Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Arab Jew, Part III
The discussion in this column of the term “Arab Jew” has solicited two additional letters. One comes from Shaye J.D. Cohen, Littauer professor of Hebrew language and literature at Harvard University. The professor writes: “Apropos of your column re: Arab Jews, I note that there is a category of Arabi(ic) Christians. The Christians of Muslim…
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Culture No More Etrogs
‘No More Etrogs” was the title of a February 7 column by well-known political commentator Ari Shavit in the Israeli daily paper Ha’aretz. In his column, Shavit criticized the Winograd Commission’s report on the 2006 war in Lebanon for dealing too leniently with the government, and wrote, “The etrog syndrome has become a threat to…
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Culture ‘Arab Jew,’ Part II
I have received two long letters arguing with my column of two weeks ago, in which I objected to the term “Arab Jew.” Here are parts of them. From Jack Warga of Boynton Beach, Fla.: My family lived for at least 150, and probably several hundred, years in Poland. I spoke Polish and attended a…
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Culture A Sarajevo Haggadah Inquiry
Jeremiah Riemer from Madison, N.J., writes: “I have a case for you having to do with journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks’ fascinating and inspiring New Yorker story about the Sarajevo Passover Haggadah. It involves the Hebrew root that gives us the word Haggadah, the literal meaning of which is ‘narration.’ Haggadah comes from the verb…
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Culture Rejecting the ‘Arab Jew’
‘A senior Saudi royal has offered Israel a vision of broad cooperation with the Arab world if it signs a peace treaty and withdraws from all occupied Arab territories,” a Reuters dispatch reported last week, citing an interview with former Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Turki al-Faisal. In the course of this interview,…
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Culture Uh, What’s a Schwa?
In a discussion several days ago of the deletion in spoken American English of the word “of” in the expression “a couple of,” so that “a couple of friends” becomes “a couple friends,” New York Times language columnist William Safire wrote: “The couple of… merges into couple a (which I would spell coupluh). As I…
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Culture Mikveh Mysteries, Solved
Forward reader Gertrude Frankel writes: “I have been trying, since seeing the movie ‘Little Jerusalem’ (in which such a figure is a great help to a married woman whose husband has strayed), to find out what the name is for the female attendant in the mikvah. I have asked a rabbi, a Hebrew teacher, and…
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Culture A Tale of Modesty and Bravery
For a change, this is not going to be a column about language. It’s going to be about modesty and bravery. Two weeks ago, you’ll recall, I wrote about the Yiddish word gikh, “fast,” after receiving a letter from a correspondent signed “Brodetzky” who mentioned, in two tantalizingly brief sentences, having given some uncomprehending German…
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