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I sincerely hope that this will also happen to Yiddish theatre [1], I am not Jewish but I live in a city (Bucharest) with a strong Yiddish cultural presence in the past and all that looks like it happened in another era. I know that the Holocaust is obviously the most to blame for this, but I also think the state of Israel could (and probably should) have done more to preserve the Yiddish culture in modern times, it looks like they decided to throw it all under the rug and focus in reviving Hebrew.
The situation of Cornish is rather different from the situation of Yiddish. Cornish entirely disappeared as a native language for about 200 years and the surviving literature, mostly from the 15th/16th century, was so meagre that many common words had to be reconstructed by comparison with related languages because they didn't happen to appear in the written record. And yet they now have (a few) native speakers again. Quite a story, really. Of course you can read all about it in Wikipedia: https://kw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernowek
In the early days of Israel, my wife's Yiddish-speaking forebears actively avoided passing it down
It was, to them, a sort of gesture of commitment to a new (old) beginning
I know that this was "a thing" among American Jews as well in the first half of the 20th century. Yiddish was the language you spoke when you didn't want the kids to know what you were saying, and you didn't pass it down because you wanted to assimilate.
FYI, Yiddish is alive and well (well, not as well as before the Holocaust). There are babies who were just born who are surrounded in a Yiddish speaking environment. Their first language will be Yiddish. However those people are a subset of the Haredim. They are a large and noticable group, but is is basically only them. Yiddish used to be a language shared by from the very observant community all the way to the Jewish atheists. That has (unfortunately?) passed. However enough living people speak Yiddish. Any old Yiddish play can be instantly translated. It is an active Wikipedia language and can even be found in Google translate. Most modern books in Yiddish will be Jewish related. But if you want to learn Yiddish, it should be easy to find a course or website (eg Duolingo) to help.
> However those people are a subset of the Haredim.
Yes, I know about them, there was a (quite hopeful) event [1] recently where they rented an entire plane from New York to Satu Mare and then they visited Sighetu Marmatiei, the small town where Elie Wiesel was actually born, plus they re-built a synagogue in there.
I was talking more about the (very) secular Yiddish culture and associated language norms that we used to have around these parts of the world, retrospectively it's quite visible in classic Hollywood productions like The Apartment (I'm sure there must be more than one study about the Yiddish cultural influence on Billy Wilder's movies) and especially in Ernst Lubitsch's movies. That part is all gone. Plus the whole socialist/left-wing movement that was heavily influenced by the local Jewish community (who had been raised in the Yiddish culture), that is of course also long gone, what was not destroyed by the Nazis and by other local rightwing autocrats was transformed (for a lack of better word) into the zionist movement (i.e. not wanting to make a better world for everybody, just for the Jewish people following Herzl's writings, which is fair enough but still a loss imo).
I don't know the Israeli government's reasoning, but my impression is that Yiddish was spoken by only one region of Jewish people, Eastern Europe.
It was a daily language in Ashkenazi Jewish centres in North America, esp Montreal and New York. Many newspapers, and communities of first language speakers even second, third generation speakers.
My impression from the outside (not Jewish, but interested in Yiddish) is that in the post-war period it was squeezed between three walls... assimilation into North American English speaking culture in North America, the revival of Hebrew in Israel, and the displacement/extermination of its source community in Europe. A tragedy.
Caveat: I am not a scholar or an expert in this area.
I think part of the difficulty with reviving Yiddish in general is that can be a "religious" language at times. That is, there are some elements of Judaism-the-religion that are woven into Yiddish language and culture, so teaching it to an audience who isn't at least somewhat interested in Judaism can be difficult or awkward.
In a world that is generally very secular, I think this is an additional impediment to reviving Yiddish as a language (and Yiddish culture in general) that is not necessarily faced by other "old" ethnic languages like Cornish.
The Workers Circle in New York is one organization that tries to promote secular Yiddish language and culture. I think it's a good thing, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning Yiddish there. But if I didn't already have a basic religious education and personal identity around being Jewish, I would have found it harder to relate to and immerse myself in what I was learning.
Before WW2 that was two-thirds of the Jews globally.