Organised leisure as promoting nostalgia: Israeli senior citizens singing in Yiddish

Abstract

This article claims that leisure activities are major vehicles for promoting nostalgia, expressing and propagating cultures whose practitioners are gradually decreasing in numbers. It underlies the meanings, which middle‐class senior citizens in Israel assign to sing‐along nights in Yiddish. These evenings indicate the extent to which structured leisure activities have turned into social worlds, which allow longing for those old experiences replaced by new ones. Through singing, senior citizens intertwine personal and collective narratives and disseminate their vision of Yiddish culture both inside and outside of their community. Singing in Yiddish is one among various leisure activities, which enhances the call to all factions of society to refresh their cultures and speak out their unique voices. The propagation of Yiddish through organised leisure makes it possible to create and aggregate stocks of popular knowledge easily spread to consumers, experiencing nostalgia and simultaneously longing and expressing the right for cultural recognition.