Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture A Two-Meaning Solution For Zionism
‘The Netanyahu government is the most anti-Zionist Israel has ever had,” Israeli author Amos Oz declared at a gathering for the left-wing Meretz party a few days before Israel’s elections. This is because, Oz said, Zionism means a Jewish state, and unless the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and…
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Culture A Nebbish Is Born
Last week’s column left you hanging in suspense about the Yiddish word nebekh, whose last consonant is pronounced like the “ch” in “Bach.” Forward reader Howard Schranz, you will recall, spoke of having it “thrown his way” after his father’s death when he was a child, and he wanted to know whether it meant, as…
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Culture Abbreviate This!
Howard Schranz wants to know the origin and exact meaning of the Yiddish word nebekh. “When I was 11,” he writes, “after my father, a”h, died, I heard a lot of nebekh thrown my way. I know it meant something like, ‘It’s pitiful,’ and I quickly tired of being called that. Show some sympathy if…
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Culture You Call That Couscous?
On a recent visit to New York, I was handed a menu in a restaurant, on which appeared the entree “Blackened salmon on a bed of Israeli couscous.” “Blackened” I knew; that’s slightly charred in a spicy sauce. But what was “Israeli couscous”? I’d lived in Israel for more than 40 years and never encountered…
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Culture When To Call a Schmuck a Schmuck
Melody Belcher writes from Larue, Texas: “I hope you will help out regarding the use of the word ‘schmuck.’ My husband and I are both 68 years old and have probably called persons at least once in our lifetime by that name. Yet in speaking with a gentleman today on another matter, he mentioned that…
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Culture The Sheynest Punim of Them All
When does a word borrowed from another language officially become a member in good standing of American English? Some might say that this happens only when it is included in the dictionaries. Yet new dictionaries are not published every day, and even when they come out, they often overlook words that have been regarded for…
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Culture How To Confuse a Gentile
Carol Russak writes from San Francisco: “My mother, who was from a small town near Chernovitz, used to use the expression daber nisht when she didn’t want to talk about a subject. I know that this means ‘Don’t talk,’ a combination of Hebrew daber and Yiddish nisht. Have you ever come across this expression?” I…
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Culture ‘Iron Dome’ Has Roots in Zionist Past
If Israel has had a hero in its mini-war with Hamas, it was not, as many commentators have observed, a person, but a surface-to-air anti-missile system known as Iron Dome — or in Hebrew, kipat barzel. With nearly a 90% interception rate of rockets heading for populated Israeli areas from Gaza, Iron Dome, never tested…
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Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
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Culture A Jewish prophet of the 1980s would be horrified to see that we didn’t heed his warnings
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Opinion With killing of Hezbollah’s chief, Israel occupies the inarguable moral high ground
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Opinion This is the most disorienting Rosh Hashanah in memory
In Case You Missed It
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Film & TV How Leonard Cohen — and a Yom Kippur prayer — inspired a coming-of-age epic
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Opinion A year after Oct. 7, Israel has the chance to remake its future — for better or worse
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Opinion Campus protests defined the year since Oct. 7. Could they actually change U.S. policy?
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Special Report At the kibbutz hit hardest on Oct. 7, a wrenching debate over how to rebuild
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