Yiddish is unique in the “threatened language” scenery, contesting ruling classifications employed to represent language vitality levels. This study explores Yiddish “peril” as a phenomenological fact and a discursive strategy. Metalinguistic community members start off ‘nostalgia socialization’, traversing temporal borders to link with empowering sources of former European Jewish communities; they associate with an envisioned past whilst preserving borders with a remote present. Yiddish thus reveals how languages are built via communities' experiences of decline, fragmentation, and reconstruction.