Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Jan Koum, WhatsApp and the Meaning of ‘The Walls Have Ears’
Benjamin Lerner writes about an interview he came across in the media with Jan Koum, the rags-to-riches Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union who founded WhatsApp and recently sold it to Facebook for a reported $19 billion dollars. Referring to WhatsApp’s emphasis on privacy in its social network, Koum said: “I grew up in…
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Culture Great Debate Between ‘Among’ and ‘Between’
Rabbi Jonathan H. Gerard of Easton, Pa., gently corrects me for writing in my column of February 14, after listing various English newspaper translations of a Hebrew phrase used by Israeli Minister of Commerce Naftali Bennett, “Not that there’s an enormous difference between any of these.” Rabbi Gerard comments, “Of course, you meant ‘among.’” Did…
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News Is There an Echo in Here?
Jeffrey Lubin writes to ask what a bat-kol is and why it isn’t a ben-kol. Since this question won’t mean much to most of you, I’d better explain. The roughly 2,000-year-old Hebrew word bat-kol is not found in the Bible, and first appears in early rabbinic literature. Translatable literally as “the daughter of a voice,”…
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Culture Can the West Bank Also Be Judea and Samaria?
Israeli peace negotiator Tzipi Livni and her Palestinian counterpart, Saeb Erekat, had an emotional exchange the other day at a meeting of the 47th annual Munich Security Conference. It started when Livni used the traditional Jewish terms “Judea” and “Samaria” to refer to the area known to Palestinians and most of the world as “the…
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Culture Why It’s So Hard for Naftali Bennett to Say I’m Sorry
Did he or apologize or didn’t he? The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that he did. Israel’s minister of the economy, Naftali Bennett, on the other hand, declared that he had not apologized at all, but had simply issued “a clarification” when telling an audience at a conference January 29: “If the prime…
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Culture Secret Message on a Bottle in Jerusalem’s City of David
A skilled paleographer or specialist in ancient writing can sometimes guess what a mere fragment of that writing is about. A month ago, Haifa University biblical historian Gershon Galil published such a guess in an Israeli journal. If he’s right, not only has he correctly deciphered a puzzling inscription written in the ancient Phoenician/Hebrew alphabet,…
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Culture When a Sentence Is Cruel and Unusually Long
An article on the Iranian nuclear program in the online paper the Washington Free Beacon tells of a reporter who asked a “senior administration official” about last November’s “Joint Plan of Action” agreement in Geneva. Did it, he inquired, prohibit the Iranians from designing new models of centrifuges? The answer received was: “We, designing is…
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Culture Is ‘Quenelle’ Backwards Version of Nazi Salute?
By now you may think you’ve heard or read all you want to about the quenelle, the double hand movement that was popularized by the French comedian Dieudonné and has been all over the news since the French soccer star Nicolas Anelka performed it after scoring a goal in a game in England on December…
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