Aviya Kushner is the Forward’s language columnist and the author of Wolf Lamb Bomb and The Grammar of God.
Aviya Kushner
By Aviya Kushner
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Culture We need to keep talking about the Sbarro bombing
Twenty years ago this week, I watched a bride have her wedding pictures taken along the water in Jaffa. As the photographer clicked and clicked, the radio blared from a nearby car with the doors open. I will always remember that white car, the two front doors open, the news of the Sbarro bombing, the…
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Culture Why Tom Friedman is wrong — dangerously wrong — about Israel
It is astonishing to read a major newspaper assert that it is not necessary to understand the language someone speaks. “To understand the political drama playing out in Israel and the tentative formation of a national unity coalition to topple Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, you don’t need to speak Hebrew,” opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman…
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Culture Why the latest White House ceremony is delighting Jewish scholars and librarians
The White House’s new science adviser was sworn in Wednesday using a copy of Pirkei Avot, or Ethics of the Fathers, from the year 1492 — a pivotal moment in Jewish history and world history. The choice delighted Judaica librarians and scholars around the world. Dr. Eric Lander, the director of the White House Office…
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Culture Behind Tucker Carlson’s white replacement rhetoric, a frightening antisemitic history
Replacement theory is inextricably tied to a hatred of Jews.
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Culture We need to talk about ‘Kike’ — how did the slur originate anyway?
What are the origins of the antisemitic slur "Kike" ?
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Culture On the delights of discovering a truly ‘essential’ Jewish book
The great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever’s life resembled an epic novel — and along the way, he wrote soul-piercing prose and saw himself in it. “These stories are myself,” he wrote on the flyleaf of his second book of prose, though readers will feel this instinctively, without being told; this prose could not have been…
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Culture Trump’s impeachment lawyers are at war with language itself
The image of a Capitol custodial worker who had to wipe feces and blood off the walls in the aftermath of the riot was a visceral and unforgettable part of today’s impeachment proceedings, and it wiped away any notion that former President Trump’s rhetoric and the damage it caused was merely metaphorical. “I felt bad,”…
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Culture An impeachment with the power to cleanse and restore
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story appeared in the Forward on Jan. 13, 2021. Every article on impeachment insists that “impeach” does not mean to “remove” — but rather, in a quasi-Talmudic tone, the word means to “officially state the charges against a public official.” As law bloggers scrambled to parse the parameters…
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