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 Why Ladino will rise again
A sold-out crowd packed the house at the Center for Jewish History — and even filled an overflow room viewing the proceedings on screen — at the third annual Ladino Day in New York, home to the largest Sephardic community in America. Tight security and what speakers described as a “daunting time” for “Jews and…
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Culture Why we have to keep talking about Monsey — a letter from my hometown
On Friday in Monsey, I went with my youngest relatives to one of the giant kosher markets and bought a hot latke to eat right there, on the spot. Monsey, where I grew up, is the kind of place where that is possible; the latke stand had signs in four languages — Yiddish, Hebrew, English…
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Culture News Flash For Rudy Giuliani: Jews Don’t Go To Church
In this era of astonishing news, it is still plenty astonishing to hear former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani claim that George Soros is not Jewish because — wait for it — Soros doesn’t go to church. Here’s the full quote, from New York Magazine’s Intelligencer; “Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him,”…
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Culture Is The West Suffering From Cultural Dementia?
London’s bookstores all seem to have a “doomsday” table right now — a prominent display of books on the end of democracy, the rise of Russia, the march to Brexit, and the collapse of the idea of Europe. On one of these tables, I encountered “Cultural Dementia: How the West Has Lost Its History and…
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Culture Happy Ladino Day — How To Celebrate An Endangered Language
Today is International Ladino Day at the University of Washington in Seattle, where the seventh annual celebration of Ladino, the mother tongue of generations of Sephardic Jews, will take place. This year’s event theme is “De la fasha asta la mortaja: From the cradle to the grave.” The celebration comes at a critical time in…
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Culture The Most Dangerous Anti-Semitic Lie — The Return Of The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion
Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert on the National Security Council, dropped a bombshell during her testimony in today’s impeachment hearings by likening the George Soros conspiracy theories “the new Elders of the Protocols of Zion.” Well, what are those Protocols? “A classic of anti-Semitic literature,” according to Encyclopedia Brittanica. The “classic” goes by…
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Culture In Impeachment Hearings, The Dignity Of Details
On Friday, instead of cleaning for Shabbat, I found myself riveted and completely spellbound by the testimony of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. But something else struck me — the raw power of the question as a form. The idea, old as the Greeks and deeply present in the Talmud, that question followed by question can lead…
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Culture What The Bible Tells Us About Quid Pro Quo
It’s rare for Latin to make headlines, but quid pro quo, the Latin phrase meaning “thing for thing” that in 16th-century English came to mean the process of substituting one medicine for another at an apothecary, continues to blare across news reports around the world. In case the extensive texts The New York Times published…
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