Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Lend Me Your (Yiddish) Earlocks
Even if one is naturally curious, one often accepts strange things unquestioningly for what they are. I suppose that’s why I never wondered about the odd phrase di linke peye, “the left ear lock,” in the Yiddish expression ikh hob es in der linker peye, “I have it in the left ear lock,” or es…
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Culture What’s an Angel of Rain Doing in a Jewish Sukkot Prayer?
The Israeli and Eastern Mediterranean climate is one of hot, rainless summers and — barring drought — cool, rainy winters, with spring and autumn as transitional seasons. This is why, though it has nothing to do with their own local weather (unless they’re living in Southern California), Jews all over the world pray briefly for…
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Culture Why ‘Have a Nice Fast’ Isn’t Always the Right Thing To Say
In the boyhood days when I was still a more or less observant Jew, I always hated fasting on Yom Kippur. It struck me as the least spiritual thing I could do, since the more the hours went by with my empty stomach gnawing away at me, the more I could think of nothing but…
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Culture What Do We Mean by ‘Erev Rosh Hashanah?’
Seth Cohen sends an email from Mamaroneck, New York, accompanied by an Internet link to an English-language advertisement, run in Israel, for a communal “Erev Rosh Hashanah” dinner in Tel Aviv. And Mr. Cohen asks, “Is an expression like erev rosh ha-shanah in the sense of ‘Rosh Hashanah evening’ proper colloquial Israeli Hebrew or an…
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Culture The Secret Yiddish History of Scotland
Recently, as Scotland’s independence vote began to loom large in the media, someone asked me if I had ever heard of Scots Yiddish. “I canna say that I have,” I answered, only to be told that there was an entire chapter on the subject in David Daiches’s autobiographical “Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood.” Scots…
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News Philologos Takes On The Times and the Forward in Epic Hebrew Battle
The New York Times, which no one could accuse of being overly sympathetic to Israel, has hit a new linguistic low. In a September 3 report from the Erez checkpoint between Israel and Gaza, Times reporter Jodi Rudoren quotes an Israeli official as telling her that “this is a secret crossing — this is Gaza,…
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News When Jews — and Everyone Else — Learned How To Have Fun
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…
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Culture Changing Names of ISIS Reveal Growing Ambitions
Ed Ravin writes: “The American media refer to the jihadist movement that has taken over a big chunk of the Middle East as ISIS, an abbreviation of’ ‘the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.’ Canadian journalists, on the other hand, call it ISIL, for ‘the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.’ The Arabic word…
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