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 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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Culture We need to talk about ‘Kike’ — how did the slur originate anyway?
What are the origins of the antisemitic slur "Kike" ?
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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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