Philologos
By Philologos
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News The Etrog
The etrog or citron, or esrog, as it is called in Yiddish and Ashkenazic Hebrew, is a curious fruit. Historically the earliest of the citrus fruits to be introduced into the Mediterranean and into Southern Europe from the East, it is also the least edible, the only way to make a food of it being…
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News The Divine Word
Pope Benedict XVI’s address at the University of Regensburg two weeks ago made headlines because of an anti-Islamic passage cited by the pope from a book by the medieval Byzantine emperor Manuel II. However, as more thoughtful commentators have noted, this passage did not stand at the center of the pope’s talk, What did stand…
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News Islam and Fascism
Although the terms “Islamic fascism” and “Islamo-fascism” have been around for quite awhile, the public debate over both has been heightened by President Bush’s use of them in an August 7 press conference in Washington, D.C. At one point in this conference, the president mentioned “the jihadist message [of] Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism.” In another,…
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News The Bride Is Too Pretty
Forward reader Harold H. Rotman writes to ask: “My mother, of blessed memory, used to use an expression that describes an absurd, impossible, preposterous circumstance, as, for example, that a prayer was too long, or that a great hockey game was going into a third overtime, or that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony took forever. The expression…
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News Camp Massad
In response to my August 18 column, Marcel J. Silberman writes in an e-mail from Oklahoma City: “I was taken back when in your last column — about Katyusha — you mentioned that you had gone as a boy to a Hebrew-speaking camp. I too attended such a camp. It was Camp Massad in the…
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News Big Kahuna
Lisa Sopher of New York City writes: “Someone recently mentioned to me that the term ‘big Kahuna’ comes from Hawaii, where it means ‘high priest,’ and I was wondering if there was any connection between this term and the kohen gadol [high priest] of the Hebrew Bible.” No, Ms. Sopher, there is no connection, apart…
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News Katyusha Quandary
As a boy, I went for several years to a strongly Zionist, Hebrew-speaking summer camp. This was in the late 1940s and early ’50s, and our camp was designed to be a little microcosm of the new State of Israel. Among our nighttime activities was sitting around a campfire, Israeli-style, singing Hebrew songs — the…
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News Say It Succinctly
Forward reader Marjorie Gottlieb Wolfe writes to ask: “In German, Torschlusspanik means a fear of diminishing opportunities. As one gets older, for example, women worry about having passed the age for having children. Middle-aged people worry about losing their jobs and having difficulty finding new ones. Is there a Yiddish word for ‘a fear of…
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