect originated in the town of Satu Mare (currently in Romania), and its members are mostly Jews of Hungarian and Romanian descent, residing mainly in the USA, with an anti-Zionistic ideology that regards the state of Israel as a sacrilegious entity. This hotline, like others, has varied content which is made available when a person calls the line. When calling, a caller is first forced to listen to some commercial jingles. These commercials are in a mixture of English and Yiddish, since the audience is supposedly fluent in both languages and since Yiddish, as a minority language, is full of English technical, commercial and other “cultural” loanwords (Matras, 2009, 110). This illustrates a salient feature of Yiddish as a minority language, which serves mainly in insider domains and hence needs to borrow from its surrounding languages whenever referring to external domains. Once the commercials are over, the caller reaches a menu of the available content: news, lottery numbers, interviews, music, and other general topics. The news bulletins are updated twice a day, and interviews are updated bi-weekly. The interviews are very popular, as is evident from the follow-up discussions on the UOJC internet forums. Moreover, on these forums participants ask for recommendations about which interviews to listen to, since, as noted, there are around 1500 interviews accessible in the hotline archives. 2. Participants in the interviews The 1500 interviews, conducted by seven different interviewers, include various types of interviewees: specialists from various fields, such as healthcare, education, and learning disabilities; elderly Jews sharing their life stories with the community; people who have visited interesting places or witnessed something socially meaningful; singers or musicians who promote their new CD; and people reporting on current affairs and engaging in fund-raising. Such reports may include an interview with the

5

http://www.israelhayom.co.il/site/newsletter_article.php?id¼15994&newsletter¼06.04.2012. “Page of the day” – a daily regimen for learning the 2711 pages of the Babylonian Talmud (Jewish rabbinic canon). Space does not allow for detailing the makeup of the UOJC, which is divided between Hasidic sects and Mitnagdim or Litvish (‘Lithuanian’) streams (Heilman, 1992, 11–39; cf. Rubin, 1997 for a study of the Satmar sect). 6 7

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head of a girls-only school about the imprisonment of students’ fathers for contempt of court (in one of the ongoing religiouspolitical conflicts in Israel), or a Rabbi in Amsterdam urging listeners to contribute to the building of a much needed new ritual bath in his city, in an event that resembles a telethon. The list of participants shows that the hotline is similar to a talk-show, with the interviewees including entertainers, politicians, and ordinary people who talk about their experiences (see Hamo, 2006 for similar participation patterns in some Israeli talk shows; note, however, that although both arenas share the same groups of participants, in TV shows ordinary people interact with politicians and celebrities since they sit next to each other in the same set on the same show, hence a multi-vocal arena is created simultaneously, whereas in the hotlines only a one-on-one interaction takes place, between one host and one guest, so the different groups do not interact with each other). Two groups of participants are noticeably absent from Kol Mevaser, pointing to one major difference between this religious outlet and the general media. One such group is the leaders of the community, who disapprove of the hotlines and therefore do not participate in them. The other missing group is women, who are prohibited from participating in the medium since their voice is perceived to be sexually enticing when heard in public. It follows, then, that both the interviewees (IE) and interviewers (IR) are all and only men (unlike the audience which, as we saw above, is also comprised of women). 3. Instrumentalities In his discussion of instrumentalities relating to the channel of communication, Hymes (1972) took into account the technical elements of the medium as well as the language used in it. Following Hymes, for whom dialects and specific language use are a facet of the instrumentalities that constitute a given speech event (Hymes, 1972, 63), we divide our discussion of instrumentalities in the Yiddish hotline interview speech events into two facets of the language used in the interviews: dialect and language ideology (language ideology refers here to speakers’ beliefs and ideas concerning language and language use, following Silverstein, 1979, 193). These aspects are at the center of our argument that the language used in this medium is used for membering (Philipsen, 1989) activities, meaning a signaling of who is a part of the hotline’s community and who is not a part of it. 3.1. Dialects Since the Yiddish used today by ultra-Orthodox Jews derives from a language that was spoken across different areas of Eastern Europe, it retains the dialects of its country of origin. The interviewers in our data-base are all from the Satmar sect in the US and, as such, all speak what are known as “Hungarian” dialects of Central Yiddish (Prince, 1988, 308). Like dialects the world over, these are indices of social affiliation, in the case at issue here, originally regional dialects, but currently serving as ethnolects indicative of group affiliations (Isaacs, 1999b, 114–117). Differences between Yiddish dialects in Eastern-Europe were phonological, morphological and lexical. Currently, due to processes of levelling, dialect contact, language contact and language change, many of the former morphological and lexical distinctions have been blurred, while the phonological distinctions (regarding the pronunciation of vowels) remain a highly salient differentiating factor, identified by Yiddish speakers as intra-communal markers (Assouline, 2015, 141–142). In addition to the phonological distinctions testifying to former regional differences in Eastern Europe, contemporary UO Yiddish varieties are also distinguished lexically due to their contact with the majority languages (particularly, English loanwords in US Yiddish and Hebrew loanwords in Israeli Yiddish). This is another facet of UO Yiddish diversity, testifying not to group affiliation but merely to the speakers’ place of residence. Differences in dialect are significant in the interviews, in which different participants used their own particular dialect. In consequence, in the interrelations between the participants’, the IR and IE, dialects are significant to the creation of a cohesive community within the larger UO Yiddish speech community. Significantly, the prestige of Satmar as a prominent Hasidic sect and the dominance of its “Hungarian” Yiddish dialect (Krogh, 2014), combined with the fact that all interviewers speak Satmar Yiddish, leads some IEs to accommodate their Yiddish to the American “Hungarian” Yiddish of the IRs. In other words, the most typical insider variety of the hotline’s community is American “Hungarian” Satmar Yiddish, and IEs who use this dialect are full members of this community. Attempts at accommodation on behalf of IEs present them as non-insiders, and the extent of their accommodation testifies to their relative distance from the group’s core. The simplest cases are interviews with IEs who share the same “Hungarian” Yiddish as the IRs. In these cases, there is no gap between the IR’s and IE’s affiliations, and so a cohesive community is (re)created, and the IRs are true insiders. Yet many IEs do not share the Hungarian dialect, possibly leading to the need for what is known as an accommodation process, as “interactants adjust their communication behaviors so as to either diminish or enhance social and communicative differences between them” (Giles and Baker, 2008. See also Giles et al., 1991, 7–11). Generally speaking, the non-Hungarian American Yiddish dialect IEs are composed of three groups: American Yiddish speakers who speak other dialects, mostly “Litvish” (Lithuanian) Yiddish; Non-American Yiddish speakers – mainly from Israel and Belgium; and speakers of Yiddish as a second language (YSL), meaning English speakers with only a poor or mainly receptive knowledge of Yiddish. Each group accommodates to the Yiddish of their hosts on different linguistic levels. In the case of the American Yiddish speakers, we may find dialectal accommodation (realized by the modification of vowels); with the “foreign” Yiddish speakers, lexical accommodation may arise in addition to dialectal accommodation (since not all of

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them are “Hungarian”); while YSL speakers may speak only a little or no Yiddish at all, in which case, accommodation may be expressed by complete shifts or code-switching, as noted further below. The common accommodation strategy performed by the IEs is convergence, defined as “a strategy where individuals adapt their communicative behavior in such a way as to become more similar to their interlocutor’s behavior” (Gallois et al., 2005, 123). Accommodation in the hotlines is usually unilateral, with the IEs typically accommodating to the IR rather than the other way around. The process of accommodation is thus consistent with and reflects a more general phenomenon in the institutional division of labor: since the IR enjoys higher interactional power (Hutchby, 1999), the IEs modify their speech, adjusting it to the speech of the IR, and also, indirectly, to an approximation of the speech of the American Hasidic audience. In so doing they attempt to demonstrate their communicative competence and engage in membering with this community. The excerpt in (1) is from an interview in which the IE is an elderly American Yiddish speaker who tells his life story to the community as a way of being part of it.

(1) 1.

Snow in Siberia8 IR:

2. 3.

IE:

4. 5. 6.

IR:

7.

IE:

vus gedenkt ir vegn sibir, ir kent inz zugn. what do you remember about Siberia can you tell us. a tug in sibir, viazoy es ot oysgezen? a day in Siberia what did it look like? nu ya, dos iz geven fil shney, shtark, kalt, so yes, there was a lot of snow, strong, cold, ober me iz geven ongeton in peltsalakh, si geven gut. but we were wearing furs, it was ok. fregt mir ask me der shney ober in rusland iz shener geven? the snow however in Russia was more beautiful? ya, dortn iz geven a greserer shney. Yes there [in Russia] there was more snow.

The IE speaks “Lithuanian” Yiddish when he tells about his years in a Siberian Gulag. When asked about an ordinary day (1:1) the IE (1:3) negatively recalls9 the amount of snow in Siberia. When he says “snow” he says shney using the North Eastern (“Lithuanian”) Yiddish dialect. As a follow-up question, the IR asks about the snow and its esthetic quality (1:6). When asking about the snow, the IR says shnay as in the “Hungarian” Central Yiddish dialect. The repair of the dialect is done in an embedded way (Jefferson, 1987), since the question is the center of the turn, and not the pronunciation of the word for snow. The content of the IR’s questions goes against the IE’s stance, as the IE’s stance was negative with regard to the snow (1:4), and the IR points to its positive elements – it was beautiful (1:6). In his answer, the IE linguistically accommodates the IR as he pronounces snow as shnay (1:7), opting to copy the IR’s pronunciation and giving up on his own original pronunciation (compare 1:3 to 1:7). Thus, the IE adopts the IR’s dialect (see Nilsson, 2015, where dialectal accommodation occurs when speakers reuse their interlocutor’s words or phrases. See also Auer and Hinskens, 2005, 338–339). Yet on other linguistic levels the IE rejects the question, since he agrees that there was more snow, but ignores its aesthetic that is, positive, aspects. The IE’s dialectal accommodation might serve as a means to soften his rejection of the question and the stance it implies. Additionally, since the IE is a newcomer who arrived in the US in 1991, he may be using the accommodation to mark his membership in the community. This excerpt shows that the accommodation is carried out from the IE to the IR. Although the IE uses the word ‘snow’ first in his own dialect, once the IR uses it in a different dialect, the IE switches to the IR’s dialect and accommodates it. Usually, as IRs ask the questions, they set the agenda (Heritage, 2002) with regards to linguistics usages as well, both in the dialect and in the form of language used. IEs thus typically mirror, or accommodate, the IRs’ dialect in their answers.10 While dialectal accommodation is not something speakers are necessarily aware of, lexical accommodation in the interviews seems more deliberate, aimed at facilitating communication between speakers from different countries and so creating a more homogeneous Yiddish speech community. This happens when the interviewees are not American, especially with Israeli IEs. These IEs are aware that their Yiddish is full of Israeli Hebrew loanwords, and they try to modify their language and adjust it to the US audience. Their accommodation efforts reflect their perception of the differences between American and Israeli Yiddish. This accommodation process can also be geared towards pleasing the overhearing audience, as part of the “double articulation” phenomena (Scannell, 1991), which suggests that interactants in the media are aware of the audience when they interact and take the imagined audience’s needs into consideration when interacting. The most typical

8 The first line in the text is a rendering in broad phonemic transcription of the Yiddish original, followed by a relatively free translation into English in the second line, with key elements bolded. 9 “Nu ya” may demonstrate problems in answering, since the discourse marker “nu” may show resistance (see Maschler and Dori-Hacohen, 2012). We translated it as “so” following Feinsilver (1962), although “well” (Schegloff and Lerner, 2009) might have been more accurate. 10 These cases of accommodation probably share a media oriented motivation, related to power relations in an interview situation (Hutchby, 1999; Heritage, 2002), but this needs further research.

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manifestation of the adjustments made by IEs in order to accommodate what they perceive as the language of their American audience is the use of English words by Israeli IEs, as in example (2):

(2) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

“afgúnes” – demonstrations ´nes, IE: ober a sakh mul i du nukh de afgu but many times there is after the demonstrations, se kimen kol miney sortn, de laydigayers, come all sorts of, the bums zay aybn un tsindn mist, in varfn shtayner of cars [.] they begin to burn garbage, and throw stones at cars, stam, gayn, untsindn garbedz in di mist in inzere just so go, burn garbage and the garbage in our geygntn vus se shtert shpeter shlufn, neighborhoods, which disturbs [our] sleep later me ken nisht efenen ken vindo [.] one cannot open a window

This Israeli speaker uses many English words (as, on occasion, do other Israeli IEs). Thus, he refers to “cars” (2:3), “garbage” (2:4), and “window” (2:6), all loanwords that he chooses to borrow from English, although they all have established Yiddish equivalents, (such as mist ‘garbage’, which he uses as well, 2:4), thus modifying his language – not necessarily due to interpersonal accommodation with the IR – but rather as a result of “audience design,” with the American audience in mind (Bell, 1984, 1991). Note that the same Israeli speakers never use English loanwords when speaking to an Israeli audience (e.g. on Israeli hotlines). IEs accommodate their speech (they may accommodate their dialect, their lexicon, their choice of language) much more than IRs. In the case of lexical accommodation on the part of Israelis, the identity of the audience is most likely a crucial factor. They know that their audience is from the US, so they accommodate their Yiddish to that of the interviewer and to their perception of American Yiddish. Since Israeli IEs are usually members of radical anti-Zionist sects who are asking for financial help from American Hasidim, they want to please their audience and gain its support and therefore accommodate them (cf. Genesee and Bourhis, 1982). The international nature of the UOJC requires certain linguistic modifications in order to achieve a mutually intelligible channel of communication among participants and audiences. This can be seen in encounters between American and Israeli Yiddish speakers, where the latter engage in linguistic negotiations, attempting accommodation as they try to identify loanwords that should be avoided. As a result, such transatlantic interviews reflect UOJC inter-communal relations as well as the interplay between the participants’ specific sect and national affiliation and their common transnational identity as Yiddish-speaking ultra-Orthodox Jews. Processes of accommodation play an important role in speakers’ attempts at finding a common language, or a Yiddish koiné, suitable for this type of transatlantic communication. These attempts at establishing a common Yiddish may thus offer an additional explanation of linguistic and communicative convergence, in addition to the affective and cognitive goals generally invoked (obtaining social approval and attaining communicational efficiency, Thakerar et al., 1982, 248; Gallois et al., 2005). These attempts deserve further analysis, since the formation of such a common Yiddish – even if only for the purpose of these specific contexts – has, as such, a significant symbolic value as the unifying language of a single global community. 3.2. Language (ideology) Since Yiddish is the language of this community, accommodation, from the point of view of its speakers, takes place in relation to different dialects. However, accommodation can occur not only between dialects, but with other languages (Burt, 1994; Bissoonauth and Offord, 2001) where the relationships between them and Yiddish have weighty ideological significance. This is true in interviews with English speakers and, more importantly, with Hebrew speakers. Since Yiddish is the language of choice for this community, as opposed to the outside languages, tensions are likely to arise in interviews with people who mainly speak the outside language. Such cases yield situations in which language is used for reasons of overt membering, so that code-switching and meta-communicative discussions may be closely related to being a competent UOJC member. Code-switching occurs only between English and Yiddish since Hebrew, the language spoken in Israel, is prohibited from use in this domain, for reasons noted below. Outsiders who wish to show affiliation with the community need to speak Yiddish. Consequently, English-speaking IEs usually start an interview with some attempt to speak Yiddish, efforts that can be considered as intergroup accommodation, when IEs try to accommodate the UO Yiddish-speaking community. By so doing, the IE demonstrates that he would like to be a part of the IR’s community, hence, indirectly, also of the audience at large, even while demonstrating a minimal level of communicative competence. Such attempts are thus deliberate manifestations of affiliation. Such affiliative accommodation may be maintained throughout an entire interaction, as illustrated in (3). The IE is an American English-speaking Jew, who is a baal teshuva – a formerly secular Jew who has become Orthodox – who speaks some Yiddish and understands it well, since his parents talked in it. During the interview, the IR speaks only Yiddish, and the IE speaks English, while making constant efforts to speak Yiddish.

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(3) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

“mayn mame and mayn tate” - my mother and my father IE: We decided, alright, we’ll go to Williamsburg, because no matter where I’ll be working, it’s very easy to get to Manhattan etc. okay, anyway, so, we, we were, when we moved in to Douglass Houses we had two bedrooms. ´khe, Because mayn mame and mayn tate, zikhroynom livro my mother and my father, may they rest in peace, ´del lekhayim, a bedroom. [.] and ikh. ibo and I, to long life,

Here is a case of code-switching to the community language. In the middle of telling a story, the speaker switches to Yiddish when he mentions his parents, who spoke Yiddish (3:5–6). This code-switching occurs throughout the interview, whenever the IE speaks about his parents or about important Rabbis he has met. In other words, the speaker switches to the inside language whenever speaking about ‘Jewish’ issues, so that his code-switching matches the content in the form of a metaphorical or thematic code-switching (Gumperz, 1982, 61). As such, metaphorical code-switching is a significant tool of intergroup accommodation, signifying to the audience not only some competence in Yiddish but also affinity with UO communal norms (e.g. adding “may they rest in peace” after the names of Jews who have passed away). Through such constant switching he accommodates the host and – especially – the community, in order to demonstrate that he is a part of the community or would like to get closer to it. When interviewing YSL speakers, that is, those who understand but can barely speak Yiddish, the IR speaks mostly Yiddish, while the IE speaks English. Since English is the outsiders’ language, it can also be used to mark someone as an outsider, as in the next interview. The next interview (examples 4 and 5) presents one of the very few cases in which the IR switches to English. Although they prefer to interact in Yiddish, IRs are, in fact, able to conduct an interview in English. Here, the IE is an Orthodox American Jew (not ultra-Orthodox, and not a Yiddish speaker, although he understands it), who was at the time an Illinois state senator. He was interviewed during the 2008 USA presidential campaign, since he knew President Obama from his political activity in Illinois. (4) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 5. 6.

“shabes goy” - Sabbath Goy IR: yeah. Okay, I gonna ask you, nor, mixed, a bisl idish, a bisl english, but, mixed, a bit Yiddish, a bit English, in, ikh hof az me vet zakh farshtayn, ya. and, I hope we can understand each other, yea. I hope that we can understand each other. Okay, vus iz ayer shaykhes tsi-, koydem vi voynt ir, Ok, what is your relation to- first where do you live, ir voynt in Illinois? you live in Illinois? IE: yes, I e-, I grew up in Illinois.

At the beginning of the interview, the IR declares that he will mix Yiddish and English. Although he targets the IE as the recipient of this instruction (“you”, 4:1–2), he probably does so for the benefit of the audience, so that they understand what is going on during the interview, showing that this IR is aware of the “double articulation” in this domain (Scannell, 1991). The IR then switches to English (1:4) before he starts the questioning in Yiddish. As can be seen (1:6), the IE answers in English and the interaction continues following this pattern of questions in Yiddish followed by answers in English. At a pivotal point in the interview, the IR shifts to English, and from which point on, for the remainder of the interview, both sides speak only English. Here is what seems to be a clear case of an accommodation process – the IR is bilingual, he can speak either Yiddish or English; the IE speaks only English, so the IR switches to their common language.

(5) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

“shabes goy” – Sabbath Goy IR: ir zugt az Obama iz geven ayer shabes goy. You say that Obama was your Sabbath goy. vi iz oysgekimen az er zol zayn a shabes goy? How did it come about that he should become a Sabbath goy? IE: Well, I don’t like using the word shabes goy. I mean-. Shabes, he was there, I needed him, he offered. So. IR: ikh ken akh fregn, may I ask you, I can ask you, why you worked Shabes in the office there? IE: Well sometimes I have to be in Springfield for Shabes, I’m not doing anything, I need, I need to vote.

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The switch to English happens after the IR asks about Obama being a shabes goy.11 Note that at first he refers to Obama as the IE’s Sabbath goy (ayer ‘your’, 5:1), and then opens up the reference to make Obama “a Shabbath goy” (5:2). The IE, using a turn-initial “well” (Schegloff and Lerner, 2009) rejects the term itself (5:3), and then repairs his talk to explain that, while he was in Illinois, Senate meetings sometimes occurred on Saturdays and Obama offered to help him with certain activities that he was not allowed to do (5:4). It is clear from this response, to the IR and his audience, that the IE was indeed working on the Sabbath. The IR therefore challenges (see Weizman, 2008 for challenges in interviews) the IE (5:5–6) and his Jewish strictness (implying he is not a good enough Jew). The IR asks for an account (Garfinkel, 1967) of the IE’s unacceptable behavior: being in his office on a Saturday means that he was not observing the Sabbath as required by the strict regulations imposed on religious Jews, an offense against the IR’s and his community’s norms. This question also suggests lack of communicative competence on the part of the IE, since he does not adhere to the IR’s – and by proxy, the UOJC’s – practices, beliefs, and norms. Here we have a good example of communication competence being more than linguistic competence. Whereas the IE understands Yiddish and responds to it easily, meaning he is linguistically competent, his lack of adherence to the community’s norms, manifested by the fact that he has admitted to working on the Sabbath on an ultra-Orthodox hotline, shows lack of communication competence, as suggested by Hymes (1972). This challenge (5:5–6) is linguistically interesting, as it is composed of three elements. The IR starts speaking Yiddish, as he had done up till then (5:5 “ikh ken akh fregn” ‘Can I ask you’); he then translates his Yiddish utterance to English (5:5 “may I ask you”); and subsequently poses the challenging question in English (5:6 “why you worked Shabes in the office there?”). That is, the IR switches from the insider language, Yiddish, as befitting a conversation between two UOJC members, to English, the language of external communication. By this change of language, the IR indicates that his interlocutor can no longer be regarded as a member of the community, and so should not be communicated with in the internal communal language (see Dragojevic and Giles, 2014, 93). By and large, a switch to the interlocutor’s language would be regarded as accommodation and so counts as an affiliating move, but in this case it is used for the purpose of creating what Giles and Baker (2008) term “a symbolic distance” between the participants, due to the distinct sociolinguistic values attributed to Yiddish and English in this context. Indeed, the IR continues using English throughout the remainder of this interview, to show he is speaking to an outsider, so that what may seem as interpersonal convergence is, in fact, intergroup divergence. This interview shows how the IR chooses the language to use in interviewing to mark a person as an outsider to the community. By switching from the community language, Yiddish, to the outsiders’ language, English, for conducting the interview, the host shows he cannot speak with the caller in the community language, since the interviewee is not a community member and should not be seen as such, due to his violating the community’s norms. English is one of the languages that the IRs of Kol Mevaser use at times. Using Yiddish codifies belonging to the UOJC, and avoiding the use of English conveys much the same message. On the other hand, speaking English, particularly in codeswitching on the part of an IR, clearly sets community boundaries. The UOJC, especially those belonging to the Satmar Hasidic sect, have a very different ideological conflict with respect to Israeli Hebrew. According to Satmar ideology, Hebrew as loshn-koydesh (‘the holy tongue’), the holy tongue of the Jews, should be used only for prayer and study in specific ritual and scholastic contexts. Yet in Israel, Hebrew serves as the language of everyday interactions at all levels of communication, a situation that Satmar members view as sacrilegious (Poll, 1980). However, given that use of Hebrew is so ubiquitous in Israel, it sneaks into the speech of Israeli Yiddish-speaking UOJC members as well, presenting a problem for the American Satmar IRs, who are not prepared to accommodate the language of their IEs for ideological reasons. The sharp distinction drawn by the ultra-Orthodox between Hebrew as a holy tongue and Hebrew as an everyday means of communication is marked, inter alia, in its pronunciation: When Hebrew is articulated with Ashkenazi pronunciation (including mainly penultimate stress and several others features differing from the Israeli pronunciation, Glinert, 2013), it is perceived as embodying “The Holy Tongue”, while the same text pronounced with the largely Sephardic articulation that characterizes Israeli usage is perceived as Israeli (sacrilegious) Hebrew (Assouline, 2013). These distinct forms of pronunciation are available only to Ashkenazi Jews, so that speakers from the Sephardic Jewish communities of the Middle-East and North Africa, who do not have access to both versions of Hebrew, are marked, to some degree, as outside the ethno-religious Ashkenazi UOJC. This point is illustrated by the next excerpt, which concerns an exorcism ritual that had been witnessed by the Israeli IE, performed by a renowned Sephardic Rabbi on a young religious Jew from Brazil on January 6, 2010. During the exorcism, the exorcist was addressed by the Dibbuk (an evil spirit that possesses souls, in this case, the spirit of a murderer who lived 3000 years ago), who spoke in Ivrít (i.e., Israeli Hebrew) – as shown in the middle of the excerpt in (6). (6) 1.

Exorcism IR:

2. 3.

11

IE:

me hot gehert az deys iz, Did one hear that this is, az deys iz a andere kol vi de yingerman? that this is a different voice than the guy? ´t yo, de, de ingerman ken bikhlal nisht ken ivrı Yes. The, the guy doesn’t know Hebrew at all.

A Shabes goy is a non-Jew who performs work that a Jew cannot do on the Sabbath.

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4.

IR:

5.

IE:

6.

IR:

7.

IE:

8. 9.

IR: IE:

10. 11. 12.

IR:

13.

IE:

14. 15.

IR:

16. 17. 18. 19.

IE:

20. 21. 22.

IR:

23.

IE:

´t de ingerman ken bikhlal nisht kan ivrı The guy doesn’t know Hebrew at all. der-, nor, nor vos me ret in brazil ken er. The, only, he only knows what they speak in Brazil. aha. dus hayst, portugezish, dakht zakh mir Aha. That is, Portuguese, I think. yo, portugezish kent er Yes, he knows Portuguese. Aha yo. in de dibek ken a por shprakhn. er retYes. And the Dibbuk knows several languages. He speaksin mitn ot er ongeeybn a ander shprakh. in the middle he started speaking a different language. ´t! rav batzri ot im ongeshrign: red ivrı Rabbi Batzri shouted at him: “speak Hebrew!” Aha, s’hayst lushn-koydesh, lemase. oh. That is, the Holy Tongue, actually. y-y-yo, si nisht mamesh loshn-koydesh, Y-y-yes, not exactly the Holy Tongue. si geven nisht klor di redn zayne It wasn’t clear, his speech dus hayst, lema- er ret, er ret an andere, That is, actual-, he speaks, he speaks a different, an andere dialekt. an andere oysshprakh. a different dialect. A different pronunciation. lushn-koydeshdike verter, ober a bisl andersh, The words are Holy Tongue, but a little different, de nekides the vowels. yo, si, si, siz zeyer, si a modne shprakh Yes. it’s it’s it is a very-, it’s a strange language. me ken nisht visn velkhe shprakh ret er, One cannot know which language he speaks, me farshteyt vos er ret. One understands what he speaks. ver si ken lushn-koydesh farshtayt vus er zugt Someone who understands the Holy Tongue can understand what he says. y-y-yo Y-y-yes.

In the course of the story reported by the IE, the IR tries to clarify the language that the Dibbuk spoke and who was speaking, in order to make sure that it was the Dibbuk and not the possessed person speaking (6:1–2). The IE explains that the possessed person does not speak Hebrew (6:3), using the word “Ivrít” as its referent. Then the IE and IR collaborate in explaining that the possessed person speaks only Portuguese (6:4–7). At the end of these clarifications (6:8), the IE continues with his story, explaining that the Dibbuk subsequently started mixing its languages (6:9–10), leading the exorcist to order it to speak only Hebrew (6:11). Throughout his narrative (6:3, 11) the IE, a young Hasidic-Israeli fluent in Yiddish, refers to the term ivrít ‘Hebrew’ (in general Israeli usage and pronunciation).12 His use of this term, although taken up by the IR (6:4), suggests the IE is not aware of all the complicated ideological associations assigned by the Satmar community with regard to Hebrew and the Holy Tongue, demonstrating that this IE has limited communicative competence with regard to this specific sect of the UOJC. The division between the two Hebrews becomes a major concern for the IR. At the peak of the IE’s account of events (6:11), the IR creates a complex turn by initiating a repair on what the IE has said (marked by “that is” 6:12, cf. Schegloff, 2000), interrupting the story midway to correct the reference from “Hebrew” (6:11) to “the Holy Tongue” (6:12). In other words, the IR is stipulating use of Hebrew as the Holy Tongue, and not as the everyday language of the state of Israel (where the exorcism took place and from where the IE is speaking). From the IR’s Satmar perspective, Ivrít or Israeli Hebrew is an entirely different entity than the Holy Tongue (Loshn-koydesh). He therefore suggests that the Dibbuk spoke Loshn-koydesh, since the Dibbuk, as an ancient creature, cannot be familiar with contemporary Israeli-Hebrew, a modern creation. By contrast, the IE’s implicit message is that such a distinction is not so simple, since both versions of Hebrew are understood (compared to “various languages” 6:9). In his response (6:13–14), the IE first confirms that it was the Holy Tongue and then goes on to explain that this was not exactly the case – an evasive turn structure, as he was probably referring to Modern Hebrew. Since the IE did not commit to a position viewing it as the Holy Tongue, the IR proceeds with further clarification request (6:15–18), suggesting that the Dibbuk’s language was a version of the Holy Tongue, but one using a different pronunciation, so distinguishing it from Modern Hebrew. The IE reiterates his inability to commit to a specific

12 One reason this Israeli IE does not distinguish the two Hebrews derives from his description of a ritual performed by rabbi David Batzri, a renowned Sephardic kabbalist. Hence, the IE is a Sephardic Jew, and as noted, there is no clear distinction, for him as such, between these two Hebrew pronunciations in the Sephardic communities.

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language since he only assumes but cannot know for sure that it was understood (6:19–21). The IR uses the IE’s last statement to formulate his own position, along lines suggested by Heritage and Watson (1979) to the effect that mutual understanding was based on shared knowledge of the Holy Tongue (6:22), a formulation that the IE minimally accepts (6:23). Once the issue of the language used by both the Dibbuk and the Rabbi is concluded to the IR’s satisfaction, the IE continues with his story (the rest of which is not given here). 4. Conclusion This study analyzes a special type of communication conducted in a minority language in a special type of communicative environment: the hotline that is broadcast-phone interviews conducted in Yiddish. In addition to describing this unique environment, we focused on the nature of the interaction in order to shed light on interactions undertaken in a language with highly specific socio-cultural constraints, in this case the complex and mixed community of ultra-Orthodox Jews. To this end, our analysis combines insights from various domains of research, including sociolinguistics and ideas of Communication Accommodation Theory and Hymes’ ideas on the SPEAKING mnemonic and communicative competence as well as employing a sociological perspective from Conversation Analysis on talk-in-institutions. Other domains to which the present study is relevant include discussion of media use in minority groups (e.g., Couldry and Dreher, 2007), the nature of religious media (cf. Hangen, 2008), and the problematic issues that arise in connection with use of technology in the UOJC (Campbell and Golan, 2011; Deutsch, 2009; Livio and Weinblatt-Tenenboim, 2007). Specifically, we focused on the role of Yiddish as the insider language, or the “we-code” (Gumperz, 1982, p. 66), in the analyzed hotline. Yiddish is the language of choice for the community in question, and mastering Yiddish and its associated ideology underlies the communicative competence of its members. Speaking Yiddish fluently, preferably with the insider “Hungarian” Satmar accent, is the highest indicator of communicative competence in the analyzed interviews, since it marks full membership in this stream of the UOJC, and hence serves as a membering device for participants to show they are members of the community. Aspiring to speak and to accommodate Yiddish indicates an affiliation with the community, while lack of proficiency means that the speaker is not a full member of the community. We demonstrated how IRs willfully and purposefully use language to draw the community lines, to include and exclude IEs. When an IR stops interviewing in Yiddish and switches to English, he indicates that the IE lacks a relevant level of communicative competence, in some cases normative aspects of the community, and so must not be regarded as a member of the community. Indeed, the switch from the inner language (Yiddish) to the outer language (English) ostracizes the IE from the community, and indicates this rejection to the audience. Similar considerations regarding language ideology are also reflected in discussion of the Hebrew language: participants not only need to eschew Israeli Hebrew, a language rejected by extremist UOJC streams such as Satmar, they also need to treat it as distinct from Hebrew as Loshn-koydesh, the Holy Tongue. The present description of Yiddish interviews on UOJC hotlines is an initial, preliminary investigation of hitherto uncharted territory. One topic that deserves further study concerns the special options afforded by the medium, such as that of volume. For example, much like podcasts, Kol Mevaser is unlimited in the number of interviews it can store, so that its audience has access to hundreds and hundreds of interviews. Nor are these interviews restricted in length, as they are in other mass media, so they can incorporate numerous anecdotes and digressions from the main topic, with no time pressure on how long they extend. In this respect, hotlines are more similar to some of the many broadcasts on the internet than to those of traditional mass media. Similarly, the opportunities afforded by telephone conversations heard by a large audience also have an impact on the experience of those listening to hotline interviews – another topic that awaits future research (as also does comparison of the hotlines and radio). Our discussion of the settings, participants, and certain aspects of the instrumentalities (particular dialects and use of a given language or languages) characterizing Yiddish hotline interviews as a special channel of communication sheds light on the complexities that emerge when a language in general, and a minority language like Yiddish in particular, is used in a mass medium, and on the relations this usage in this medium has to community construction. We showed how a sociolinguistic process, accommodation, can be used for enhancing the sense of the community, by either converging to the same Yiddish dialect or to Yiddish itself for the sake of insiders, or by divergence or disaffiliate accommodation, when an interviewer switches to English in contact with outsiders. We also showed some of the relations between the different languages functioning in this medium and how they contribute to demarcating the ideological boundaries of the community in question. Our study also illustrates how accommodation processes may coincide with quite general power relations. In the hotline interview setting, dialectal accommodation usually went from the IE to the IR. This accommodation direction may well prove relevant to other mass media environments, so warranting further investigation. The present study also clearly demonstrates the effectivity of applying elements of Hymes’ descriptive theory and ethnography of communication in general, including the concept of membering, to demonstrate how a given community stretching across three continents – the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community – uses its multilingual as well as its dialectal repertoire as a tool for creating and expressing a coherent sense of itself via a unique means of mass media – Yiddish-based hotline interviews. References Assouline, D., 2013. Hebrew among Yiddish speaking ultra-orthodox (Haredi) Jews in Israel. In: Khan, G. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics. 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Thakerar, J.N., Giles, H., Cheshire, J., 1982. Psychological and linguistic parameters of speech accommodation theory. In: Fraser, C., Scherer, K.R. (Eds.), Advances in the Social Psychology of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 205–255. Weizman, E., 2008. Positioning in Media Dialogue: Negotiating Roles in the News Interview. Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. Dalit Assouline, Ph.D. 2007, Hebrew University, Israel, is a linguist and a sociolinguist, studying contemporary ultra-Orthodox Yiddish. Her research focuses on language contact, language change, and various sociolinguistic matters such as language ideology, language maintenance and language and gender. https://haifa.academia.edu/DalitAssouline. Gonen Dori-Hacohen, Ph.D. 2009, University of Haifa, Israel, is a discourse analyst and a communication scholar, studying both interactions in the media and in mundane situations, focusing on the intersection of interaction, culture, politics, and the media. Currently he studies civic participation in Israeli radio phone-ins, American Political Radio Talk, and other arenas of public participation, such as online comments. Further information can be found: http://gonen. dori-hacohen.com/.