Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Circassian: A Most Difficult Language
The other day, I was in the waiting room of a doctor’s office in Haifa, when three people walked in and sat behind me. Two were men dressed in Western clothes, one looking to be in his 30s and the other in his 50s or 60s; the third was a woman in her 20s of…
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Culture What’s the Difference Between Mass Killing and Genocide?
Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about “neo-Nazi” as a term for anti-Arab hooligans among Israel’s settler population, explaining why I thought it inappropriate. Because the Nazis, I said, have rightly come to represent the ultimate in monstrously hateful human conduct, it has become common to invoke them in condemning all forms of violent…
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Culture Is ‘Kushim’ a Racist Israeli Term for Blacks?
The Forward’s Israel correspondent, Nathan Jeffay, has passed on to me a letter he received. Referring to Jeffay’s May 23 dispatch on Maccabi Tel Aviv’s winning Europe’s 2014 basketball championship cup, it states: “In your article, you mistakenly say that the Hebrew word kushim, when used by Israelis to refer to Maccabi’s black players, is…
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Culture No, Amos Oz, We Shouldn’t Call Settlers Jewish ‘Neo-Nazis’
Amos Oz, probably the most widely acclaimed of all living Israeli authors, has been both criticized and defended for saying several weeks ago that Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria engaged in acts of violence and vandalism toward Arabs were “a monster that needs to be called what it is: Hebrew neo-Nazi groups.” Not all…
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Culture Why God Can Sometimes Sound Female
Irving Salzman has a question about an ancient Hebrew prayer, the answer to which involves some fine points of linguistic history that may not interest everyone. Yet since the prayer is one that all of you who are synagogue-goers know and may have wondered about, too, I’ll risk discussing it. The prayer begins with the…
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Culture The Most Beautiful Word in the World?
The Hebrew word ḥ eshbon, pronounced “khesh-BONE” (with the second vowel halfway between an “o” and an “aw”), can mean sum, arithmetic, bank account or bill, and is also found in a number of common Israeli idioms, such as l’havi b’ḥ eshbon, to take into account; la’asot ḥ eshbon, to make a reckoning or assessment;…
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Culture Spitting and Other Methods of Warding Off Canaries, Jinxes and Evil Eyes
Forward reader Herb Hoffman writes: “I was raised in Brooklyn with the knowledge that spitting three times (or at least making a ritualized spitting movement or sound, which I’ve always rendered as ‘ptu, ptu, ptu’) is an effective way of warding off a kinehore — or ‘canary’ in my native Yinglish. My mother especially used…
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Culture How Some Piffle About Mr. Pouffle Inspired John Kerry’s ‘Poof’
If anyone thought “Poof!” would go poof in a single column, he or she thought wrongly. That column ended, you may recall, with my tracing the word with which John Kerry summed up the failure of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations to the phrase “Piff, paff, pouf” in the French Jewish composer Jacques Offenbach’s opera “La Grande-Duchesse…
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