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 On the delights of discovering a truly ‘essential’ Jewish book
The great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever’s life resembled an epic novel — and along the way, he wrote soul-piercing prose and saw himself in it. “These stories are myself,” he wrote on the flyleaf of his second book of prose, though readers will feel this instinctively, without being told; this prose could not have been…
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Culture Trump’s impeachment lawyers are at war with language itself
The image of a Capitol custodial worker who had to wipe feces and blood off the walls in the aftermath of the riot was a visceral and unforgettable part of today’s impeachment proceedings, and it wiped away any notion that former President Trump’s rhetoric and the damage it caused was merely metaphorical. “I felt bad,”…
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Culture An impeachment with the power to cleanse and restore
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story appeared in the Forward on Jan. 13, 2021. Every article on impeachment insists that “impeach” does not mean to “remove” — but rather, in a quasi-Talmudic tone, the word means to “officially state the charges against a public official.” As law bloggers scrambled to parse the parameters…
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Culture What this week’s Torah portion says about Marjorie Taylor Greene
Members of Congress who took the unprecedented step this week of removing Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from committees in the House of Representatives also took a page from the Bible — which specifically counsels distancing oneself from lies. “From a lying word stay far away, and the guiltless and innocent do not kill, for I…
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Culture Why Israel’s multilingual approach to vaccination works — and why our monolingual one doesn’t
Israel’s Ministry of Health has been taking a very multilingual approach to its vaccination campaign, with videos in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and Amharic on vaccines and how they work, plus hasbara in Yiddish. All the videos are up on YouTube and can be viewed here: The short and clear one-minute videos discuss subjects like how…
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Culture How the Capitol riots changed the way we talk about insurrection
In the aftermath of an unprecedented second impeachment following a violent attack on the Capitol that left five dead, some language themes are emerging. One immediate question that affects all of us: Did the riot reflect the views of the “fringe?” Or was it a natural outgrowth of increasingly mainstream views and behavior? Fringe or…
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Culture In Hebrew, ‘impeachment’ has the power to clean and restore us
Every article on impeachment insists that “impeach” does not mean to “remove” — but rather, in a quasi-Talmudic tone, the word means to “officially state the charges against a public official.” As law bloggers scrambled to parse the parameters of an “impeachable” offense, sounding a lot like the rabbis of two thousand years ago, the…
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Culture No, the Trump Twitter ban isn’t ‘Orwellian’ – Stop saying it is.
Events that have been taking place in Washington will force dystopian novelists to try a little harder to imagine the collapse of civilization. When Twitter permanently banned President Donald Trump’s social account in the aftermath of the violent riot that took over Capitol Hill, sending members of Congress into hiding and reporters fleeing for cover,…
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