I’m glad to hear it. It is fitting and proper that the fascist effort to exterminate European Jewry only succeeded in dispersing it to the rest of the world, where its future is assured. There is some justice in the world, after all.

By accident, my mother lived in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, New York for most of her teenage years and young adulthood, and went to school there, had Jewish girlfriends, dated Jewish boys, and was quite at home in that culture, she admired and respected the Jewish people, and passed that respect to me. She also spoke English with a Yiddish (Jewish) flavor. Although her English had no “Jewish accent” per se, she did use many of the phrases and colloquialisms peculiar to the NYC Jewish community, and easily fell into the rhythms and cadences of Yiddish-American English. I have been told there are traces of this in my own English, too.

My Jewish mother-in-law is from Brooklyn, and it’s quite easy to spot it.

My Jewish wife was born and raised in sunny Panama, but I detected no accent from her at all. Many American colloquialisms seemed to go right over her head, which I took to be a kind of listrening accent, one that managed to make her all the cuter. Some Jews in her congregation here in Ohio said she spoke Yiddish with an odd accent, though.

I suspect you likely meant the stereotypical TV-Jew from the Olde Country, one who speaks with that Olde Country flavor,. or possibly a first generation American, still under the influence of his community?

Wish I could describe that weird night. There is a feeling in those canyons that cannot be expressed, unless it is a chant, in a lost language, born there, under the stars framed by cross-bedded walls bathed in desert moonlight. A language designed to echo, to resonate in empty spaces.

Gawd, I need to go back to the desert. Do me good.

I’ve never been to Central America, Egypt or the Classical Med, so I’ve never seen ruins anywhere but the American Southwest, but there is something really spooky about these ruins. People used to live there, live ordinary lives in ancient evenings. When you’re there the feeeling they are looking over your shoulder is inescapable, as if at any moment you will round a corner and find yourself face to face with someone who belongs there.

It’s not scary, or uncomfortable, but you feel that they just left moments ago, and at any moment could come back.

I’m sure I picked up accents from my shipmates in the Navy, and I picked up preppy slang and hippy English when a student. I have also lived and worked as an adult in Florida, Puerto Rico, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and California. There is no single correct way to speak English, it is an evolving language, with regional and class dialects that change over time. But its dialects can be identified, classified and mapped.