Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina who hopes to win the White House in 2016, made headlines this week when an AIPAC dinner in Boston, “Everything that starts with ‘Al’ in the Middle East is bad news.” The senator then gave some examples: “Al-Qaida, Al-Nusra, Al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula.” It was a…
Call it a confirmation bias. Everywhere I turned this year, I saw a new expression of Arab Jewish identity. The revival seems to be happening across all fields — literature, food, music — yet somehow nobody’s talking about it. As an Arab Jewish writer (my family hails from Morocco, India and Iraq), I couldn’t be…
A newly published book, Norman Berdichevsky’s “Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language,” is an excellent survey of its subject. In just 200 pages, Berdichevsky manages to touch succinctly but informatively on nearly every aspect of Zionism’s successful revival of Hebrew as the spoken language it had not been for two millennia…
In late August, a group of Knesset members from the right flank of the Likud party, Yisrael Beiteinu and the Jewish Home party proposed a bill that would make Hebrew the only official language of Israel, annulling a requirement in existence since the British Mandate period that all official documents be published in Arabic as…
Beth Kissileff writes: “A rabbi recently said to me that there is no word for ‘fun’ in any Jewish language because Judaism is purpose and goal oriented. I said, ‘But there is keyf in Hebrew,’ and he said, ‘No, that’s from Arabic.’ Was the rabbi right?” On first thought, he would appear to be. If…
A group of right-wing Israeli lawmakers are proposing a bill to make Hebrew the sole official language of the state of Israel. The bill, which has the support of Knesset members from the Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, and Jewish Home parties, would break from current law, which mandates that Arabic as well as Hebrew must be…
For the past two years, increasing numbers of English speakers worldwide have been turning to The Times of Israel for news and analysis on Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world. Beginning this week, Arabic speakers can do the same. The Jerusalem-based online newspaper’s founding editor David Horovitz announced on February 4 the launch…
Samuel Sislen of Washington, D.C., writes: “Jews have traditionally greeted one another ‘Shalom aleykhem’ and responded with the words inverted. Arabic speakers greet each other, ‘Salaam aleykum’ and also respond with the words reversed. And I have been told that some Christian services begin with the leader saying, ‘Peace be unto you,’ and the congregation…
