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 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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Culture 70 Years Later, We’re Still Debating Jean-Paul Sartre and Anti-Semitism
Scholars from around the world convened in Jerusalem this week for a conference marking the 70th anniversary of the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s influential “Anti-Semite and Jew.” Originally published in French as ”Réflexions Sur la Question Juive” and translated widely, the book-length essay was written just after Paris was liberated in 1944. The English translation…
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Culture Why David Friedman Is So Wrong To Call J Street Liberals ‘Kapos’
Donald Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has called Jews with left-leaning political views “far worse than kapos.” It’s a highly-charged word, to say the least, and discussion of Friedman’s word choice — kapoim in Hebrew — is blaring from the radio on Israeli buses. I heard a radio host explain Friedman’s use…
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Culture Do You Think Differently When You Write in Another Language?
One afternoon, when I was 22, I nervously asked my boss if I could attend a French writing workshop at the Alliance Française each week — during work hours. It was my first job out of college, and I worked as a copy editor at a daily financial newspaper covering the municipal-bond market. I was…
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