Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture The Goddess Matriarchy
Barry Dancis writes: “I recently began reading the book ‘When God Was a Women’ by Merlin Stone, written some 30 years ago. In it she points out that Near Eastern societies from 9000 BCE or thereabouts to 2500 BCE or somewhat later revered a supreme female deity or goddess (Astarte, Isis, etc.), and that the…
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News Hitkansut
Hitkansut. (Hit-kahn-SOOT.) Keep an eye out for it. It’s already a much bandied about and argued about Hebrew buzzword, and it’s going to become even more of one. It’s not an easy word to translate. According to the context, it might be rendered in English as “getting together,” “rallying round,” “gathering oneself” or “withdrawing into…
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News Kill Me the Geese
We were seated, full from a sumptuous meal, around a dinner table: My wife and I, a retired professor of Russian literature and his wife, several other guests and our hosts. Two of the guests were having a political argument. “Koyl mir di genz,” one of them said. “What does that mean?” I asked. That…
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Culture Fame’s Good Fortune
Recently I came across an article in a Hebrew newspaper that bore the caption “Children of Celebrities Are Fed Up With Strange Names Given Them by Their Parents.” The article began with the complaint of Peaches Honeyblossom Michelle Charlotte Angel Vanessa Geldof, the 16-year-old daughter of singer Bob Geldof, that she would have preferred something…
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News You Say ‘Phylacteries,’ I Say ‘Tefillin’
Fred Lerner of White River Junction, Vt., a little town that has now accounted for two straight columns (see last week’s “Now Shmear This”), has a complaint. He writes: “In the January 20 issue of the Forward, Raphael Mostel, in an article about the composer Osvaldo Golijov, wrote that, ‘One memory he has of his…
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News Now Shmear This
Jane Civins of Cranston, R.I., sent me a copy of The Baker’s Catalogue, a mail-order business run out of White River Junction, Vt. The company’s many products include “Spreadable N.Y. Chocolate Blackout Schmear” ($6.95 for a 16 oz. can). This catalog also has a recipe for chocolate blackout cake — made, naturally, with the aforementioned…
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News Welcoming the Angels
Forward reader Gilad J. Gevaryahu has written to tell me that my discussion of the Sabbath greeting “shabbat shalom” in this column two weeks ago was scooped. A many-sided correspondence regarding this greeting, Mr. Gevaryahu informs me, can be found in “Mail.Jewish” (featured on www.ottmall.com, a site devoted to halachic issues). It appears in Volume…
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Culture The Battle Over ‘Judea and Samaria’
One would expect someone as pro-Israel as The New York Times’ William Safire to know better. In his January 16 On Language column, he wrote: “In wartime, words are weapons; we have seen how Israelis and Palestinians are highly sensitive to connotations in their conflict. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon preferred to refer to land in…
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Culture ‘The Pitt’ tackled the trauma of the Tree of Life attack. Here’s how survivors of the synagogue shooting reacted to the episode.
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Antisemitism Decoded How an ‘all-American boy’ became a Mississippi synagogue arson suspect
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News Why Josh Shapiro’s memoir could complicate a presidential run
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Culture The mysterious case of Barbra Streisand and the missing half-pound of Zabar’s sturgeon
In Case You Missed It
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Culture What will become of the Dutch farm school that saved my father from the Nazis?
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Opinion I’m a Zionist. I support Palestinian rights. My campus has no space for people who believe in peace
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Opinion Long before Trump’s second-hand Nobel, a laureate sought to curry favor with Nazis by regifting a prize
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Fast Forward Oct. 7 spurred this secular private school in Manhattan to start holding an annual Shabbat gathering
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