Chris Doss: It makes sense, but I just want to point out a couple of other factors (which Leon may address) perhaps moving in different directions.
1) The huge increase in anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire after the assassination of the Tsar-Liberator and corresponding attacks on the shtetl communities (and Jews in general). I would imagine this strengthened Jewish identity -- wasn't this after all one of the formative experiences of Zionism?
Yes but it also radicalised many Jews who became communists, Bundists or socialist Zionists. Zionism only ultimately won the day when Stalinism failed to 'solve' the Jewish question and turned, on occasion, to anti-Semitism as it took on an increasingly nationalist tinge in an attempt to gain popular support. Also Jews fleeing the holocaust often had no other alternative but to join the Zionist 'experiment' in Palestine as their entry to every other country was blocked. Trotsky rightly called this the 'bloody trap'.
2) By the time the Holocaust happened, the Jews in the USSR (not in Poland or the Baltic States) had been living under the Soviet government's policies, which though they were contradictory in general aimed ultimately at eliminating national-cultural differences, and this was accompanied by the replacement of precapitalist relations with whatever you want to call the Soviet ones. I doubt much "progress" had been made by that time though I suppose.
Well at least Jews won equality and civil rights in the 20s in the SU (not an insignificant gain) and Birobidjan was set up as a 'Jewish Autonomous Republic' (don't know what's happened there since). During WW2, Stalin, for all his backwardness, also moved tens of thousands of Jews to safer parts of the SU to prevent the Nazis from wiping them out. He also of course subsequently exterminated many communists of Jewish origin on anti-Semitic grounds at various stages. The 'Doctors Plot' was the most famous instance of this. Jews were also vilified as 'rootless cosmopolitans'.
>In any case, if the Holocaust hadn't happened, would
you hear Yiddish spoken on the streets of Kiev today?
I think you probably would. These things outlive the
social formations that gave birth to them.
Perhaps, if there was still a sufficient social weight of Jews around. The South African experience was that although there was a substantial Jewish population in the hundreds of thousands, Yiddish pretty much died out with the demise of the first generation of East European immigrants. Some wealthy Jews like the Oppenheimer family assimilated to the extent of converting to Anglicanism, as being Jewish ceased to be good for business.