Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Getting Chummy
‘Livni mitkasha lihyot sah.bakit,” said a headline in a Hebrew paper the other day. The subject of the headline was Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, now running in a primary contest to replace Ehud Olmert as head of Kadima, the ruling party in the country’s parliamentary coalition. Livni, who is known for her polite but…
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Culture Lord Have Mercy
Reader Alan Margolis wants to know whether the English name John comes from the biblical name Yohanan — which, he writes, “sounds like Hebrew for ‘God has had mercy.’” Margolis is right on both counts. John does ultimately come from Yohanan, and Yohanan indeed means “God has had mercy” or “God has forgiven.” It’s a…
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Culture The Meaning of Khnyok
‘Growing up in Israel,” Anna Choder Hampton of Minneapolis writes, “I would hear my parents, both secular Jews (my mother from Poland and my father from Ukraine), use the word ‘chnyok’ — uttered with great disdain — when referring to ultra-Orthodox Hasidim. What exactly does ‘chnyok’ mean? In what language is it?” Khnyok — it’s…
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Culture Philadelphia Prakas
Philadelphia-born Manhattanite Zelda R. Stern has this inquiry: “Every current or former Jewish resident of Philadelphia whom I know calls stuffed cabbage ‘prakas.’ My parents, who spoke Yiddish, called them that, but so did all other Jews. I never heard the Yiddish word holiptshes used for stuffed cabbage until the 1960s, when my family came…
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Culture Daughter of a Voice
Forward reader Barry Seidel of Newark, Del., asks about the origin of the Hebrew expression bat-kol and wonders “how interesting and valuable the concept has been to Jewish thought.” Bat-kol is indeed a unique Hebrew expression that has no real equivalent in any other language that I know of. Literally the “daughter of a voice,”…
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Culture How Did Jews Choose Their Last Names?
Sam Sherman of Voorhees, N.J., writes: “Many Jewish family names are those of cities in Europe, often with a suffix that means ‘a resident of.’ For example: Berlin-er, Frankfurt-er, Minsk-y, Pinsk-y, Slutsk-y, Posnan-ski, Smolensk-y, etc. But surely these families weren’t known by the names of their cities while they were living there: They must have…
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Culture The Origins of Ashkenaz
Sol Schindler of Bethesda, Md., writes: “Paul Kriwaczek tells us in his book ‘In Search of Zarathustra: Across Iran and Central Asia To Find the World’s First Prophet’ that the Hebrew word ashkenazi originally meant a Scythian. I myself always thought it meant a German. Did ancient Hebrew speakers use one term to describe all…
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Culture Playing Telephone
You all know the children’s party game of “Telephone,” in which everyone sits in a circle and one child thinks of a word or phrase and quickly whispers it to the next child, who whispers it to the next child, and so on all around the circle — the idea being to see how many…
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Culture RFK Jr.’s poems to Olivia Nuzzi are peak cringe — so were King Solomon’s
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News DNA test kits spark a surge of online conversions to Judaism in the U.S.
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