In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the words yom kippur shel, “the Yom Kippur of,” have referred in Israeli speech to any debacle that might have been prevented by better judgment.
Hebrew was once written in both directions. How did it fix its direction, and what does that show about the history of writing in general?
The word, like a small number of other Egyptian loanwords in the Bible, testifies to a period in which the early Israelite nation, or a part of it, was in intimate contact with Egyptian life.
The Blue-and-White party has transformed into . . . well, it’s unclear, at least in English.
The deultimization of the Hebrew language proceeds apace.
In the end, one doesn’t know what to be struck by more: the fact that a computer can translate Hebrew at all, or the fact that when it does, it does so atrociously.
Only in Schopfloch, as far as I know, have a large number of originally Jewish words survived in the speech of the local populace to this day.
“An earthquake in biblical scholarship” is how the discovery has been described. That’s true, as are the connections it reveals between ancient languages and modern ones.
And why each has been preferred in different times and places.
Quite a few masculine and feminine Hebrew words, when pluralized, take the form of the opposite gender. Why?
As tracked through the waxing and waning value of the Hebrew words for “departees” and “descenders.”
In anti- and post-Zionist circles, the verb of choice for immigrating to Israel has been replaced by something less romantic.
The Israeli actress recently released “Gal Gadot Teaches You Hebrew Slang,” a short video from Vanity Fair. She turns out not to be such a good teacher, but it doesn’t matter much.
The two giants of Jewish literature come together for a wide-ranging discussion centered around his new book on the seminal Hebrew writers of modernity.