Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture A Coup Is a Coup — Even If We Like Outcome
When is a military coup not a military coup? Whenever, so it would seem, an administration in Washington wants to say it’s something else. Although, as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank observes, “call[ing] the overthrow [of the Egyptian government] a ham sandwich won’t make it any less of a coup,” Washington has preferred to refer…
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Culture Was Judas Hanged or Was He Hung?
Commenting on my July 5 column about the word “Judas” and the New Testament figure it derives from, Robert Cotton writes: “It appears that you are not a member of the Association of English Grammarians, since if you were, you would have written ‘Judas is said to have hanged himself’ and not, as you did,…
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Culture When the Second Verse Is Same as the First in Hebrew
From Ben Zion Katz of Chicago comes this email: “The noted Italian rabbi Leon de Modena (1571-1648) accomplished a linguistic tour de force by writing an octet, entitled Kina Sh’mor, that made sense whether read as Hebrew or Italian. My brother Jeffrey and I have written a poem that does the same with Hebrew and…
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Culture Why Judas Still Conjures Up Images of the Jew as Christ-Killer
‘I never informed or ratted on nobody,” John “The Executioner” Martorano said while testifying at the trial of crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger in a Boston court June 18. Martorano, a professional hit man with a confessed 20 murders under his belt, had agreed to take the witness stand against Bulger and his partner, Stevie…
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Culture A Second Chance at a Yiddish Poem
Three readers — Daniel Soyer, Hirshl Hartman and Ben Ross — have written to correct a mistake I made in my June 7 column, “Whose Broad Noodles and Bright Farfel.”(The titles of my columns, by the way, are chosen by the Forward, not by me.) This occurred in my translation of Abraham Liessin’s 1938 Yiddish…
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Culture Heading Into the ‘I’ of the Knaidel
The point that has been missed in the great knaidel (knaydel? kneidel? kneydl?) controversy is that the real problem isn’t the spelling of Yiddish words in Latin characters. It’s the spelling of English words in Latin characters. In the Hebrew characters that are native to it, Yiddish has been, for the most part, ever since…
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Culture It’s a Hebrew Thing — You Get It or You Don’t
In last week’s column, I argued, in discussing the Hebrew word sefirah, that the kabbalistic doctrine of the 10 sefirot or emanations of the divinity was not a result of Christian influence. This week, going from the cosmic to the strictly linguistic, I’ve been led to the conclusion that a well-known rabbinical expression definitely was…
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Culture How Greek Philosophy Influenced Both Christian and Jewish Theology
My fellow columnist at the Forward, the estimable J.J. Goldberg, has written a blog post about my May 19 column, “Could the Holy Ghost be Jewish?” In his blog, he respectfully takes exception to my statement that “neither biblical nor rabbinic Judaism has anything like the Christian Trinity in its thinking about God,” and goes…
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