My tupperware container of old gefilte fish is not making the office smell weird. You have a poor sense of smell, remember? This seems like it’s all in your head. Plus, are you sure you’re not just smelling your own breath? Maybe you smell weird. This, friends, is an example of gaslighting. Gaslighting isn’t a…
Recently, a friend wrote a piece that appeared in these pages. When I glanced at the comments that were posted, I was shocked by how vitriolic they were toward my friend and toward the other commenters. Almost none of them addressed the substance of the piece. Instead, they were ad hominem attacks on the writer…
This series began as an unpacking of some controversial translations of Biblical texts I offered in an Op-Ed in The New York Times, “Is God Transgender?. I argued that the Hebrew Bible is filled with gender-bending language, all intended to hint at an Israelite priestly / scribal tradition that God is “dual-gendered” – “male” and…
Why were Nazis called Nazis? The full name of the party was the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), and you can see in the first word where the “Na” and “zi” come from — just as members of the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei) were called “Sozis.” But there is a more…
Harei at m’kudeshet li b’tabaat zo k’dat Moshe v’Yisrael. Harei atah m’kudash li b’tabaat zo k’dat Moshe v’Yisrael. Behold, you are consecrated for me, with this ring, according to the religion/tradition of Moses and Israel. We memorized these Hebrew vows for weeks, drilling until we could recite them without a hitch when the pressure was…
Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews, also represents a culture that has survived hundreds of years and is still relevant today. And more people need to know about it. Ladino is a pan-Mediterranean language that crosses geographic, linguistic and cultural boundaries. Otherwise known as Judeo-Spanish, Ladino is the hybrid dialect that Jews from the Iberian…
fry on the right track. “Patriarchy is inventive,” she writes. It’s true. It is. So inventive in fact, it keeps finding reasons to dismiss young women’s voices. Vocal fry is just the latest in a long, long series. Naomi Wolf, not for the first time, stands on the side of patriarchy, telling women that they…
Week in and week out, for 24 years, the person known as Philologos has graced our pages with an erudite, engaging and often surprising column about language. About Yiddish, English and Hebrew, French, Polish, Latin and Greek, Aramaic and Circassian and just about any other tongue humans have spoken. Ostensibly, Philologos answered readers questions about…
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