(Reuters) — Pope Francis and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traded words on Monday over the language spoken by Jesus two millennia ago. “Jesus was here, in this land. He spoke Hebrew,” Netanyahu told Francis, at a public meeting in Jerusalem in which the Israeli leader cited a strong connection between Judaism and Christianity. “Aramaic,”…
An extremist Jew is arrested at a 2012 rally for ‘price tag’ attacker comrades / Getty Images Over at Tablet, Liel Leibovitz is unhappy that Israeli author Amos Oz is going around calling violent Israeli settlers “Hebrew neo-Nazis.” He claims Oz’s statement suffers from “a logical flaw,” one that has “more to do with philosophy…
A West Bank-based organization filed a police complaint charging Israeli author Amoz Oz with incitement to racism. The complaint by the Samaria Residents Committee was filed in the West Bank settlement of Ariel two days after Oz called Israelis who carry out “price tag” attacks “Hebrew neo-Nazis,” the Times of Israel reported Sunday. Oz made…
A 15th century printed book of the Torah fetched a record $3.87 million at an auction in Paris. Three buyers attempted to outbid each other over the telephone during the sale which the Christie’s auction house organized on April 30, the news website actualitte.com reported Thursday. Christie’s listed the buyer as “anonymous” but said the…
A reader signing his or her name as “ASP” asks: “In her book ‘The Passover Seder,’ Ruth Gruber Fredman wrote that the galaxy is called seder or ‘order’ in Hebrew. Is this true?” Exactly what Ruth Gruber Fredman wrote in her book, I don’t know, but seder, while it does mean “order” in Hebrew, does…
The other day, a French friend who lives in Israel used the expression quel capharnaüm to describe the state of her apartment after her small grandchildren had come for a visit. What she meant was, “What a mess,” but to my surprise, when I told her she had used a most appropriate word for Hebrew-speaking…
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…
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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