Purim is just around the corner and, in my house, that means my children have been super-glued into their costumes for about three weeks. My 6-year-old son, a dinosaur fan, has been wearing his T-Rex hat and roaring at the baby non-stop. My 3-year-old daughter has been wearing her poofy, pink princess dress and tiara,…
It sounds like a high-tech thriller with DaVinci Code undertones: A file name inside a lethal computer worm might reference the Biblical Queen Esther — and could finger Israel as the source. A report in today’s New York Times says a file inside the Stuxnet worm’s computer code was named “Myrtus,” possibly a “cross-linguistic wordplay”…
She’s got the No. 1 album in the country — and, apparently, she can relate to the Bible’s Queen Esther. Katy Perry, who’s dominated radio waves since May with the inescapable pop single “California Gurls,” went straight to the top spot September 1 with the release of her third album, “Teenage Dream.” In addition to…
When I was in kindergarten I played Queen Esther in our synagogue’s Purim spiel. I remember feeling pretty good about playing the lead, and energized that the role called for playing a heroine and putting on a frilly pink dress. I thought about this Saturday during a discussion at my synagogue about gender and power…
You can learn an incredible amount about different people from language. There are, for example, 27 words for “moustache” in Albanian – including a word for what English-speakers would call “no moustache.” It seems that in Albania, moustaches are pretty important. Similarly, the Inuit are famous for having 30 words for snow – clearly they…
Traditionally, Purim celebrants drink enough alcohol to confuse the Book of Esther’s villain, Haman, with its hero, Mordechai. But this year, two unlikely female characters were confused: Queen Esther and the mermaid depicted in the Starbucks Coffee logo. “The girl in the Starbucks logo is Queen Esther … the queen of the Jews,” Safwat Higazi,…
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