Hope you all had a great holiday!
Happy Purim, everyone! is a post from: Michael Wex.com
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Hope you all had a great holiday!
Happy Purim, everyone! is a post from: Michael Wex.com
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]]>Tsaytn derlebt, as my parents used to say, “Look what we’ve lived to see”: a Jewish camp where they play lacrosse, a sport that exists only in order to realize all of my mother’s worst fears for my health. I’m from Canada and I know from lacrosse: you could poke an eye out, break an arm or leg or, God forbid, do yourself something before you even knew what hit you.
The one time I went to camp, there was no such thing as lacrosse. They were afraid of what we might do with the sticks. The camp, for delinquents from religious homes, was called Shoymer Pesoyim (the name comes from the Psalms; it means “the Lord looks out for idiots”) and was primarily devoted to Talmud under the open sky. The athletic program consisted of water sports; every Friday afternoon, each boy got five minutes alone in the mikveh with a snorkel.
The only thing we had that even resembled anything they have at my daughter’s camp was arts and crafts. They used to let us whittle. Every boy got a knife and something to carve, and we used to sit there in the moyel workshop, just us, the knives and carrot after carrot after baby carrot.
We ate nothing but salad and tsimmes. I’m so glad my daughter will be playing lacrosse.
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Week. Below are some items for sale from eBay for those of you with an interest in Yiddish.
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Yiddish Moyshe Nadir Lakht In Der Velt Arayn 2 Books |  |
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Yiddish Wisdom for Parents by Kristina Swarner 2001 | |
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Born to Kvetch Yiddish Language and Culture in All of | |
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Invitation to Yiddish Manual and guide by Yudel Mark | |
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Lacrosse at Jewish Summer Camp? is a post from: Michael Wex.com
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I’ve been asked to explain the term dover akher, "something else," "another thing," something that you don't want to mention. It comes from the Hebrew. Dover means "thing"; akher means "other"; the two together were used as a means of getting from one interpretation to the next in rabbinic literature, where akher on its own was sometimes used to mean "that person or thing that I prefer not to mention" or "Mr. X., whose identity we all know.” Rather than mention the name of Elisha Ben Avuya, a prominent second century scholar who turned his back on Judaism and became a pagan, the Talmud prefers to call him akher, which it also uses to mean “non-Jew.” Fundamentally, it’s calling Elisha a sheygets.
When the source of the indelicacy or repugnance is not human, dover is joined to akher to produce a you-know-what, an I-don't-have-to-spell-it-out-for-you. The Talmud uses dover akher to refer to things as diverse as sodomy, coitus, idolatry and leprosy. Most often, though, it means “pig,” and this is the meaning that has crossed over into Yiddish.
A Yiddish dover akher is always human, though. Where a khazer can be any kind of two- or four- legged pig, dover akher means only a human swine.
The development of dover akher/illustrates how a bland, almost meaningless euphemism can end up needing a euphemism of its own: call a man a khazer and he might argue, call him a dover akher and he'll sue.
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Week. Below are some items for sale from eBay for those of you with an interest in Yiddish.
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Yiddish Moyshe Nadir Lakht In Der Velt Arayn 2 Books | |
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US $7.95 | 1h 6m |
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Yiddish Wisdom for Parents by Kristina Swarner 2001 | |
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US $3.99 | 1h 26m |
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Born to Kvetch Yiddish Language and Culture in All of | |
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US $5.50 | 2h 24m |
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Invitation to Yiddish Manual and guide by Yudel Mark | |
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The dover akher… is a post from: Michael Wex.com
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Sabina Wex graduates from middle school
At least once a month, someone, usually a business acquaintance who doesn’t know much about my private life, will ask what my 14-year-old daughter is up to at her Hebrew day school, and then go on to let me know in no uncertain terms that I am a traitor to every aspect of the Yiddish language and culture from which I make most of my living, from the fondly remembered labor movement to the Yiddish-speaking Orthodoxy in which I was raised. They’re upset that someone like me, who spends so much of his time writing and lecturing about Yiddish, has been sending his kid to an Ivrit b’Ivrit (Zionist Hebew-language) day school in which the study of Yiddish is, quite literally, not an option.
Why dafke Hebrew school, and why dafke the kind in which the kids are not only taught to understand the language, but also are expected to function in it without recourse to anything else — English, Russian or French — for 50% of every eight-and-a-half-hour school day? “You like Hebrew so much,” they ask, “why don’t you just send her to Israel?”
I would — if everyone didn’t speak Hebrew there. As things are, though, Hebrew (thank God) comes too easily in Israel, where someone my daughter’s age can morph very quickly into a virtual native speaker. Like any state-sponsored national language, Hebrew in today’s Israel is conditioned, in Gershom Scholem’s words, “by unconscious processes in which the power of tradition is a minor factor.” Every native speaker of Hebrew calls an eagle, for example, a nesher because — because nesher is just what it’s called.
Things are a little different over here, where “eagle” is the default term for an aquiline bird, a fact that allows nesher to take on nuances that might not be present in English: The ideal day school graduate will be able to turn out an idiomatic Hebrew sentence about the nesher on the Great Seal of the United States without being able to forget that she first encountered the word in the 19th chapter of Exodus, which states that God took our ancestors out of Egypt “al kanfey nesharim, on eagles’ wings.” Fluid as a student’s Hebrew might get, such a word — nesher is only one of thousands of possible examples — will never quite lose a certain biblical tinge.
And that’s what I like about day school. When language acquisition rests squarely and unashamedly on “the power of tradition,” students receive a rare opportunity to get the best of both linguistic worlds: the Holy Tongue of tradition, and the day-to-day language of a contemporary sovereign state. Since all classes with any Jewish content at all are taught in Hebrew — these classes include literature, history, Hebrew grammar and composition, and other subjects that would be looked upon as limudei khol, secular studies, in traditional religious and secular Israeli schools alike — pupils develop near-native levels of fluency; gaps in day-to-day usage are filled in during classroom discussion by teachers who tend to be Israeli.
On the more strictly religious side, the kids are learning modern Hebrew in a Jewish context. Whether they realize it or not, they’re being taught to see today’s Ivrit as the most recent stage in an unbroken continuum that starts with the Bible and moves up through the Mishnah and later rabbinic literature, the liturgy and commentaries, and then on to the work of such writers as Mendele, Peretz and Agnon.
My daughter and her fellow students are learning something that might look and sound just like the official language of a state on the other side of the world, but is really a great deal more: It’s a key — the only real key — to who they are, who their forebears were, how and where they lived, and how and why they died.
Fluency in modern Hebrew, along with the ability to read biblical and rabbinic versions of the language with the same facility as students from a traditional yeshiva background, give the day school student (the one who sticks around for a while, at any rate) immediate access to the entire range of Jewish culture: religious and secular, conservative and liberal, ancient and modern. As Rashi puts it — in the idiom in which I was taught — girso de-yankuso miskayem yoyser mi-shel zikno, “What you learn as a child has a longer shelf-life than what you learn when you’re older.” Children who receive such schooling receive both the tradition itself and the means of making it their own: Regardless of where they might end up on the spectrum of religious observance, they will rarely fail to look at the world from a Jewish point of view.
Please note that my daughter’s school is a Hebrew day school — not an Orthodox, Conservative or Reform day school, not a yeshiva. This type of Hebrew day school does not prescribe social attitudes or religious activity outside the classroom. It deals in words, and it’s the words themselves that are important; the students can decide how to use them. Kids like my daughter are getting an education that gives them the tools to develop their own understanding of Jewish life and history and then find their own place in it.
At a time when the various streams of Judaism seem to be growing further and further apart, when delegitimation is more common than cooperation, my daughter and her fellow students — Orthodox (albeit “only” Modern Orthodox), Conservative, Reform and even completely unobservant — not only engage with one another in order to try to understand Jewish law and tradition, but also do so in Hebrew, in the language of the texts that they’re studying, in the idiom of a modern state where some of them were born and many have yet to visit. They’re hardly tannaim (the rabbis of the Mishnah), but they’re engaged in a similar activity. Unlike the tannaim, though, they’re doing it here instead of in Israel. And why? I can’t speak on behalf of other parents, but after paying the Hebrew school tuition, I can barely afford to take my kid to the zoo.
Why send your kid to Hebrew school? is a post from: Michael Wex.com
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]]>“Of course,” she replied, but couldn’t tell me where the term comes from.
Virtually any Jew of South African origin will tell you that Afrikaaners, the Boers who make up so large a part of the white population, are known as khateysim (singular, khatas). Khatas derives from the Hebrew khet, a sin, and means sin-offering, a meaning that it retains in Yiddish, where it acquires the additional--and more common--sense of sinner or rogue. There is a well-known line in the Mishnaic tractate Avos, which every orthodox male studies every Saturday between Passover and Rosh Hashana: "Eyn bor yerey khet , a bor [uncouth ignoramus] is not afraid of sin." The coincidence of sound was too much to ignore, and since someone not afraid to sin must therefore be a sinner, South Africans of Dutch descent--Boers, that is--became known as khateysim, as if Boer (which is related to the Yiddish poyer and the German Bauer) were not only Hebrew, but a Hebrew word as defined in an authoritative Hebrew text.
And we owe it all to Hebrew school.
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Week. Below are some items for sale from eBay for those of you with an interest in Yiddish.
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Yiddish Moyshe Nadir Lakht In Der Velt Arayn 2 Books | |
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US $7.95 | 1h 6m |
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Yiddish Wisdom for Parents by Kristina Swarner 2001 | |
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US $3.99 | 1h 26m |
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Born to Kvetch Yiddish Language and Culture in All of | |
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US $5.50 | 2h 24m |
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Invitation to Yiddish Manual and guide by Yudel Mark | |
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South African Jews in Yiddish is a post from: Michael Wex.com
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You call this a vacation? I’m so tired that I don’t even know how to describe myself. Am I oysgemutshet un oysgematert, “run down and weary, exhausted and exhausted?” Don’t ask me. Mutshet comes from Yiddish’s Slavic component, matert from the German; there is no real distinction between them because we’re all too tired to remember the difference.
Maybe, though, I look like a hon nokh tashmish, “a rooster after the hens have been trod.” Anyone who's spent any time on a chicken farm or read Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale knows that a rooster will service any number of hens in a single night, thus giving the rooster's owners a chance to sleep in the next day. Using a word like tashmish makes the expression cute. Tashmish is the generally accepted shorthand for tashmish ha-mite, use of the bed, the standard rabbinic euphemism for sexual intercourse found in commentaries and legal codes from Talmudic times to today. It’s usually translated as "conjugal duty" or "nuptial rights." Although man is obliged to "pay" these to his wife on her return from the mikve, it's absurd to discuss conjugal duties or use vocabulary of this type when talking about poultry; Yiddish pretends that the rooster is a pious Jew who is busy with the punctilious performance of a religious duty, a Jew--for the sake of this idiom—who is always losing sleep because he has so many mitsves to fulfill: the shabbes tables of America depend on his exhaustion next morning.
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Week. Below are some items for sale from eBay for those of you with an interest in Yiddish.
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Yiddish Moyshe Nadir Lakht In Der Velt Arayn 2 Books | |
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US $7.95 | 1h 6m |
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Yiddish Wisdom for Parents by Kristina Swarner 2001 | |
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US $3.99 | 1h 26m |
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Born to Kvetch Yiddish Language and Culture in All of | |
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US $5.50 | 2h 24m |
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Invitation to Yiddish Manual and guide by Yudel Mark | |
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Yiddish exhaustion…. is a post from: Michael Wex.com
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The audio version of my book, Just Say Nu, recently won an award and I found myself confronted with the same problem that I had to face after Born to Kvetch won something: How could I let people know? How was I to say something nice about myself without calling down an evil eye and very likely destroying the very good fortune that I wanted to talk about? How are you supposed to spit three times at the end of a press release?
Some of you might remember the old commercials for Crest toothpaste that had kids running into the house and yelling, “Look, Ma, no cavities!” Imagine these commercials in Yiddish. The kid, in scarf and galoshes, a clove of garlic in a sock wound around its neck, runs into the kitchen. “Look, Ma, no cavities, keneynehore, ptoo ptoo ptoo, af ale yidishe kinder gezugt, may such be the case with all the Children of Israel.” Not very catchy, but if the kid doesn’t do it, the mother will have no choice but to respond with, “Vey gevalt, bays dir op di tsing, bite your tongue,” — i.e., “you’ve just condemned yourself to a life of toothlessness,” and then she’ll have to start spitting.
You can imagine my dilemma. I called my publicist and said, “What would you say if I were to tell you that Mel Gibson’s book about making The Passion of the Christ just won an award?”
To which she replied, “Mazl tov, Michael. What award did you win?”
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Week. Below are some items for sale from eBay for those of you with an interest in Yiddish.
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Yiddish Moyshe Nadir Lakht In Der Velt Arayn 2 Books | |
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US $7.95 | 1h 6m |
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Yiddish Wisdom for Parents by Kristina Swarner 2001 | |
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US $3.99 | 1h 26m |
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Born to Kvetch Yiddish Language and Culture in All of | |
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US $5.50 | 2h 24m |
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Invitation to Yiddish Manual and guide by Yudel Mark | |
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Spit three times when you win an award is a post from: Michael Wex.com
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]]>It was just too damned good to keep to ourselves. Mary Tyler Moore producer Stan Daniels does Old Man River as an old Jewish guy. Enjoy! (And if you receive this via email and can't see the YouTube player, just click on the link to bring you to the website and you can look at it here.)
Old Jewish Man River is a post from: Michael Wex.com
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]]>It’s probably a good thing. According to the medresh, "Were it not for the yeytser horeh, no one would build a house, get married, have children, or do any business;" it drives people to satisfy their urges and gratify their egos. Someone who has been seized by the yeytser has fallen into a passionate desire––for an ice cream, a new house, or finding a cure for cancer––anything that can be desired or even lusted after. It's Inclination with a capital I, immune to cold showers or thoughts of Santa.
There's only one way to resist, especially when the yeytser starts to talk about sex: “Shlep it into the bes-medresh [study house]. If it’s made of rock, it’ll be crushed; of iron, it’ll be smashed to pieces (Sukko, 52b).”
Rock, iron--the only thing that's supposed to be hard in a bes-medresh is the book you're trying to read: yeytser-horeh-bleterl, “a small blotch of the evil inclination,” is what Yiddish calls a hickey. “She got such a yetster-hore-bleterl at the Teaneck drive-in that she wore turtlenecks for the next three weeks.”
May she wear them in good health––as long as she isn’t my daughter.
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Week. Below are some items for sale from eBay for those of you with an interest in Yiddish.
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Yiddish Moyshe Nadir Lakht In Der Velt Arayn 2 Books | |
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US $7.95 | 1h 5m |
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Yiddish Wisdom for Parents by Kristina Swarner 2001 | |
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US $3.99 | 1h 26m |
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Born to Kvetch Yiddish Language and Culture in All of | |
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US $5.50 | 2h 24m |
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Invitation to Yiddish Manual and guide by Yudel Mark | |
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The evil inclination is a post from: Michael Wex.com
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]]>Musically-inclined readers have probably guessed that I’m talking about the long-overdue induction of the Dave Clark Five into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame.
Loving the Dave Clark Five has always struck me as a secular way of fulfilling the commandment found in Leviticus 18:3: “And you shall not walk in their statutes.” If we have to do something that gentiles also do, we’re supposed to do it differently. If their hats have narrow brims, our brims will be wide. If their curses and insults focus on mothers and their body parts, ours won’t mention mothers at all. If they want Beatlemania, then we prefer the Dave Clark Five.
As I did in 1964 and ‘65; and as I still do today. History has finally absolved me. The Messiah can’t be too far off.
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Week. Below are some items for sale from eBay for those of you with an interest in Yiddish.
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Yiddish Moyshe Nadir Lakht In Der Velt Arayn 2 Books | |
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US $7.95 | 1h 5m |
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Yiddish Wisdom for Parents by Kristina Swarner 2001 | |
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US $3.99 | 1h 26m |
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Born to Kvetch Yiddish Language and Culture in All of | |
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US $5.50 | 2h 23m |
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Invitation to Yiddish Manual and guide by Yudel Mark | |
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Yiddish and the Dave Clark Five is a post from: Michael Wex.com
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