"I don't want a niche – I want an empire!" – Michael Wex, Globe and Mail
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Hope you all had a great holiday!
The list of what to send to camp with my daughter arrived this week. They want her to bring a lacrosse stick.
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. (more...)
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. (more...)
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. (more...)
After a lecture I recently delivered about the importance of a familiarity with traditional Jewish texts and religious practices to a proper understanding of Yiddish, I was beset by a number of doubters. Noticing that one of my interlocutors had a South African accent, I asked her if she was familiar with the term khateysim. (more...)
