The English word large has been absorbed into Hebrew, but in Hebrew, large is not a physical measure. It’s a measure of character, and describes an aspect of the Israeli character. “Tihiyeh large,” Israelis exhort each other: “Be generous, expansive, grand.” At its best, being large is the capacity to expand beyond one’s limitations. When,…
*This fall, guest editors have helped to shape Forward Forum by commissioning opinion pieces. The eighth and final of the group is Judith Shulevitz, a cultural critic and magazine editor who helped to start both Slate and Lingua Franca, which won a National Magazine Award for General Excellence under her co-editorship. She has been a…
Israelis are an impatient people. They speak dugri (“directly,” an import from Arabic). They get to the point. Haval (guttural, as in Hanukkah) means “too bad.” Al hazman means “about the time.” Haval al hazman: It’s a waste of time. Don’t even look at her, haval al hazman, she has a tall, dark paratrooper boyfriend….
Hamatzav means “the situation,” and can refer to any situation — the economic situation, the weather situation, your medical situation. However, within certain groups, at certain times, the expression came to refer to the Israeli political situation, and specifically to the Israeli-Arab situation.* I first heard the expression when I became active in the early…
‘Sa l’shalom,” said the policeman who had been about to give me a ticket for a traffic violation. (In the end he didn’t, because he discovered that he and my eldest daughter had been in the same class in elementary school, but that’s another story.) Translated freely, this meant, “You can go.” It’s at such…
Nobody likes to be a sucker, but call an Israeli man a freier and you insult him to the core. Not only should he have gotten a better deal, you imply, but he has betrayed the cardinal rules of Israeli masculinity: don’t play by the rules and never let someone outsmart you. Being a freier…
When used with the definite article ha, medina, meaning state, may express anger (“The state threw us to the dogs,” say the newly unemployed); disappointment (“this is not the state we dreamed of!”); wonder (“what a state! An extraordinary state!” sings the popular entertainer Eli Luzon); even love. This range of strong emotions is a…
In 1911, when the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published, the entry titled “The Hebrew Language” stated: “The dream of some Zionists that Hebrew — a would-be Hebrew, that is to say — will again become a living, popular language in Palestine, has still less prospect of realization than their vision of a…
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