Today in Jewish History - Cheshvan 19

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In 1785, the earliest known Yiddish letter from America was sent from Philadelphia to London. Yiddish is a colloquial mixture of German and Hebrew, and came to be the spoken language of much of European Jewry. Following the influx of Jewish immigrants to America, Yiddish was a language increasingly heard on the streets of New York, and in 1925 New York alone had seven daily newspapers printed in Yiddish. According to the U.S. census of 1940, 1.75 million Jews spoke Yiddish at home. Today, Yiddish words like chutzpah, klutz, schmaltz and schlep have crept into mainstream English usage.