Yiddish was the language spoken by Eastern European Jewish immigrants to Britain from the early 1880s. By the 1950s this working-class community was dispersed, communities of origin had been destroyed and Yiddish largely disappeared. Today, the literary and cultural heritage of Yiddish has been lost. As part of the AHRC-funded project 'Making and Remaking the Jewish East End', London Yiddish literary sources from archives across the world were collected, translated and analysed, and the project researchers built a picture of East End working-class Jewish life. Our follow-on project arises from the unforeseen public enthusiasm generated by our stagings of Yiddish performance. It aims to use these texts in Yiddish and English translation to engage a range of public audiences with the history of Jewish immigrants to London's East End, including people with an ancestral connection to this history and those interested in migration history or London cultures. Secondly we aim to stimulate and support the teaching and learning of the Yiddish language, which remains an endangered language in Britain. The project will produce 'The Cockney Yiddish Podcast', a series of podcasts and linked website about the history of Yiddish culture in London. The series celebrates the richness of Cockney Yiddish culture, and its close intertwinement with British culture and literature, as an integral part of British migration history. The podcasts will be presented by the project team with guest scholars, writers and actors and will explore the experience of immigration and acculturation through the medium of popular culture, especially fiction and song. These lively texts from London's popular Yiddish press will also be made available on the website as teaching and learning resources for intermediate-level Yiddish language, in order to serve the learning needs of the growing Yiddish language learning community. Interactivity among learners and listeners will be fostered through an online discussion forum and live events. Our UK community partners the Jewish Museum, the Jewish Music Institute, the Holocaust Survivors' Centre and Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives will facilitate the involvement of a number of different audiences in the project, including both younger learners of Yiddish language and elderly native speakers. In turn the project will enable our community partner organisations to expand their provision of Yiddish-focused cultural programming. In addition, the team will use their existing connections to Yiddish language centres in the US and Israel to reach wider international audiences. At the same time, through making texts available in English translation in the podcast and website, the project also addresses people with no knowledge of Yiddish or Jewish culture. By generating engagement with these several audiences through informative, entertaining and provocative content, the project aims to expand knowledge of working-class Jewish history in Britain and to engage more people with Yiddish culture.

While British attitudes to immigration from the Victorian period onwards have increasingly come under scrutiny, the experience of immigrant minorities remains under-researched. Our project focuses on one instructive case study: the history of Jewish immigrants to east London, their children and grandchildren. Around 150,000 Jews migrated to Britain in the late Victorian period, the majority settling in east London. Their story has largely been written from sources produced by the leaders of the established Anglo-Jewish community, who regarded immigrant Jews as profoundly different from them - poor, pious and politically radical - and who had little understanding of the East End environment where Jewish immigrants settled. However, this perspective has limited our understanding of Jewish culture and social change in modern London. Our project seeks instead to attend to the voices of working-class and lower middle-class East End Jews. Crucially, this entails study of the Yiddish language culture of Jewish immigrants, which flourished in east London in the early twentieth century and subsequently became a formative influence on Jewish culture after World War II. The project will analyse a body of rarely used sources in Yiddish and English-language popular culture, drawing on literature, periodicals, theatre, songs, and oral history recordings. Contesting the still dominant view of Yiddish-speaking immigrants as pliable subjects moulded by philanthropy and schooling, our study will examine the forms of agency and creativity they exerted in the process of acculturation. Instead of assuming that Jewish immigrant culture in the East End was inward- and backward-looking, we will approach it as a mobile, hybrid and transnational phenomenon. For immigrants and their children, we contend, the East End was experienced not as a ghetto but through relationships to other social and cultural spaces: to the West End Jewish world but also to European or north American centres of Jewish culture, to Cockney London and to other immigrant communities. We will explore how this diasporic hybridity was enacted in immigrant culture, including London Yiddish - a dynamic language that absorbed and adapted words, ideas and literary forms from eastern Europe to the East End. In the postwar period, the Jewish East End continued to be remade. As Jews migrated to suburbs, it became a temporal as well as a spatial marker. We will examine how, in novels, memoirs and oral histories, looking back to the East End, and the Yiddish culture in which many Jews were raised, produced new understandings of the present. The research will be undertaken by two leading academics in the field of British Jewish studies from the disciplines of History and English, and a postdoctoral researcher experienced in Yiddish-language text and performance. Academic outputs will include articles, conference papers, an anthology of translated Yiddish literature and the digitization and transcription of oral history recordings. Impact activities will take place with partner institutions in north and east London and include public lectures, a rehearsed reading of London Yiddish drama, a guided walk in London's East End and a short film. A sound installation and creative workshops will involve contemporary East Enders with local oral history and reflection on east London's hybrid cultures in the past and present. The project's multi-dimensional approach to the history of Jewish immigration, acculturation and integration will speak to the history of other immigrant populations in Britain. As part of our impact programme we will bring together comparative perspectives from east London community history organisations and other historians of immigration, whose expertise will help shape our research. Documenting the multi-relational character of immigrant cultures in the past will, we believe, generate a more complex and empathetic understanding of immigrant cultures in the present.