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 Breathtaking, Rare Yiddish Magazines Get New Life Online
A treasure trove of Yiddish avant-garde journals from the period between the two world wars is now online through a remarkable digitization project called Milgroym. The project presents originals, translations, and commentaries, and the visuals are breathtaking; treats for the online reader include a drawing for a Chassidic costume for a modernist ballet, circa 1923….
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Culture World War II-Era Envelopes Suggest Polish Knowledge of Holocaust
As Poland’s Senate passed what The New York Times editorial page called “a needless, foolish and insulting draft bill that would penalize any suggestion of complicity by the Polish state or the Polish nation in the Nazi death machine,” the National Library of Israel announced that it had received an astonishing donation that proved just…
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Israel News How Israelis Are Planning For A Tsunami
Wild rain in Tel Aviv is causing some bizarre sights, like a fallen cactus piece stretched across a main street. Today, passersby stopped during their Friday pre-Shabbat shopping to look at signs delineating a path of escape in case of tsunami. “A tsunami means an earthquake,” opined a woman taxi driver, making her way through…
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Culture The Complicated Story Of How Israelis Greet Each Other In The Morning
Tel Aviv is a city of night owls, but the Mediterranean morning sun makes it hard to sleep in, which may be why morning means hearing waitresses all over the city respond to patrons’ “Boker tov” — “Good morning” — with boker or, meaning “morning of light.” But where does that response of light come…
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Culture Why ‘Shithole Countries’ Sounds A Bit More Poetic In Hebrew
If you’re wondering what “shithole countries” are in Hebrew, here’s the answer from Israeli newspaper Haaretz: medinot mechurbanot. Countries = medinot. And, well, shitty = mechurban. Of course, churban is “destruction” in Hebrew, as in the destruction of the Temple. Or Temples. For the uninitiated, churban is a college-appropriate word, but mechurban is not. Maybe…
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Culture Yiddish Cabaret in Israel Brings Odessa To Tel Aviv
Recently, a sold-out crowd packed the Sholom Aleichem House in Tel Aviv for Yiddish cabaret. The crowd swayed and sang to Yiddish songs, including one about a young woman who reaches Buenos Aires and sleeps in the train station, and thinks of her dear mother, who she left back home. The entranced, standing-room-only crowd seemed…
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Culture How Do You Say ‘Mansplaining’ In Israel — A Country Where So Many People Do It?
In Israel, where everyone has an opinion, it may seem difficult to separate mansplaining from regular telling-you-exactly-what-I-think as well as telling-you-exactly-what-you-should-do-with-your-life-because-I-know-best. But there is, in fact, a charming and relatively new Hebrew word that is equivalent to the English term “mansplaining”—and that word is hasgvara. The Israeli version of mansplaining combines the ancient and the…
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Culture How Jews And ‘Jee-ews’ Tell The Story Of Roy Moore — And A Polite Ugliness
This may be the first time in American history when intonation has become a political issue. Of course, 2017 has been a year so chock full of disturbing firsts that it might be hard to pay attention to an extra syllable uttered by a losing candidate’s wife, but in this case, a little bit of…
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