radiogooroo said:
How's the Yiddish-language media doing today? You say the German-language papers were gone by the 1930s.
Did they ever become a corporate behemoth like Univision?
There were some fairly large and profitable businesses built out of Yiddish (and German, and Polish, etc.) media back in that era. They either evolved or faded away, just as Univision and Telemundo will have to do in time.
Telemundo, at least, knows this: their youth-oriented service, "Mun2," already runs much of its programming in English. Why? Because while first-generation Hispanic immigrants are, like
all first-generation immigrants, predisposed to wanting programming in their native language, their children and grandchildren increasingly live and think and consume entertainment in English.
We're able to have this discourse today because members of your family wanted more, and more involved embracing English. These days, Spanish-language media at least has grown in size and scope where the news and entertainment needs of the Hispanic community can be met entirely. I doubt that was the case with the now defunct Yiddish and German outlets you speak of.
It most certainly was the case.
Much as you might wish to paint the latest batch of "those people" as being somehow different from all the prior generations of "those people" who've preceded them, there's really less difference than you'd think. As I said in my last post, it was entirely possible to go through an entire day on the Lower East Side of Manhattan circa 1910-1930 without ever using (or needing to use) English. There was full-time Yiddish radio, numerous Yiddish-language newspapers, theaters, music halls, schools, shops, even a sort of makeshift judicial system that served as a community small-claims court.
Here's some fascinating reading about this now-lost world:
http://yiddishradioproject.org/
I'm not sure how it is in your part of the country Scott, but here, you can drive through parts of town where all the signs on storefronts are in Spanish. They are all low-income areas where crime is high. There isn't a single affluent or even middle class neighborhood like this.
Yup. Believe it or not, this is what assimilation looks like. My great-grandparents were "those people," too. The neighborhoods where they lived in New York City were the low-rent, high-crime places of their day. The neighborhood here in Rochester where my grandfather grew up is an area where I'm hesitant to go now even in daylight, never mind at night.
The story of immigration and assimilation in America has been ever thus: immigrants don't leave their native land because they're wealthy and comfortable - if they were, they'd stay where they are. They leave because they're poor. The first generation of immigrants come here poor and, at least for a while, live in poverty, working menial jobs, speaking their native tongues and (if they're lucky) getting some comfort and a sense of community from media that speak those tongues, too.
It's the generations that follow that really become part of the melting pot, and it doesn't
ever happen overnight. Those bagels that are on your brunch buffet this weekend? It took them a century to go from peasant food in eastern Europe to the jalapeno-cheddar concoctions you can get in the freezer case in a Sioux Falls Safeway, right next to the frozen pierogis and spring rolls.
We are still in the first- and second-generation phase of the southwestern Hispanic immigration wave. There's already demographic data (where's David Gleason when we need him?) showing that Hispanics are following much the same path that my grandparents did - and your ancestors, too, wherever they came from: the generations that are born here, especially the third generation, grow up speaking English and participating in "mainstream" American culture, no matter what media their parents and grandparents consume.