Photograph by Jon Wunder Gift No. 3 The holiday season is upon us, which for many means a time of social gatherings, family, friends and traditions both religious and secular. This time of year brings me back to my youth, when I believed December was the time the Jews celebrated Hanukkah as well as Passover…
A newly published book, Norman Berdichevsky’s “Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language,” is an excellent survey of its subject. In just 200 pages, Berdichevsky manages to touch succinctly but informatively on nearly every aspect of Zionism’s successful revival of Hebrew as the spoken language it had not been for two millennia…
Syria’s official news agency, SANA, has launched a Hebrew-language website to reach Israeli readers. The website went live Sunday and joins existing pages in Arabic, French, Russian, Turkish, Chinese and Spanish. Khalid al-Hamad, the editor and translator of the Hebrew page, said in a statement that the new website will expose Israel’s involvement in the…
Not too long ago I found myself in an argument — civilly conducted, I must say — with a friend of one of my daughters, a young man of emphatically liberal views who teaches sociology at a college in Israel. In the name of gender equality, he said, he was careful to address his classes…
In late August, a group of Knesset members from the right flank of the Likud party, Yisrael Beiteinu and the Jewish Home party proposed a bill that would make Hebrew the only official language of Israel, annulling a requirement in existence since the British Mandate period that all official documents be published in Arabic as…
Beth Kissileff writes: “A rabbi recently said to me that there is no word for ‘fun’ in any Jewish language because Judaism is purpose and goal oriented. I said, ‘But there is keyf in Hebrew,’ and he said, ‘No, that’s from Arabic.’ Was the rabbi right?” On first thought, he would appear to be. If…
One of the more surprising things about the war in Gaza is the fact that most Israelis still don’t call it a “war.” In Israeli media, the war is largely referred to as mivtza, which translates as “operation” but is rarely used to mean that in vernacular Hebrew. Outside of referring to military actions, the…
Birthright Israel and the Israeli-American Council will offer a new Birthright program track for Israeli-American young adults called IAC Shelanu. The free trip for children of Israelis, which will be funded by the council, will be conducted in Hebrew. The Birthright program takes Jewish 18- to 26-year-olds on free 10-day trips to Israel. The impetus…
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