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…
One of the most treasured collections of ancient Hebrew manuscripts and books will be digitized and available for public view online under an agreement by the state libraries of Russia and Israel announced on Tuesday. Israel has long sought the transfer to its national library of the 14,000-item Guenzburg collection in the Russian State Library…
The textbook for the intensive Hebrew class that I enrolled in this past summer was called “Hebrew from Scratch”. Which didn’t technically apply to my situation, at age 48, in the Beginner Aleph classroom. Forty years earlier, living in Brooklyn and attending my neighborhood public school there, I had begun Hebrew School in Sheepshead Bay’s…
COIMBRA, Portugal (JTA) — From its mountaintop perch, the University of Coimbra towers majestically over the downtown square that used to be the regional headquarters of the Portuguese Inquisition. It’s a fitting location for the 737-year-old university, the seventh oldest in the world, which outsmarted and outlived the campaign of persecution against Jews and freethinkers…
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