Aviya Kushner is the Forward’s language columnist and the author of Wolf Lamb Bomb and The Grammar of God. Follow her on Twitter @AviyaKushner.
Aviya Kushner
By Aviya Kushner
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Culture Can the Simple Act of Writing Bring Muslims and Jews Closer Together?
I am a longtime believer in the power of writing by hand, but it took a museum exhibit in a converted mosque in Beersheba, Israel, to teach me that the bridge among Chinese culture, the Islamic world and Western civilization was made of paper. Two thousand years ago, paper was invented in China, and it…
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Culture A Second Coming for Jesus — at the Israel Museum
‘It turns out that all Israeli art is about Jesus,” an American tourist said to me as he moved away from a painting in The Israel Museum’s paradigm-shifting new exhibit titled “Behold the Man: Jesus in Israeli Art.” In Hebrew, the title is a bit different: Zeh Ha’Ish, or “This Is the Man.” Throughout the…
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Culture FOUND: Hannah Arendt’s Library Card
Hannah Arendt’s library card was recently found in the French national library’s archives, along with the library cards of writers Stefan Zweig and Marguerite Yourcenar. The treasure trove of library cards includes period photographs, home addresses, signatures, and most tantalizingly, listed professions. Zweig, for instance, identified himself as a “homme des lettres” or man of…
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Culture Why the Dreyfus Affair Is Suddenly Trending in Israel — for All the Wrong Reasons
Log into Twitter in Israel and you’ll see “Dreyfus” trending. The reason is Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s choice of words in his response to France’s effort to host an international conference on Middle East peace in January. “This is a modern version of the Dreyfus trial,” Lieberman said, referring to the infamous case of Alfred…
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Culture This Unusual Menorah Exhibit Is Drawing Crowds in Tel Aviv
Crowds of schoolchildren and tourists are converging on an unusual exhibit of menorahs in Tel Aviv, amassed by two collectors over forty-six years of menorah obsession. The exhibit is named after a famous Hannukah song popular with children titled Chanukiyah li yesh, or “I have a menorah.” When they married in 1959, Drora and Pinchas…
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Culture Volkswagen Can Change Its Language — But Not Its History
The German foundation Deutsche Sprache (“German Language”) announced Thursday that it had sold all its shares in Volkswagen, after the carmaker announced plans to switch its official language from German to English. “The words ‘Volkswagen’ and ‘German language’ will no longer fit together,” the foundation’s executive spokesman Walter Krämer said in a statement objecting to…
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Culture Remembering Dan Pagis 30 Years After His Death
The widely-admired poet Dan Pagis, famous for his haunting poems of the Holocaust, was the subject of a special memorial conference at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva, Israel. A Romanian-born Holocaust survivor who died in 1986 at age fifty-six, Pagis was also an important scholar of medieval Hebrew literature. The conference, which took place entirely in…
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Culture Why ‘Farkakt’ Is Only One of Many Words That Describes 2016
Dictionary editors and cultural denizens are scrambling to come up with a single word to describe the craziness of 2016 — and some are turning to Yiddish for ideas. After flirting with “fascism” as a possibility, Merriam-Webster went with “surreal,” which it defines as “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream.” The word…
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