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 Want To Filter Out Fake News? The French Have an App For That
The French newspaper Le Monde launched a new tool today called Décodex to help readers verify the reliability of information. In a remarkable email to the newspaper’s subscribers, Camille Joly, director of subscription services, described how Décodex combs through 600 websites in order to better analyze “news.” The new tool is intended to help readers…
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Culture NSFW: The True Story of Shitgibbon: 2017’s Most Memorable Insult
Linguists, language bloggers, and amateur word enthusiasts are all taking special delight in headlines featuring the memorable insult “shitgibbon.” After all the blood-pressure-raising press featuring Donald Trump’s insults, ranging from “nasty woman” to “bad hombres,” Pennsylvania state senator Daylin Leach turned the tables and made news by calling the President “shitgibbon.” More specifically, in the…
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Culture Could Crowdfunding Bring Us More Yiddish and Ladino Literature?
Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have helped filmmakers, bands, visual artists, and regular folks in a jam. Now, the idea of asking friends, family, and the public to kick in dollars to make a project possible is coming to the world of literary translation — as Shortwave, an independent, not-for-profit publisher based in Oxford, turns…
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Culture Why Israel’s Street Lamp Poetry Seems All Too Apt Today
Look up on some of the most famous streets in Jerusalem, and you will see poems or poem-excerpts affixed to streetlamps. I found the one pictured here, on a light-blue banner, high above Emek Refaim Street, which means The Valley of Ghosts Street. The phrase emek refaim appears in the Book of Isaiah (Chapter 17,…
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Art How the Art World Is Responding to Trump’s Muslim Ban
Hundreds of artists and dozens of prominent museums around the world have signed a strongly worded open letter calling for a reversal of the ban on entry to the US for citizens of seven mostly Muslim countries. “We the undersigned individuals of the international contemporary art field call for the immediate and total overturning of…
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Culture How the Literary World Is Fighting the Muslim Ban
A group of literary agents is publicizing an open call for submissions from Muslim writers, in response to the recently instituted Federal ban on refugees and immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries. “Like so many of you, we are gravely alarmed by the present administration’s recent broad ban on refugees and immigrants from Muslim countries,” the…
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Culture Why Donald Trump Sounds Smarter in Russian
Considering how often President Donald Trump praises Vladimir Putin and suggests that close cooperation between Russia and the U.S. would be a good thing, it is strange that there is so little American media coverage of how Trump is coming across in Russia. A rare exception was when David Filipov, the Moscow bureau chief for…
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Culture How OkCupid Became Part of the Anti-Trump Resistance
Right after the “Muslim ban” began to dominate the headlines, the dating site OKCupid issued a statement promoting non-discrimination — and outlining a definition of American values. Daters received a highly unusual email reading: “At OkCupid, we believe that judging others based on their sex, religion, country of origin, or orientation is un-American. There is…
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