Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture The People of the Books
This column seems recently to have aroused in many of you questions about Yiddish words or phrases that you remember hearing long ago from parents or grandparents. The latest such query comes from Marcia Bender of Forest Hills, Queens. She asks: “When my grandmother was very old, I used to help her light the Sabbath…
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Culture Should Anti-Semitism Be Hyphenated?
John Marschall, a retired professor of history at the University of Nevada, writes: “Throughout my book “Jews in Nevada: A History,” and in other articles on Jewry and Judaism, I have chosen to use the spelling ‘antisemitism’ rather than ‘anti-Semitism.’ I agree with authors [of books on the subject], like James Parkes, A. Roy Eckardt,…
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Culture Exploring ‘Chai’ Culture
There is, so I’m told, a new off-Broadway play in New York that is called “Bad Jews.” Its plot revolves around, believe it or not, the struggle of three grandchildren for possession of their beloved and recently deceased grandfather’s “chai” (pronounced khy, with the guttural “ch” of “Bach”) — which is, as most or all…
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Culture Israelis Should Avoid Using Term ‘Apartheid’
“Most Israelis support an apartheid regime [mishtar apartheid] in Israel,” announced the lead headline in the October 23 issue of the left-liberal Hebrew daily Haaretz, Israel’s most internationally prestigious newspaper. “Survey: Most Israeli Jews advocate discrimination against Arab citizens,” was the translation of this headline in the same day’s English edition of the paper. Any…
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Culture Yiddish Offers Many Options for Flu Season
Three related queries from readers have recently arrived in my mailbox. The first comes from Robin Dershow of Minneapolis, who writes: “My late mother would use the expressions ‘God forbid’ and kinehore, but for the worst of the worst cases, she used something that sounded to me as a child like ‘Godsilapeten.’ I can’t find…
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Culture To Err is Human, To Forgive Bovine
Writing about the Spanish economic situation in the New York Times on October 4, columnist Roger Cohen, in an op-ed entitled “In the Time of the Skinny Cows,” remarked: “In Spain, the euro zone’s fourth-largest economy, the good times are those of ‘vacas gordas,’ or fat cows, and the lean years those of ‘vacas flacas,’…
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Culture The New Testament Sounds Odd in Yiddish
In my September 6 column about a Yiddish translation of the Qur’an, I observed that many of the singular effects created by translating the sacred scriptures of Islam, a religion closely linked to Judaism, into an intensely Jewish language like Yiddish would no doubt be found in a Yiddish translation of the Christian New Testament,…
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Culture Legends of the Fall
‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” As often as we read these words, which we do every Simchat Torah when beginning the…
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