n the 1946 film The Big Sleep, based on the Raymond Chandler mystery of the same name, Carmenâthe promiscuous, drug-addicted younger sister of Lauren Bacallâs characterâsizes up Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart, and asks him, âWhat are you, a prizefighter?â Bogart responds, âNo, Iâm a shamus.â âWhatâs a shamus?â ...
This past spring, Trayon White Sr., a Washington, DC city councilmember, sparked an outcry by blaming a late season snowfall on the Rothschilds, the famous Jewish banking dynasty, who, he explained, control âthe climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities.â ...
âMavenâ is a relatively new transplant into American English. Written references to the word begin to increase in the mid-1960s and continued to rise through the early 2000s, according to Google Ngrams, which charts wordsâ popularity in books over time. ...
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump proclaimed at a rally that Hillary Clinton âgot schlongedâ in the 2008 primaries. Schlong, when used as a noun, is a Yiddish word for penisâand a pretty vulgar one at that. But when used as a verb, is it even a word? ...
Itâs hard to escape the OMGs and LOLs of today, but donât blame millennialsâacronyms actually originated thousands of years ago with the development of the ancient Hebrew alphabet. Around the 10th century BCE, Hebrew letters emerged out of ideographic pictures and, soon after, groups of letters started to be used ...
Although such comparisons remain rare, for Jews and non-Jews the golem serves as a concept uniquely suited to expressing the fears and insecurities of the modern era. As Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in 1984, âThe golem story appears less obsolete today than it seemed one hundred years ago. After all, ...
The term âanti-Semitismâ has evolved. As scholarship on the subject grew, the available vocabulary expanded. Today, its definitionâand its boundariesâare uncertain. âAnti-Semitismâ is but one of a convoluted, interconnected web of similar wordsâincluding âanti-Judaism,â âanti-Zionism,â âJudeophobiaâ and âZionophobia.â ...
âKeep reminding yourself: This is not normal,â warned comedian John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. It was less than a week after Election Day, and the country was just beginning to process Donald Trumpâs unexpected victory. Opponents of the president-elect were scrambling to discern what had changed in a world ...
We should learn from our sages. ...
In September, Josh Marshall of the online political news outlet Talking Points Memo reached for an unexpected metaphor to express his disgust at Donald Trumpâs anti-immigration rhetoric... ...
A lexicographic tour de force, the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary, published this year by Indiana University Press, is an expedition through the layers of a language spoken by rebbes and poets, nurses and prostitutes, schoolchildren and soldiers... ...
When Academy Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow appeared on NBCâs hit show âWho Do You Think You Are?â she was delighted to discover that her paternal great-great-great grandfather, Tzvi Hirsch, was a prominent rabbi, kabbalist and purported miracle-worker in Novogrod, Poland... ...