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…
Many people believe that when it comes to the Hebrew language, the Sephardic pronunciation is the correct one. It’s common to hear that this is the reason that modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation is based on the Sephardic one. People have told me for instance that the phonetics of the Sephardic speech is closer to the…
Let us take a moment to paraphrase a teaching from the Mishnah on the subject of atonement: For transgressions against readers of the Forward, the Schmooze atones. But for transgressions against Meghan Markle, the Schmooze does NOT atone until it becomes clear why Meghan Markle seems so Jewish. Let’s backtrack. Last Spring we were ecstatic…
All cultures have a tendency to make their building blocks into part of a collective myth, oversimplifying them in textbooks and in the collective consciousness of their members. We Jews are hardly immune from this impulse. Indeed, we have performed this very simplification upon a touchstone of our culture: the Hebrew language. Hebrew plays a…
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