Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Yom Kippur Isn’t Always Yom Kippur
‘The age of rampant capitalism is over. If it’s Yom Kippur in America, it’s time for Israel to repent as well.” So, the other day, said high-ranking Israeli Labor Party member Avishai Braverman, a former economics professor who is now chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee. To an American Jewish reader, such a sentence, while…
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Culture If Ben-Yehuda Had Made Time the Way He Remade Hebrew
For those of you interested in the life of the celebrated Hebrew journalist and lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922), the most dominant single figure in the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language in late 19th- and early 20th-century Palestine, a new book purporting to be about him, “Resurrecting Hebrew” by Amherst College professor Ilan Stavans,…
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Culture The Rest of ‘The Rest Is Commentary’
In the September 10 issue of The New York Times, the well-known journalist Jeffrey Goldberg (whose career got its start in these pages) published a long and grim op-ed column about the dangers of a terrorist nuclear attack on American soil. Compared with such a prospect, he wrote, “Everything else — Fannie Mae, health care…
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Culture Don’t Worry About a Maverick in This Campaign
Although I try to keep this a Jewish-language column, sometimes a question is asked of me that offers a pretext for sneaking in an outside issue. Such is a letter I recently received from David H. Margulies of Bethesda, Md. Mr. Margulies writes: “Contemporary political rhetoric has driven me to explore the origin and meaning…
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Culture Public Displays of Piety Are In Fashion, Thank God
Back in June, I clipped an article by New York Times Egyptian correspondent Michael Slackman about the increasingly ubiquitous use of the word inshallah in Egyptian Arabic. Inshallah is a compression of the three words, in sha’a allah, “if God wills,” and it is widely used by speakers of all dialects of Arabic when referring…
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Culture Is the Dialect of Vilna Yiddish the One We Want To Rely On?
Paul Malevitz writes from Los Angeles: “For well over 70 years now, the standard dialect taught in Yiddish schools has been and still is the ‘northeastern’ one, similar if not always identical to that which was spoken in Vilna. (One difference is that in Vilna Yiddish, veynen can mean both ‘to reside’ and ‘to cry.’…
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Culture Too Dumb To Be a Thief?
Dr. Harold J. White writes: “At the beginning of ‘The Miller’s Tale’ in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” in Vincent Hopper’s interlinear translation, I came across the line ‘A riche gnof that gestes heeld to bord,’ which Hopper renders as ‘A rich scoundrel who took in paying guests.’ Could gnof come from Hebrew/Yiddish ganef, a thief? And…
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Culture Cherubic Question
Alvin Golub of Brooklyn has a question about cherubs, those little winged figures who, in paintings and illustrations, cavort about the heavens, tooting their horns. Why, he wants to know, does English also have the form “cherubim,” using the Hebrew plural rather than the English one? On the face of it, this may not seem…
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