Wex

Michael Wex and the Kosher Easter bunny

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!I saw it. I bought it. I ate it after Pesach and I loved it. I’d dreamed of it for years and it didn’t disappoint. A chocolate Easter bunny with a hekhsher is exactly the sort of thing that led my family out of Europe: full participation in general society without any sacrifice of Jewish integrity. A hekhsher (plural,...

Wex

Hernias in Yiddish

I’ve been lifting weights like a madman lately, trying to work off the winter’s tsholnt before bikini season hits, and so far all I’ve got is a kileh, the most-beloved Yiddish word for “hernia.” Old school Yiddish-speakers will be quick to tell you that the two afflictions that once characterized Yiddish and were apparently endemic to its speakers, are the hernia and hemorrhoids, which both enjoy...

Wex

Lacrosse at Jewish Summer Camp?

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...

Wex

The dover akher…

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...

Wex

South African Jews in Yiddish

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. “Of course,” she replied, but couldn’t tell me where the term comes...