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…
Google Maps is perhaps the most impressive cartographic endeavor in world history, with nearly the entire globe detailed down to the street level and available for free public perusal. Its latest update, last month, was praised for finally eliminating the Mercator Projection — the flat-pane system that distorts Greenland to falsely look bigger than Africa….
Whether you participate in Jewish prayer three times a day or two times a year, entering spiritual spaces can be a linguistic minefield. Rich tradition plus an ancient language is a recipe for beauty, but also for confusion. Here’s a handy glossary to keep you informed from the moment you pop open the siddur to…
(JTA) — A pocket watch with Hebrew letters on its face that belonged to a Jewish Russian immigrant who died aboard the Titanic sold at auction for $57,500. Heritage Auctions offered the pocket watch — for a starting bid of only $20,000 — at its headquarters in Dallas on Saturday in a public auction of…
One often hears about two main cultural groups of Jews: Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Some also speak of a third group, Mizrahim, for the Jews who lived in modern Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Georgia and Uzbekistan. But these groupings can be more complicated than they at first seem. There are three main ways of approaching the…
(JTA) — Uber suspended one of its drivers in Chicago pending an investigation into an Israeli diplomat’s claim that the driver threw him out for speaking in Hebrew. Itay Milner, deputy consul general of Israel to the Midwest, wrote on Facebook Thursday that he was ten minutes into his ride, which he booked with the…
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