In the alternate pandemic reality of my daydreams, I don’t spend my afterwork hours sanitizing groceries and watching more TV than ever before. Rather, I’m raising chickens outside my charming farmhouse, harvesting my own produce and cancelling my streaming subscriptions to focus on projects of personal and societal improvement. No one is actually living like…
At the request of a National Guardsman from Utah, protestors sang a canonical Jewish plea for peace at protests outside the White House on Tuesday night, according to video from the scene. “Shalom rav al Yisrael amcha, tasim l’olam,” sing multiple voices out of the frame, as three Guardsmen watch and one in particular grins…
You might think that the biggest news to come out of the 2019 Scripps Spelling Bee would be the historic eight-way tie in which the competition ended. Well, you’d probably be right. But what about the Jewish news? Several of the high caliber words posed to contestants were either Yiddish or Hebrew, joining the many…
Grinning impishly, “Aladdin” director Guy Ritchie told the Israeli reporter that his Hebrew is only “kacha-kacha” — so-so. And yet Ritchie — and the very patient Israeli journalist speaking to him about the premiere of Disney’s “Aladdin” — conducted their conversation solely in Hebrew. “My wife — she speaks Hebrew,” Ritchie slowly recited for Ynet…
“Can I quote some Hebrew to you?” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey asked rhetorically on Wednesday night during a CNN presidential town hall. “Because I studied the Torah too.” Click here for video; scroll to the 1:40 mark for the Hebrew. Booker, who was mostly talking about his Christian faith, is known in the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. I first heard complaints about Ashkenormativity in March 2009, five or six years before the term was apparently coined. I was attending a conference in Chicago for young Yiddish speakers and college students interested in studying the language. While explaining how learning Yiddish as a teenager and…
How can one find fresh nuance in an over 2,ooo-year-old book? If the book is the Hebrew Bible, by returning to the original Hebrew. After over two decades, the 83-year-old literary critic and translator Robert Alter has completed his translation of the Hebrew Bible, an undertaking that has resulted in over 3,000 pages of commentary…
(JTA) — If you read the “Harry Potter” series in Hebrew you may have noticed a curious Jewish fact: Though Sirius Black isn’t Jewish, the character sings a Hanukkah song in one scene. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Hebrew translator Gili Bar Hillel reveals some behind-the-scenes tidbits about her “Harry Potter” translation process. In…
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