Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture A Slice Of Paradise
Writing from San Francisco on June 9, The New York Times’s Edward Rothstein reviewed that city’s new Contemporary Jewish Museum, which has recently opened its doors to the public. “The jagged lights on [its] sloping lobby wall,” he wrote, “form four Hebrew letters that spell ‘pardes.’ That word has the same Persian root as the…
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Culture Smelling A Rat
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has flown back to Israel from the United States to find himself in the same trouble that a few days in Washington helped take his mind off. One source of it is his old friend Uri Messer, the Israeli lawyer who told the police that he handled the slush funds the…
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Culture Kettle’s On!
Forward reader Mark Hurvitz writes in an e-mail: “The question of the Yiddish expression hakn a tshaynik [literally, to hit, strike or hack at a teakettle] in the sense of to bother someone came up recently with some friends because Michael Chabon uses a translation of it in his novel ‘The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.’ Why,…
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Culture Wigging Out
Ruth Seldin writes from White Plains, N.Y.: “The Hebrew term for a wig, pe’ah nokhrit, strikes me as odd and paradoxical. It is odd because it’s made up of two biblical words, neither of which seems related to a wig: Pe’ah, which refers in the Bible to the hair of the beard or the upper…
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Culture The Thirty-Six Who Save the World
Last week’s column ended with the question of where the Hebrew-Yiddish expression Lamed-Vavnik — literally, a “thirty-sixer” — comes from. Why is it that, in Jewish legend, the number of hidden tsadikim — or just men on whom the world depends for its existence — is, in every generation, 36? The idea that a small…
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Culture The Joys of Being Taken To Task
Among the thousands of readers who, over the years, have written me with their queries, criticisms, comments and encouragement, there are a small number of regulars who keep returning. Although I have never carried on a personal correspondence with any of them (as much as I might like to, I simply don’t have the time…
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Culture Israeli Arabs and Hebrew
An unsigned e-mailer has sent me an article that appeared recently in the English-language edition of the daily Hebrew newspaper Haaretz. It’s about the use of Hebrew by Israeli Arabs, and since I had already noticed in it the Hebrew Haaretz myself and considered writing about it in these pages, the idea for this column…
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Culture ‘Sean Ferguson,’ Continued
The file on Sean Ferguson isn’t closed yet. A few weeks ago, as you may remember, I brought to your attention a letter received from Forward reader Eldad Ganin with the information that a Jewish resident of Syracuse named Tracy Ferguson may have invented the tall tale of the Yiddish-speaking immigrant who answered “Shoyn fargesn”…
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