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 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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Culture Why Reading Is a Lot Like Sailing
Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction By Ken Frieden Syracuse University Press, 389 pages $29.95 For centuries, Jews dreamed of elaborate sea voyages. After the destruction of the Second Temple, in 70 C.E., and the ensuing exile, wandering became the norm, as did trade involving long distances. Pilgrimages to Israel…
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Culture Why Dead Languages Like Akkadian Still Matter
I grew up hearing the Code of Hammurabi read out loud, in Akkadian, at the dining-room table. I did not know that my graduate-student mother was one of Akkadian’s few regular readers. The language of the ancient Akkad region, or modern-day Iraq, is considered a “dead language,” just like Ugaritic and Phoenician. All these dead…
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Culture How in the World Did Cuneiform Cookies Become a Thing?
Cuneiform cookies? Yes, they are a thing. Though it has been centuries since Akkadian was spoken, cuneiform writing has had an unexpected burst of popularity as a cookie decoration. The idea started with Katy Blanchard, the Fowler/Van Santvoord Keeper of the Near Eastern Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, in…
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Opinion Republicans Want To Teach the Bible in Public Schools. But Which Bible, Exactly?
The Republican Party’s new platform calls for teaching the Bible as literature in public schools. But which Bible, exactly, would the Republicans approve of? The idea of the Bible taught in public schools has a fraught Constitutional history. For the Jewish community, it can bring back memories of “prayer in the schools” or mandatory participation…
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