Aviya Kushner is the Forward’s language columnist and the author of Wolf Lamb Bomb and The Grammar of God. Follow her on Twitter @AviyaKushner.
Aviya Kushner
By Aviya Kushner
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Culture We’re Arguing About Concentration Camps — But What Does The Term Really Mean?
The use of the phrase “concentration camp” has caused a firestorm on Twitter — this time because New York Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez on June 18 called detention centers at the U.S. border “concentration camps,” language that was swiftly criticized by Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney as demeaning the memory of the Holocaust. After Ocasio-Cortez said in…
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Culture Why Saul Bellow Really Matters Right Now
As I walked into the completely packed house for a performance of “The Adventures of Augie March” — the new play based on the Saul Bellow novel that is making its world premiere right now in Chicago — I thought of how Bellow was once everywhere. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature; taught at…
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Culture How To Capture The Nuances Of Torah — In Braille
Recently, I unexpectedly found myself in an elegant hotel ballroom in Virginia, discussing Yehuda Amichai’s iconic poem “The Diameter of a Bomb” with a deaf and blind poet. As the poet and his interpreters communicated in Pro-Tactile American Sign Language — an emerging language using touch to convey sign language, much in the way that…
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Culture Does The Book Of Esther Have The Longest Word In The Hebrew Bible?
For word nerds, the Book of Esther contains a special treat — the longest word in the Tanakh. Technically, v’ha’achshadrapanim and its eleven letters makes it the length champion of the entire Hebrew Bible. It means “and the satraps” or “and the governors of the provinces of the Persian Empire,” and it comes near the…
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Culture Ilya Kaminsky: A Poet At The Height Of His Powers, Questioning Everything
Deaf Republic: Poems By Ilya Kaminsky Graywolf Press, $16, 80 pages The poetry world has been waiting for Ilya Kaminsky’s new collection for fifteen years — but this is the book that will bring him wide readership outside of the small yet passionate continent of poetry readers. This is the book that will let readers…
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Culture What Hebrew Means To Americans
What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) Edited by Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg University of Washington Press, $30 In the 1980s, the king of minimalist fiction, Raymond Carver, published a story titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Both the story…
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Culture Want To Learn Arabic? Start With ‘The Little Prince’
Here’s something lovely and unexpected — “The Little Prince” published in Arabic transliterated into Hebrew, as well as in Arabic itself. Al-Amir Lehzir is accompanied by a CD of the Arabic narration. Readers of Hebrew can easily follow along, and a short sound clip is up at the publisher’s website. There is also a video…
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Culture Why Making Hebrew Nonbinary Is So Crucial
The Israeli poet Yona Wallach memorably wrote that “Hebrew is a sex maniac.” Wallach, who died in 1985, was no stranger to attention-grabbing subjects: One of her poems discusses sex with tefillin. Today, pronouns are a hot topic, and Wallach’s poem “Hebrew,” which explains why gender-neutral language is easier to accomplish in English, is the…
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