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 How Can Such An Unpopular President Deliver Such Popular Sentences?
Donald Trump is apparently more popular at the sentence level than he is as a person or as a President, according to an intriguing new poll released today by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News. The poll of 1000 adults, polled February 18-22, found that a whopping 86 percent approved of this line from…
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Culture Why Israeli Children Need To Learn Arabic at an Earlier Age
Every street sign in Israel is in Hebrew and Arabic, but many Israelis can’t understand a standard conversation in Arabic. In a moving letter to Haaretz written this week by Lital Lam, a student at Tel Aviv University, headlined “Israelis, Speak Arabic,” Lam expresses the alienation she feels because she does not speak Arabic fluently….
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Culture How Marie Antoinette and Sean Spicer Are Making Babka Famous
Bomb threats against JCCs throughout the U.S. are bringing many reactions, but none tastier than this tweet from The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect in response to Presidential spokesman Sean Spicer’s bizarre insistence that Donald Trump has spoken out against anti-Semitism many times: Spicer @WhiteHouse says about our org: “No matter how many times…
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Culture Could a Few Good Short Stories Save The Trump Presidency?
In Peter Orner’s new book, “Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living To Read and Reading To Live,” he admits that he reads in taquerias, at traffic lights and “in part, to get away from email.” Illustrated by the cartoonist Eric Orner, the author’s brother, the unusual and deeply personal book is being passed hand-to-hand…
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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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