In 2008, a group of Jewish Democratic political operatives had an idea: If young Jewish voters traveled to Florida, they could convince their hesitant grandparents to vote for Barack Obama, thus ensuring a win in the vital swing state.
Comedian Kevin Hart was bumped from hosting the 2019 Oscars for years-old homophobic tweets.
In Chaim Potok’s 1969 novel The Promise, sequel to the better-known The Chosen, there’s a scene that piercingly illustrates the Jewish legal emphasis on saving a life.
As Devorah Halberstam, a prominent local activist, drives through Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood in her white 2017 Acura, she grows increasingly animated.
As Israeli elections near, Moment looks at the history of political slogans in the country’s elections. From Mapai to Rabin, Netanyahu and Benny Gantz.
n the 1946 film The Big Sleep, based on the Raymond Chandler mystery of the same name, Carmen—the promiscuous, drug-addicted younger sister of Lauren Bacall’s character—sizes up Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart, and asks him, “What are you, a prizefighter?” Bogart responds, “No, I’m a shamus.” “What’s a shamus?” she inquires. “It’s a private detective,” he answers. Yes, Bogart is using the Yiddish version—more popularly spelled “shammes”—of the Hebrew word, “shamash.”
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 “the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities.”
“Maven” 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 words’ popularity in books over time.
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump proclaimed at a rally that Hillary Clinton “got schlonged” in the 2008 primaries. Schlong, when used as a noun, is a Yiddish word for penis—and a pretty vulgar one at that. But when used as a verb, is it even a word?
It’s hard to escape the OMGs and LOLs of today, but don’t blame millennials—acronyms 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 in place of frequently recurring words.
