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 Jews are literally ‘the people of Thanksgiving’
Jews are linguistically rooted in gratitude; the word for Jew in Hebrew is directly tied to the word for thankfulness
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Culture Jews are under siege on campuses and in college towns — where’s the outrage? Where are the intellectuals?
Anyone remotely affiliated with universities should be chilled by the news that a Torah was destroyed at a fraternity house at George Washington University. The image of a replica Torah scroll — ripped apart and doused in laundry detergent, its pages on the floor — is the very latest in a series of increasingly disturbing…
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Culture No, George Soros doesn’t control school boards — these antisemitic conspiracy theories need to stop
The danger of conspiracy theories is that they can become mainstream thinking in the blink of an eye. That’s what’s happening right now in the governor’s race in Virginia, where Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin is in a tight race with former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin has blamed George Soros — the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire…
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Culture They saw the Afghanistan debacle coming long before everyone else
The world was shocked by images of desperate Afghans cramming into Kabul’s airport and hanging on to planes — but the world’s translators have been fearing this outcome for quite some time. In April, 22 translation organizations sent an open letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken outlining the danger they sensed. The email was…
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Culture We need to keep talking about the Sbarro bombing
Twenty years ago this week, I watched a bride have her wedding pictures taken along the water in Jaffa. As the photographer clicked and clicked, the radio blared from a nearby car with the doors open. I will always remember that white car, the two front doors open, the news of the Sbarro bombing, the…
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Culture Why Tom Friedman is wrong — dangerously wrong — about Israel
It is astonishing to read a major newspaper assert that it is not necessary to understand the language someone speaks. “To understand the political drama playing out in Israel and the tentative formation of a national unity coalition to topple Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, you don’t need to speak Hebrew,” opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman…
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Culture Why the latest White House ceremony is delighting Jewish scholars and librarians
The White House’s new science adviser was sworn in Wednesday using a copy of Pirkei Avot, or Ethics of the Fathers, from the year 1492 — a pivotal moment in Jewish history and world history. The choice delighted Judaica librarians and scholars around the world. Dr. Eric Lander, the director of the White House Office…
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Culture Behind Tucker Carlson’s white replacement rhetoric, a frightening antisemitic history
Replacement theory is inextricably tied to a hatred of Jews.
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