Comments Elsewhere

candid:

(2) Similarly, while your great-grandparents were able to arrange their lives to be Yiddish-only, I suspect it was much more difficult for their children, who did not have a panoply of Yiddish-language TV and radio stations to choose from.

This is not true.

candid:

(5) Your great-grandparents certainly did not belong to organizations claiming that New York was the rightful property of the Eastern European Jews, and certainly did not engage in protests demanding it be returned.

No, but while I don’t know about his great-grandparents personally, but many Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants did belong to anarchist, communist, and socialist organizations (some of them democratic, others revolutionary), including both multiethnic organizations like the Communist Party and the IWW, as well as Yiddish-specific groups such as Arbeter Ring.