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 Why David Friedman Is So Wrong To Call J Street Liberals ‘Kapos’
Donald Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has called Jews with left-leaning political views “far worse than kapos.” It’s a highly-charged word, to say the least, and discussion of Friedman’s word choice — kapoim in Hebrew — is blaring from the radio on Israeli buses. I heard a radio host explain Friedman’s use…
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Culture Do You Think Differently When You Write in Another Language?
One afternoon, when I was 22, I nervously asked my boss if I could attend a French writing workshop at the Alliance Française each week — during work hours. It was my first job out of college, and I worked as a copy editor at a daily financial newspaper covering the municipal-bond market. I was…
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Culture What’s the Word of 2016? Hint: It’s Not Mishegas
Think you’re hearing a little more Yiddish along with the news of the latest Trump drama? You may not be imagining. Charles Blow used schlepped in the first sentence of his widely shared column “No Trump, We Can’t Just Get Along,” kicking it off with the classic “Donald Trump schlepped across town on Tuesday to…
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Culture What AP Gets Wrong About the Alt-Right — And What We Can Do About It
Copy editors around the world are struggling to write headlines that are accurate in a rapidly changing political landscape, and many are getting flak for calling white racists and anti-Semites what they are now calling themselves: “the alt-right.” Normally, calling someone what they call themselves — such as “environmental activist” — is reasonable, and if…
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Culture How Hitler Changed The Bible — and Why It Still Matters in Donald Trump’s America
In the days of Hitler, the Bible was condensed and transformed. Throughout the Third Reich, the “Old Testament” was taken out, thus erasing the Jewish contribution. Imagine: a 12-year-old German reader in 1945 might have been entirely unaware of Genesis, Exodus, or Isaiah. It wasn’t just book burning, it was a replacement of text. It…
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Culture How To Vote in Other Languages — Including Yiddish
Voting early in Chicago, where the lines were long and snaking around the Edgewater Library stacks, I received a receipt printed in four languages — English, Spanish, Hindi, and Vietnamese. I immediately wondered about languages not listed but certainly heard in this zip code, one of the most diverse in America, and home to refugees…
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Culture Why This Literary Translator Will Do Yiddish — but Not Haruki Murakami
I once heard a woman in cat’s-eye glasses say that she likes to look at a large map on her wall, which has pins affixed to the countries from which she has published literature in translation. But what haunts her, she passionately explained, are the empty spaces on the map — the countries with no…
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Culture How Oakland Turned Into a Heaven for Literary Translators
More than four hundred translators working in several dozen languages attended the American Literary Translators’ Association conference in Oakland this past weekend. The conference, known as ALTA, is probably the only event in America where you can go from a Russian translators’ dinner to a Kurdish-English poetry reading to a book fair consisting entirely of…
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