Yiddish as a Second Language

"If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish."

— Lenny Bruce

In some shows, the characters — some portrayed as being Jewish, some not — will pepper their dialogue with words and phrases in Yiddish (or more specifically, in Yinglish). Translations and subtitles are not provided, and meanings must be inferred from context. This trope goes back quite a ways in American television, almost to the point of being a Dead Horse Trope, without passing through the stages of Clever Idea → Trope → Subverted Trope → Discredited Trope. (Mainly because its roots are another fifty years back, in vaudeville.) It occurs in both dramas and sitcoms, sometimes without regard to the setting city of the show, though it most often appears in shows set in New York, where it's most common in actual speech, and Los Angeles, where schmooze — a Yiddish word if ever there was one — is a way of life. The criminal argot of East End London Gangsters has also absorbed a few Yiddish words, particularly "shtum" (keep quiet).

Thanks to this trope, however, several Yiddish terms have become a standard part of American English vernacular. Concentrated in large American cities and spreading out worldwide, common Yiddish terms like "putz", "schmooze", "Word, Schmord!", are slowly becoming standard English words. Even idioms that sound perfectly American, like "Eat your heart out" or "What's not to like?" are calques from Yiddish, still preserving the original Yiddish speech patterns. This trope evolved from the early movies and TV — censors were aggressive in editing out curses, sexual references, etc. However, most of these early censors did not speak Yiddish, so the writers, actors, and producers (who often did) used Yiddish curse words as a way of Getting Crap Past the Radar. Similar linguistic absorption is observable in Cockney and related North London dialects. Essentially Yiddish is Gratuitous German with a spoonful of Hebrew and a sprinkle of Slavic and Romanian.

If a character speaks in Yiddish as sole proof of Jewish authenticity, then they may be practitioners of Informed Judaism. If a senior character has the accent as well, they're an Alter Kocker.

Yiddish as a first language declined a lot over the 20th century — five million speakers were killed by the Nazis and those in other countries gradually switched to the local languages — many Jews arriving in Israel from 1948 onwards came from Arab countries where Yiddish was not used. (YIVO, the society that collects and preserves European Jewish cultural history, has lots of pre-war Yiddish works.) However, reports of the death of Yiddish are greatly exaggerated. It flourishes among the Chasidim, and there are movements to teach it to children and keep it going among Reform and Reconstructionist Jews; anyone can learn it through free courses online, formal instruction, or immersion — regular visits to a community where people speak it a lot. Of course the language has evolved a lot; pre-war "literary" Yiddish was much more influenced by German, and also a lot less "clean" than the version spoken by, say, Torah scholars.

Compare All Jews Are Ashkenazi, Jews Love to Argue.

See As Long as It Sounds Foreign, Pardon My Klingon, You Are the Translated Foreign Word.

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Moshln:

• Telewisie
• Faktischs Lebn (Real Life)

Animefilmen (Anime)

• One episode of Revolutionary Girl Utena, about Nanami's transformation into a cow, features the Yiddish song "Dona Dona," which is a popular song in Japanese schools. How they got it, no one knows. But pay attention to the lyrics...
  • This song turned up in Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, as well.
  • And the manga of Ah! My Goddess...
  • And in the His and Her Circumstances anime adaptation, when Maho gets forced into participating in the play, very much against her will.
• Meowth from Pokémon: The Series has been known to occasionally let loose an "oy vey" ever since Carter Cathcart started voicing him in the English dub.

Karikaturschurnaln (Comic Books)

• Bodies (2014): To remind readers that Whiteman is Jewish, he'll frequently sprinkle Yiddish in his dialogue and narration, e.g. exclaiming "Gavalt!"
• Spider-Man: Spider-Man, particularly the Ultimate universe version, is fond of peppering his speech with random Yiddish, especially during fights — despite the fact that he's Lutheran, not Jewish. But then, he's from New York City. In fact, his home neighborhood in Queens, Forest Hills, is very Jewish.
  Mary Jane: Where do you know Yiddish all of a sudden?
  Peter: I picked it up.
  Mary Jane: You should put it back.
• The Thing from the Fantastic Four is Jewish and often peppers his speech and battle banter with Yiddish words and phrases.
• Shaloman. All together now... "Oy vey!"
• Marville has hadrosaurs using the Hebrew word "mishbucha", during the Jurassic period. If this strikes you as in any way coherent or logical, seek help.
• Kate Kane, who is Jewish, occasionally uses Yiddish in Batwoman (Rebirth).
• Many of the founding writers of MAD were of Jewish ancestry and often snuck Yiddish into the magazine as a Running Gag. Words like "schmuck" tend to show up in practically every issue.
• Harley Quinn of Batman, first started using common Yiddish phrases like "Oy" when she first appeared in Batman: The Animated Series owing to Gotham City often being thought of as another expy of New York City. Many thought she was only borrowing the language since Harley has blue eyes and blonde hair, but Gotham City Sirens #7 confirmed that not only is Harley originally from New York, she is half-Jewish on her mother's side.
• One Pearls Before Swine story arc has Rat teach himself to speak Yiddish because he thinks it's "by far the best language in the world for hurling insults".

Onhengerarbetn (Fanfiction)

• The Bolt Chronicles: Common Yiddish-derived words occur prominently in a few stories.
  • Mittens uses the term "kvetch" in "The Coffee Shop." Bolt misunderstands the term as "kwetch."
  • Blaze uses the words "schlep," "canoodle," and "verklempt" in "The Cameo." His girlfriend Tracey refers to him as a "putz."
  • In "The Party," Mittens fakes a reason to excuse herself after meeting her now-morbidly-obese former fling Tom, claiming that her naturally white paws are actually cloth booties and that she needs to clean the "schmutz" off them before they get dirty.
• DC Nation's Sue Dibny peppers her dialogue with a few choice Yiddish phrases, but only if she is really ticked. Dr. Light wound up with a real earful before she and Constantine all but tossed his sorry hide out an airlock.
• In Eleutherophobia: Back to the Future, Tom mentions that his great-grandmother's rant contains just enough Yiddish words that he doesn't understand what she's talking about at first.
• In Flufferverse: The Countdown, Rachel tells Jordan to "gey aroys", meaning "go away".
• In the Abridged Series Ranma ½: The Abridged Chronicles, Ryōga is Jewish. He often includes Yiddish in his lines, and his intro episode even had Yiddish-to-English subtitles on the YouTube captions.

Filmen

• One of the best examples is this scene from the opening of the 1932 Warner Bros. picture Taxi! (1932), in which a Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant is frustrated in his attempt to communicate with a policeman, until Cagney interrupts in fluent Yiddish to offer the man a lift. Supposedly, the scene was actually improvised, to take advantage of the fact that Irish-American actor James Cagney had learnt Yiddish from his playmates while growing up in New York City. The presence of the perplexed Irish cop only makes it ten times funnier.
• The Lion King 1 ½: Timon the meerkat's mother. In the film proper, after she pulls Timon into a burrow when the hyenas attack, she asks him, "What are you, a meshuggenah?" In one of the special features on the DVD edition, she comments that she's "so excited I'm shvitzing!"
• Hercules managed to have Hades, of all characters, throw various Yiddishisms into his speech, despite ostensibly being from ancient Greece.
  • Philoctetes occasionally does this, as well.
• The Genie from Aladdin occasionally does this thanks to Robin Williams, who, according to Supervising Animator Eric Goldberg, would throw in Yiddishisms with his improv.
• A wonderful instance appears in the film A Mighty Wind: Ed Begley Jr. plays Lars Olfen, a first-generation Swedish-American Public Television executive who nonetheless laces everything he says with a vast amount of Yiddish:
  Lars Olfen: The naches^note joy that I'm feeling right now... 'cause your dad was like mishpoche^note family to me. When I heard I got these ticket to the Folksmen, I let out a geshreeyeh,^note squee and I'm running with my friend... running around like a vilde chaye,^note wild beast right into the theater, in the front row! So we've got the shpilkes,^note nervousness 'cause we're sittin' right there... and it's a mitzvah,^note good deed what your dad did, and I want to try to give that back to you. Okeinhoreh^note not the word he meant to use; alav hasholem means "rest in peace," this is more along the lines of "knock wood", I say, and God bless him.
• A common gag in Mel Brooks films, with Mel usually doing them himself.
  • The Yiddish-speaking Indian chief in Blazing Saddles. His headdress actually reads "Posher l'Kesach": roughly, "Posher for Kassover". When he meets Bart's family, he says in Yiddish, "Blacks!" When one of the other Indians raises his tomahawk, Brooks says, "No, no, don't be crazy. Let them go!" After Bart's family has ridden away, Brooks mutters, "Have you ever seen in your life?" He finishes in very Yiddish-accented English, "Dey darkuh den us! Wuff!"
    • This is also an obscure allusion to very old Western movies, where Natives would often be played by Jews.
    • Similarly, Hedley Lamarr calls Taggart a "provincial putz" and mutters "schmucks" during the Repeat After Me scene.
  • Mel Brooks as Yogurt in Spaceballs drops some Yiddish, such as, "The ring was bupkus!" Also, when about to translate the words on the medallion, he makes a bunch of croaking noises that are probably supposed to lampoon the fairly guttural sound of Yiddish. He's just clearing his throat.
  • Rabbi Tuckman in Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
    • Interestingly, the Englishmen he's talking to understand some Yiddish words.
      Robin Hood: You've just entered the territory of Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
      Rabbi Tuckman: (waves his hand) Feygeles?
      Robin Hood: (the Merry Men react negatively) No, no, we're straight, just merry.
  • Van Helsing in Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
  • A Those Wacky Nazis Take That! rap music video as Hitler.
  • Bigweld in Robots uses tochis (alternative spelling for toches which means butt in Yiddish).
• Eddie Murphy's urban conman running for Congress in The Distinguished Gentleman impresses a Jewish senior citizen by contradicting her in Yiddish, which he apparently picked up playing gin on Miami Beach. He is also shown driving through several neighborhoods while talking on a megaphone using an accent common to each neighborhood, including sounding like an old Jewish man with Yiddish-peppered sentences.
• London hood Don Logan in Sexy Beast uses a little Yiddish during a Mirror Monologue.
• Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels pokes fun at London gangsters not realizing the origins of their slang when Tom assures Nick the Greek that a deal is "kosher as Christmas," to which Nick answers, "Jews don't celebrate Christmas!"
• An extended joke in the erotic thriller spoof Fatal Instinct: the hero's wife and the man she is having an affair meet in a park to discuss murdering the hero. She suggests they speak in Yiddish and they both converse fluently for several minutes in the language before the elderly black man on the opposite bench interrupts with a helpful suggestion. He can't speak Yiddish but he can "read subtitles".
• Both of the old comedians in The Sunshine Boys (played by George Burns and Walter Matthau) liberally use Yiddishisms. Both of them are veterans of the old Borscht Belt comedy circuit.
• In Independence Day, Judd Hirsch plays a Jewish man and drops a lot of Yiddish.
• Used by every Jewish adult in A Serious Man, because they are all conservative Jews in the late 60s.
• Top Secret! uses Yiddish dialogue and signage to stand in for actual German.
• In Robin and the Seven Hoods, Frank Sinatra at one point feels like he's being noodged. "It's an old Italian word."
• In City Hall, Mayor's aide John Cusack (who's supposed to come from Louisiana) mispronounces "schlep" as "slep", prompting Bridget Fonda to snap at him to "get the gumbo out of your Yiddish" if he's going to get anywhere in New York City politics.
  • In addition to that, the Mayor (Al Pacino) explains about menschkeit, which he translates as honor and character between men.
• In Mary and Max, Max, who is Jewish, sends off his letters and packages to Marry with "Gey gezunderheit" ("Go in good health").
• Batman Returns villain Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) was originally supposed to sprinkle a few Yiddishisms into his dialogue. For example, he would have told Penguin to "be a mensch," call people goniffs ("thieves") in one scene in his office, and later call Penguin a "schmuck." All of these were excised, perhaps to make his dialogue more clear and also avoid any Greedy Jew connotations.
• In Reversal of Fortune, Alan Dershowitz explains to one of his students the reason why he decided to appeal Claus Von Bulow's attempted murder conviction; the family hired a private prosecutor to collect their own evidence and decide what to turn over to the D.A., and that if the conviction is upheld, "the next victim isn't going to be going to be rich, like Von Bulow, but some poor schnook who can't afford, or can't find, a decent lawyer." A schnook is Yiddish for dupe. Being a New York Jew born in the 1930s, it's almost certain that Dershowitz knows some Yiddish.
• In the movie In the Land of Women, Phyllis asks Carter about his ex-girlfriend Sofia, "Was she zaftig?" This is Yiddish for a large-statured or 'curvaceous' woman.
• In the Steve Jobs movie, Jobs asks his assistant Joanna Hoffman to get his estranged daughter Lisa to come backstage, and for Hoffman to use her "wise, old European act" to entice her. Hoffman replies, "You do know I wasn't born in a 19th century Russian shtetl, right?"
• In Die Hard, Ellis very famously calls Hans Gruber "bubby," short for "bubalah," a term of endearment. The line was ad-libbed by Hart Bochner, who is Jewish. That said, Ellis also casually drops an anti-Semitic slur in the same scene, so it's unlikely that the character himself is Jewish.
• In Heavyweights, Philip's bunkmates find him eating a McDonald's cheeseburger in a bathroom stall. Everyone is tense, as their summer camp's new health-nut owner has long declared junk food contraband. The other boys ask where Phillip got the cheeseburger and he lies that he found it, leading Josh to cry "Come here, you little putz!" and seize the burger.
• Rosemary's Baby: Rosemary's husband tells her that his new part will grant them wealth, luxuries and "the whole schmear."

Literatur

• This abounds in the works of Harry Turtledove, most prominently in those sections of his World War series featuring the Russie family, and also in several sections of his American Empire trilogy. While what they say always fits with the meaning of the word, they are sometimes idiomatically incorrect — no one would actually use the word the way the character does.
  • Shtetl Days: Veit and the other actors playing Jews speak fluent Yiddish in their roles and pepper Yiddish words in casual conversation.
• Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an Alternate History mystery featuring a Jewish refugee state in Alaska. Almost all the Jews who immigrated there are Ashkenazi and they interact with few outsiders, so Yiddish has been adopted as the standard language. There are even a few Yiddish/English puns, such as calling a handgun (a "piece") a "sholem," meaning "peace."
• Vorkosigan Saga: Miles Vorkosigan uses a noticeable amount of Yiddish words, despite living around 1000 years in the future. He is portrayed as having an above average knowledge of the past, but it's interesting that this part of a High German language of Jewish origin was preserved.
• The classic science fiction short story "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum includes a German engineer named Putz.
• Esther Friesner's novel Elf Defense includes among its minor characters a classic Tolkien/Shakespeare-style elf maiden named Loris whose speech is unexpectedly punctuated with the occasional bit of Yiddish. When called on it, she abashedly admits to dating a dybbuk (a possessing demon of Jewish myth).
• The American Girls Collection features a character named Rebecca Rubin. She's a third-generation American of Russian Jewish descent who converses with her family in English and Yiddish, in addition to their having several conversations where it's not clear which language they're using.
• In respect to the influence of Yiddish on British criminal argot, this probably explains why a Redwall character who was a Lovable Rogue ended up with the name Gonff (goniff is Yiddish for thief). In a more general example, the phrase "keeping shtum" (quiet in the sense of "not snitching") is much more likely to be heard from a London Gangster character than a Jewish one.
• Dashiell Hammett used the word gunsel in The Maltese Falcon. It was actually Yiddish for "a young man kept for sexual purposes", but he knew that his editor would misinterpret it as "gun-carrying hoodlum"; and indeed, as a result, the word now means that!
• In Feet of Clay all of the golems' names are Yiddish; these names include Dorfl, Schmatta, and Klutz. The golem who goes mad is named Meshugah. Dorfl's speech patterns, first seen in writing and then in actual speech after he receives a tongue, are extremely Yiddish.
• In John Moore's Fractured Fairy Tale, The Unhandsome Prince, Rumplestiltskin never actually admits to being Jewish (in a world where antisemitism is definitely a real thing), but he seems to drop a lot of Yiddish into his conversation, and he becomes much more interested in Rapunzel when he finds some clues that she may be Jewish.
• In Primo Levi's Holocaust memoir If This Is a Man, many of the Jews in Auschwitz overcome the Language Barrier by using Yiddish. A certain tension rises between Yiddish speakers (mainly Poles and other Eastern Europeans) and non-Yiddish speakers (mainly Western Europeans, such as the Italian author).
• The Second Mango: Rivka's unnamed native language contains several Yiddish words and phrases that she peppers her speech with.
• In Romain Gary's The Dance of Genghis Cohn this is due to possession by the title character/narrator, the ghost of a Jewish stand-up comedian.
• In Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr series Bernie's across-the-hall neighbor Mrs. Hesche refers to East Side residents as momsers^noteBastards. several times and calls a dead woman a nafkeh^noteWhore..
• Whateley Universe: Of the many tropes that this series invokes, this may be the most surprising, especially since it is mostly done with a Lampshade Hanging.
  • "Stress Fracture" depicts Dee Castle's family as stereotypical American Ashkenazim (possibly as a reflection of author Diane Castle's real family, in much the same way the character's OCD reflects her own problems with the condition). [1]
  • Phase, as a native of New York City, gets a bit envious of Jade for having learned a significant number of Yiddish words after going on a Mel Brooks film binge, and decides to study the language just to one up her.[2]
  • Jericho (a Blind Black Guy from Texas) refers to Peeper and Miasma as 'yutzes' while doing the color commentary on their combat final (he's using his cybernetic implant to watch it through the video link). When Razorback calls him out for it, he says, "What? I don’t look Jewish to you?”, before explaining he'd picked it up from a student codenamed Rabbinic ("I heard some way better words from him, but I don’t think the FCC would let me say them on the air.”)[3]
  • In "Razzle Dazzle", supervillain Mephisto (who claims to have grown up in the Vaudeville community of the late 19th and early 20th centuries) uses a truckload of Yiddish in giving his biography.[4] He even says he got called out for it by a Nazi scientist/supervillain he was working with against The Champion in 1938:
    "This is playing to his strengths, you PUTZ!"
    The Red Eagle glared suspiciously at Mephisto. "Are you by any chance… Jewish?"
    Mephisto glared back. “NO. I was in Show Biz - they use a lot of Yiddish, because Yiddish has so many great words for people who are being STUPID! If I was Jewish, would I be working for the fucking Nazis?”
• In the introductory note to the Rivers of London short story "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" in Tales From the Folly, Ben Aaronovitch refers to the spirit of the river Wandle (which was once the centre of the London textile industry, as a result of which its Genius Loci has an innate connection to cloth and clothing) as the Goddess of Schmutter.
• Prussian Blue: The Krauss brothers, Jewish burglars and expert safecrackers, pepper their speech with Yiddish. Detective Bernie Gunther, who has liberated them from Dachau in order to open Karl Flex's safe, knows that their Yiddish is an act.
  Karl Krauss: That red Italian car? It's a nice car. But even in Italy it's just a noodge. Not a car for gonifs like us....We gay avek in a car like that and the whole world sees, and hears, too, probably.
• The Scottish Jewish poet David Bleiman often uses Yiddish in his work. The poem "The Trebbler's Tale", from the collection This Kilt of Many Colours, is written in what the lost Scots-Yiddish dialect of Jewish itinerant tradesmen in 1920s Scotland might have sounded like.

Muzik

• "Weird Al" Yankovic
  • The song "Pretty Fly for a Rabbi" features Yiddish liberally sprinkled throughout the lyrics. When asked how he knew the Yiddish, Al replied: "A good percentage of my friends are Jewish, and most of those Yiddish words are fairly common usage — in the entertainment industry, anyway. Also, I bought several English-Yiddish dictionaries for reference." Contrary to popular belief, Al himself is not Jewish.
  • "Cavity Search" rhymes "x-ray" with "oy vey" and "The Plumbing Song" says to "call the mensch with a monkey wrench," while "eBay" states "I'll buy your tchotchkes."
• Used liberally in the Voltaire song "Coin Operated Goi," a parody of The Dresden Dolls' song "Coin Operated Boy."
• "Bei Mir Bist Du Shein", a big hit for The Andrews Sisters back in the day.
• The Black Eyed Peas: "I Gotta Feeling".
  Fill up your cup! (Drank!)
  Mazel tov!
  L'CHAIM
• The Vaudeville song (later used in Forbidden Zone) "Yiddishe Charleston."
• El-P's "The Full Retard" includes "oy vey", a very rare usage of the term in a hip-hop song. El-P himself, while a sworn atheist, is culturally Jewish to some degree, and the co-owner of a Jewish delicatessen/smoked fish emporium in Brooklyn.
• The David Bowie-led Tin Machine named their live album Oy Vey Baby. This was in reference to U2's Achtung Baby which, oddly enough, also had Jewish roots.
• Robyn Adele Anderson's retro cover of "Rich Girl" sees her perform one run-through of the chorus in Yiddish.

Teater

• Played with for laughs in "The King of Broadway" from the stage musical adaptation of The Producers.
  Max Bialystock: I was a protege of the great Boris Tomaschevsky! He taught me everything I know. I'll never forget, he turned to me on his deathbed and said, "Maxella, alle menschen muss zu machen, jeden tug a gentzen pisch pippikachen!"
  Crowd member: What does that mean?
  Bialystock: Who knows? I don't speak Yiddish. Strangely enough, neither did he.
  • Even the NAZI speaks Yiddish in the musical.
    "So ve hop our hops, Und ve clop our clops, Und ve drink our Schnapps 'Til ve plotz!"
• In Fiorello!, LaGuardia says he's half-Jewish when campaigning among the Jews, and sings a Yiddish version of his campaign song ("Ich zug tsu eye-ich, Tammany is nisht kosher").
  *An odd case of semi-truth in television. LaGuardia really was half-Jewish in real life. But his mother was an Italian Sephardic Jew, who would have spoken Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, not Yiddish. (It's possible LaGuardia learned Yiddish to speak on the campaign trail though, just as modern New York City politicians can mostly use a few words of Spanish at least.)
• In the musical Little Shop of Horrors, the plant knows some Yiddish, like "Come on Seymour, don't be a putz". (I mean, come on, he even says "Feh!") He probably learned the Yiddish from the likely-Jewish Mr. Mushnik, who uses "mensch" and "mishegas". The lyricist/composer team, Ashman and Menken, also did many Disney movies, and the same influence is seen there (Phil in Hercules, etc.).
  • It's in the original film as well.
• The musical In the Heights, which takes place in Washington Heights (upper Manhattan with a predominantly Hispanic community), has several Latino/Latina characters use Yiddish rather believably in their daily conversations, similar to their usage of Spanglish (although less frequently, for obvious reasons). Prior to a wave of Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants into the area Washington Heights was a rather Jewish neighborhood (and still is, with even a Jewish university there), and the characters probably picked it up from one of the innumerable senior citizens with a rent-controlled apartment dating back to the 40s — in which case the Lenny Bruce quote above becomes applicable.
  • During "It Won't Be Long Now" Vanessa tells Usnavi he has "some schmutz on his face" from fixing the refrigerator.
  • During "The Club," Usnavi and Benny are trying to drink away their troubles and Usnavi says "As long as you buy 'em — L'chaim!"
• Stephen Sondheim uses it in several instances.
  • In "How I Saved Roosevelt" in Assassins one of the witnesses of Guiseppe Zangara's attempted assassination of FDR says "I thought I'd plotz."
  • In "It's Hot Up Here" in Sunday in the Park with George Frieda complains that "The boatman schwitzes."^noteSweats.
• The 1938 revue Hellzapoppin' began with a film strip featuring Adolf Hitler speaking in a Yiddish accent, to invoke the Rule of Funny right off the bat.
• In City of Angels, Yiddish words are dropped by various characters, but mostly by Buddy.
• Played for Laughs in the crossover parody show Avenue Jew, where the casts of Avenue Q and Fiddler on the Roof mashed their shows together for Broadway Cares. In the original Avenue Q, Princeton sings about his useless B.A. in English. In Avenue Jew, his life choices get worse: "What do you do with a B.A. in Yiddish? Who the hell majors in that?"
• Played for Laughs in Monty Python’s Spamalot when Sir Robin sings a song about the overwhelming Jewish presence in Broadway, dropping quite a bit of Yiddish along the way.

Internetkarikaturn (Webcomics)

• The Finkelsteins in The Specialists make use of Yiddish occasionally, such as in this breakfast conversation.
• In one arc of Skin Horse Nick Zerhakker started swearing in Yiddish to bypass his profanity filter, but it adapted eventually.
• Sabra "Stick" Klein in PreTeena and her parents speak a little Yiddish.
• Tripping Over You: Both Liam Schwartz and his father Eli occasionally add some Yiddish to their lines. Cousin Alfons' native language is German, so it's a fairly safe bet that their family descends from German-Jewish emmigrants.

Meyreve Karikaturn (Western Animation)

• The Joker, in Batman: The Animated Series, often threw in a Yiddish word when searching for another adjective to drive his point home, although probably out of many Yiddish terms being Inherently Funny Words. Harley Quinn being Jewish, used plenty too.
• In Big Mouth, the Hormone Monsters are known to drop a few Yiddish phrases from time to time.
• In Brandy & Mr. Whiskers, Mr. Whiskers' brain speaks with a Yiddish accent. Whiskers himself does not. Whiskers appears to be capable of thinking on a Whiskers level without the aid of a brain (the plot of at least two episodes revolves around Whiskers' brain getting fed up with being ignored, and leaving), so maybe it's not so surprising.
• Slappy Squirrel's eternal (and elderly) nemesis Walter Wolf speaks with a Yiddish accent and swears in Yiddish a lot.
  • Minerva Mink and Slappy herself are fond of the Yiddish insult "yutz", meaning "idiot".
• Futurama's John Zoidberg, from the Space Jew race of Decapodians: "Hello? Attack Earth! Yeah I know it's a schlep, just do it!" He also says "Mazel Tov".
• Irwin's grandfather from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy is this, even though he was an Egyptian pharaoh.
• Larry of Time Squad often says "Oy vey!" when dismayed. Seeing as he was originally designed to be a polyglotic diplomat, this is rather appropriate.
• The Critic's Alice Tompkins: "Honey, we have a saying back in Tennessee: 'Be a mensch, not a schmendrick.'"
  • Especially series star Jay Sherman, thanks to his being voiced by Jon Lovitz.
• The Simpsons: Krusty the Clown is fond of spouting Yiddish words, like ferkakta. Not very surprising, since Krusty is Jewish (his father Hyman Krustofsky is a rabbi).
• One episode of Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series featured a wise old duck who taught Grin how to keep his head while playing hockey. At first, he looks and talks like a stereotypical Fu Manchu Chinese-type, but suddenly shifts into stereotypical Yiddish blabbering without any warning. Keep in mind, he's from another planet, in a different dimension.
• In Hey Arnold!, Harold is Jewish and once used the word "Kibitzer" (Yiddish for a non-participant offering (often unwanted) advice or commentary) to describe Arnold's tendencies to butt into other people's business. "Yutz" has also been used by a few characters in the series, mostly by Helga. Gerald also recites a Hebrew prayer in the movie even though he's not Jewish.
• Lenny Turtletaub, the old Jewish tortoise movie producer from BoJack Horseman, is known for peppering his speech with Yiddish phrases. This comes to a hilarious head when BoJack asks him if he's really Jewish, because it sounds like he's just making some of these up.
• Grunkle Stan of Gravity Falls occasionally uses "Oy!" and "Moses!" to express anguish.
• Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum: Owing to Brad's Jewish heritage, he often says "Oy vey" when he's frustrated, exhausted, or worried.
• Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: Casey, being both Puerto Rican and Jewish, peppers her speech with Spanish and Yiddish.
• In the Phineas and Ferb episode, "Candace gets Busted", Doofenshmirtz's latest Inator backfires predictably and Doofenshmirtz politely ask Perry the Platypus to "be a mensch" and press the reverse button. Perry does.
• In the Family Guy episode "Road to Germany", Stewie, Brian, and Mort attempt to flee the Nazi-occupied city of Warsaw by disguising Mort as a Catholic priest. Unfortunately, the Germans ask him to give the Last Rites to a dying soldier and Mort begins to blows his cover by opening the prayer with:
  Mort: Dear God, uh non-Jewish God, be a Mensch.

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