Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture A Very Yiddish Take on the Star Spangled Banner
Frieda Danziger of Manhattan writes to ask whether I have ever encountered the Yiddish term farfl un lokshn as a comical or disparaging way of referring to the Stars and Stripes. I have, once, in a poem by Abraham Liessin, a well-known Yiddish poet. Liessin, who was born in Russia in 1872 and came to…
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Culture Could The Holy Ghost Be Jewish?
Robert J. Foley of Wilmington, N.C., sends me a copy of an open letter written by author and rabbi Rami Shapiro to Pope Francis. In it, Rabbi Shapiro hopes that “ruach ha-kodesh, the Holy Spirit, has called a new pope from the new world to lead the Catholic Church,” and Mr. Foley writes: “Rabbi Shapiro……
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Culture How Do You Say ‘Fuhgeddaboudit’ in Yiddish?
‘What’s Fuhgeddaboudit in Yiddish?” The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Stephens asks in a column in which he concludes that, following President Obama’s Syrian chemical weapons shuffle, the president’s promise to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon has lost its credibility. Was Stephens suggesting that “Fuhgeddaboudit” is an English version of an original Yiddish expression?…
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Culture Man Thinks, God Laughs, a Reader Writes and a Columnist Contemplates
A reader signing herself Goldele asks if I know anything about the origins of the well-known Yiddish proverb “Der mentsh trakht un got lakht,” “A man thinks and God laughs.” The knowledge that the future, whether conceived of as the result of blind fate or of a divine plan, is not under our control is…
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Culture The Tsarnaev Brothers Are Many Things. But Cowards? Not So Much.
“A heinous and cowardly act,” President Obama called the Boston Marathon bombing soon after its occurrence. Heinous, it certainly was. But why cowardly? To do what the two Tsarnaev brothers did —construct and transport homemade bombs that could have gone off in their hands at any moment, fling them out the windows of a speeding…
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Culture How Adam Kadmon Made the Leap From The Kabbalah to Italian Television
Just who is the mysterious and much talked about Italian television personality and conspiracy theorist Adam Kadmon, who always appears on TV with a mask to hide his identity? Is he an imaginative Italian investigative journalist? The descendant, as he claims to be, of an ancient family endowed with mystical powers, stemming from seven androids…
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Culture Grappling With Yiddish Words That Punch Above Their Weight
A reader identified as “JA” wants to know: “Does the English word ‘slug,’ as in to slug someone, come from Yiddish shlogn, to hit? They certainly sound very similar.” My thinking about this went through three stages. Stage 1, my immediate reaction, was that “slug” and shlogn — or shlugn, in the Yiddish some of…
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Culture Passover’s ‘The Song of Songs’ Is Correct Name, Not ‘Solomon’s Song’
One of the customs of the week of Passover is the reading in the synagogue — done at different times in different traditions — of the biblical poem of “The Song of Songs.” “The Song of Songs,” or “The Song of Solomon,” as it is called by the King James and other English Bibles, is…
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