Assume No Hitler, and that a war vs the Red Menace doesn't take the
place of OTL WWII: at most, a limited Cold War of sorts and perhaps
some sort of dustup in the Pacific with Japan vs Whoever. Stalin, if
he gets around to seriously persecuting Soviet Jews, doesn't kill more
than, say, 25% of them.
Under this sort of scenario, what odds that a high percentage of the
Yiddish-speaking Jews of eastern Europe still are doing so in 2008?
Given nationalist pressures to assimilate, and efforts to make them
proper Soviets in the USSR, possibly at gulag-point, one would think
there would be a serious drop in the number of Yiddish-speakers: and
not only by assimilation, but also by emigration (in a WWII-free
world, how long does the US keep its immigration as restricted as it
was during the 30's?).
Even with no Holocaust, it seems likely that the old world of Yiddish-
speaking ghettos and shtetls would still be a largely "lost world" by
the present date: how far assimilated would the Jews of Poland,
Romania, the USSR, etc. be? (Those who hadn't moved to the US,
Australia, France, etc.)
OTOH, might the Soviets, always happy enough to ID their population by
nationality, decide that the "Jewish nationality", although of course
having to learn Russian in school like anyone else, needed their
culture protected and promoted in the usual faux-multicultural style
("traditional" clothes and dances, godawful socialist realist
paintings, etc.) for international consumption, including the use of
the Yiddish language?
Bruce
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