These are just a few findings of the Survey of American Jewish Language and Identity, the results of which were published online late last month by linguist Sarah Bunin Benor and sociologist Steven M. Cohen. (The researchers will be giving a webinar on their study tonight; they’re also publishing a more academic version of their report in a linguistics journal later this year.) Dozens of surveys about American Jews have come out the past few decades—most famously, perhaps, the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey that caused alarm in some quarters with its claim that 52 percent of Jews were intermarried—but this is a rare one that shows rather than tells. Instead of asking respondents how religious they are or whether their grandchildren will be Jewish, Benor and Cohen asked questions like, “When you say ‘Mary’ and ‘merry’ in regular speech, do they sound the same or different?” and “How do you refer to the Jewish skullcap?” By hitting the question of Jewish identity at a slant rather than head-on, the researchers have come up with an unusually nuanced portrait of contemporary American Jews.

“Patterns of language use can tell us things about identities and communities that might not even be known to the actors themselves,” said Cohen, who has been conducting Jewish identity surveys of the more direct variety for some four decades. “There are things we can see through the side door that we can’t see through the front door.”

Benor and Cohen’s survey technique, like the questions they asked, was untraditional. Instead of using a random survey sample, they employed a “snowball technique,” emailing the survey to 600 friends in July 2008 and asking respondents to forward it in turn. They make clear in the introduction to their report that this approach has both its advantages and its drawbacks. On the one hand, 41,696 people completed the survey just in the first few weeks of its life on the internet. (You can still take the survey online, though only data from those first 41,696 respondents has already been analyzed.) By contrast, the National Jewish Population Survey, conducted every 10 years by United Jewish Communities (the umbrella group of local Jewish Federations), has a sample size of about 5,000. On the other hand, Benor and Cohen acknowledge, “we know it over-represents Jews with strong Jewish engagement and social ties”—the kind of people most likely to take such a survey of their own volition.

As Benor expected from her previous scholarship (like Cohen, she teaches at Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement’s seminary, which sponsored the survey), the data suggests that for the most part, American Jews across the religious spectrum draw from the same “repertoire” of distinctive speech elements—that is, they are English speakers who use varying amounts of Yiddish or Hebrew phrasing and grammar to distinguish themselves both from non-Jews and from Jews elsewhere on the spectrum. With the exception of those ultra-Orthodox Jews who use Yiddish as their primary language, Benor said, American Jews fall somewhere on this “continuum of distinctiveness” rather than being separable into different dialect groups.

“My favorite example is ‘gmar cha-tee-MAH to-VAH,’” she said, enunciating each syllable of the traditional Yom Kippur greeting: in English, “may you be inscribed in the book of life.” “That’s the most modern Hebrew pronunciation you can get. Then there’s ‘gmar cha-TEE-mah TO-vah,’ ‘gmar cha-SEE-mah TO-vah,’ and then ‘gmar ch’SEE-mah TOY-vah.” For those in the know, each pronunciation signifies a different spot on the religious continuum: a non-Orthodox Jew would probably use the modern Hebrew pronunciation; as you move along the spectrum of observance, the greeting becomes more Yiddish-inflected.

One of the key findings of the survey was what Benor and Cohen call “the growth of linguistic distinctiveness among the Orthodox.” Distinctive strains of Yiddish-inflected English are not only still in everyday use among younger generations of Orthodox American Jews, their prevalence is growing. Take the phrase, “She’s staying by us,” which borrows a Yiddish grammatical construction to mean, “She’s staying at our place.” Fifty-three percent of Orthodox Jews who took the survey use the phrase (versus 21 percent of non-Orthodox Jews). But a full three quarters of Orthodox Jews between the ages of 18 and 24 use it, compared to 12 percent of Orthodox respondents 75 or older. According to the report, “such words and phrases are so important for Orthodox identity that many baalei teshuva (newly Orthodox Jews) make a conscious effort to incorporate them into their speech, even when some people consider them to be incorrect English.” Observant Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews—whose ancestors never spoke Yiddish in the first place—have adopted Yiddish religious terminology as well.

Benor attributes this to the fact that Orthodox communities have in general become more conservative, politically and culturally, in recent years. “Part of that shift to the right is a linguistic shift: some Jews who used to use less distinct English are now incorporating more Yiddishisms into their English,” she said.

In non-Orthodox Jewish communities, two trends are happening concurrently, the survey found: as members of an older generation die and takes certain language patterns with them, younger Jews are using more Yiddish and Hebrew than before (and certainly more than their more assimilationist parents’ generation did). But the words disappearing and those reappearing aren’t necessarily the same words. Though Jews (and non-Jews) of all ages still say “shmutz” and “mazel tov,” seniors are more likely than their grandchildren to use Yiddishisms like “haimish” (homey), “macher” (big shot), “nu?” (so?), “naches” (pride), and “bashert” (predestined). Where the younger generation is overtaking their grandparents is with religious terminology—Yiddish words like “shul,” “daven,” and “bentch” (for the blessing after meals).

“You see more Jews now identifying as a religious rather than as an ethnic group,” Benor said. “Those Yiddish words that are increasing [in use] have to do with religious life.” Thus, the phenomenon one survey respondent reported: “When I was growing up, I called it Temple. When my children went to Day School, I called it synagogue. I now call it shul. I am not sure why.”

Though Jews across the religious spectrum said they would be likely to consider Hebrew names for their children, baby names are “an important resource for Jews to indicate intra-Jewish differences.” Less observant Jews, they found, are most likely to prefer anglicized biblical names, like Jacob, Ethan, Hannah, or Abigail. Modern Orthodox Jews were most likely to choose modern Hebrew names, like Ezra, Ari, Talia, or Eliana, often substituting them for the equivalent Yiddish names of deceased relatives (so, for example, they might name a daughter Tova, meaning “good” in Hebrew, after a grandmother named Gittel). For the most part, only ultra-Orthodox Jews said they would consider giving a child a Yiddish name like Moyshe, Mendy, or Basya. In one of the survey’s least surprising findings, only two percent of Jews said they’d consider naming their baby Christopher.

Well, okay. It’s a little better than that. (I can also say, “The cat was under the table,” “The cat will be under the table,” and, “Blessed is the cat under the table, who created the fruit of the vine.”)

I learned to read Hebrew in religious school—the usual bat mitzvah stuff. I took a fun language class a few years ago at the JCC. And I had a wonderful modern Hebrew tutor, two hours a day, in Jerusalem the last two times David and I were there. I left the U.S. talking about cats and tables; I came back actually being able to chat.

And yet, even after a few months with a weekly tutor in Brooklyn, my Hebrew is still nowhere near where I’d like it to be. I envy David, and his friends and colleagues, the ease with which they make their way around scripture and menu alike.

Language means so much to me as—at very least—an entrée into a culture. Not a unique revelation, I realize, but for me, it runs deep. Without the fluent—if Valley Girl—Spanish I acquired on my first stay with my host family at age fourteen, I would not have such dear lifelong friends in Mexico. Without my crash course in Italian before a trip to Tuscany, my friend Judy and I would not have the same memories of long, Chianti-soaked nights with the locals. Without my passable Catalan, I would not feel so at home in Barcelona. And without Hebrew, in Israel I feel like a dork: I’m the lame American for whom everyone has to switch to English, the klutz in my husband’s crowd.

But my thing for language is about even more than having cultural currency to jingle in my pocket. I was born with it. My father, you see, is a famous linguist—specifically, a famous phonologist of Spanish, which means about seven people know who he is. (Still, as a professor emeritus at MIT, he is a heartbeat away from Noam Chomsky.) Much of his work is theoretical, unlike that of, say, ethnolinguists who head off into the bush with tape recorders, or people like Stephen Pinker whose books you can actually curl up with. My Dad’s definitive work offers a “systematic description of the stress contours of Spanish words that follows from morphological and markedness considerations” along with a formulation of “the Peripherality Condition,” which is not a Robert Ludlum novel. Still, his flawless Spanish is indistinguishable from that spoken by the natives, at least in Mexico, which is where it was acquired. (In Spain or Venezuela, everyone just assumes he’s Mexican.)

While his job does not sound glamorous, it does involve a lot of world travel. When I was a child we took extended trips to Catalonia and Venezuela, where he taught at summer institutes; we vacationed in Mexico with his colleagues there. And in my early thirties, I went with my parents to the Basque country. (As I said at the time, “I’d prefer to go with my husband, but I haven’t met him yet.”)

This trip went down as the most colossal linguistic failure in Harris family history. Never mind the fact that Basque has twelve grammatical cases (versus Latin’s cushy five); it’s linguistically unrelated to any other tongue. This means—as I learned when I cracked open the textbook Dad and I had each bought—that trying to learn it is like trying to stick Velcro to particle board. I’d do the exercises, biting my lip, and get them all wrong. The moment I’d finish, I’d forget everything. You don’t know how close I came to hurling the damn book off the subway. Me? Unable to learn a language? This was a soul-challenging, humbling, deeply frustrating first.

“Bet Dad can do this,” I thought. I emailed to find out. “How’s the Basque going?” His reply: “Fucking language from hell. This is a waste of my time.”

Hebrew, to be sure, is no Basque. But to be fair to myself, it’s not Spanish either. (Hence the song I made up when David took his crash course in Spanish: “Spanish Is So Much Easier Than Hebrew.”) What do the other languages I speak have in common? Shared Latin roots, for one—and, oh yeah, an alphabet. And to be able to say just about anything in Hebrew besides “chocolate” or “Golda Meir,” you have to make rote memorization a big part of your life. That, and this: If someone says, “Oh, Hebrew is so easy, it’s all so regular,” well, hu meshaker. (He is lying.) The other night I was practicing future tense with my tutor by discussing our trip to Israel. Our conversation went something like this:

Chantal: What will you be doing this summer?

Me: We [will travel] to Israel on May 5.

Chantal: [Correcting verb.] It’s irregular. What will you do there?

Me: I [will work] part-time.

Chantal: [Correcting verb.] It’s irregular. What will Bess do while you work?

Me: We [will find] a sitter.

Chantal: [Correcting verb.] It’s irregular. What will—

Me: I [will give up.]

There is much about Hebrew that is tidy and elegant, with great appeal for linguistic nerds and poets alike. You don’t need indefinite articles; you don’t have to learn the subjunctive. And, even when they’re tripping me up, I appreciate Hebrew’s complexities as well. You want a deliberately standardized language to have some messiness around the edges, like a homemade cookie. The standard, shrugging, in-joke reply to a student’s frustration: Kacha zeh b’ivrit. “That’s how it is in Hebrew.”

It makes me think of the old Yiddish song “Oyfn Pripitchik.” (I once took a Yiddish course too, by the way, at a local synagogue. Our textbook actually taught us to say things like, “It hurts everywhere.”) The first few verses of the song tell a sweet tale of students learning to read and write. Then the teacher speaks up: “When you get older, children, you will understand that this alphabet contains the tears and the weeping of our people.” I may shed tears over irregular verbs, but these are the irregular verbs of my people. Evkeh, aval lo evater. I will weep, but I will not give up.

Balagan means “total chaos.” But this word is unique, because contrary to the implied negative value the concept has in other languages, the subtext of balagan is positive. True, that positiveness is not overt—a bit like a proud parent trying to hide a smile from his mischief-making son—but it is completely there. But chaos for a society that is itself full of balagan is nothing less than proof of vitality and passion. In a place where people push and shove in line, where children insist on drawing on walls and not on paper, where a briefcase holds stained income tax reports

lying between a pastrami sandwich and a piece of graph paper with the beginnings of a poem on it, that’s where you’ll find human liberty, the liberty that both Yiddish and Hebrew have always held sacred.

The second word that came to mind was dugree, a word taken from Arabic that means “direct, honest talk.” Just like chaos, directness is a valued attribute in Israeli society. So dugree people will always tell you that you’ve gotten fat, that your wife is ugly, that the film you made is so-so, and—come to think of it—they never did manage to get through any of your books. They don’t do it because they have a need to enlighten you, but because for them saying anything else would be hypocritical. Of course, they know they could just smile and save you from some of that honesty, but then they wouldn’t be completely dugree. And so, genuinely dugree people will call you two hours after you’ve said goodbye and add that in all the excitement, they forgot to mention that your son seems underdeveloped for his age and your skin looks terrible.

If the concept of balagan only slightly aroused the intellectual curiosity of the visitors from LA, the concept of dugree managed to get their full attention. They tried to think of a time when someone came up to them after a screening with a negative comment and couldn’t. “Maybe your movies were simply great,” one of the Israeli hosts said, trying to pay an extremely non-dugree compliment.

“No,” said the director, “that’s not it. It’s just that in LA, when a film isn’t good, your colleagues come over and say things like, ‘It was so brave of you to do this film,’ or ‘I really liked the dog.’”

“And if the film is really terrible?” I asked. “If someone suffered through every frame of it?”

“Oh,” said a producer. “In that case, chances are he’ll come over wearing a big, toothy smile and say, ‘Good for you.’”

In the taxi on the way back from dinner, I pictured the toothy smiles of all the people who said how much they loved my book during that fabulous book tour on the West Coast in 2001. Now, when I think about it, many of them did tell me how brave I was to write that book, and there’d been a tall, thin woman from Berkeley who shook my hand warmly and said that she really loved the dog. In retrospect—to be dugree with myself—that should have made me suspicious right then because there was no dog in the book. On a more positive note, it may have taken me six years, but I did finally get it. Good for me.

Translated by Sondra Silverstone.