Jewish Word | Jews of Color
While “Jews of color” is not an exclusively American term, it was born of this country’s complex interrelationship between race and identity.
Jewish Word | When the Past Is Present and the Present Is Past
We Jews are obsessed with history. From ancient to modern times, from the Flood to the Exodus to the destruction of the Temples and the exiles, from the Middle Ages to the Inquisition and the pogroms to the Holocaust to the establishment of the State of Israel, we recall and retell our history.
Jewish Word | Challah
The word “challah” made its first appearance more than 2,500 years ago.
Jewish Word | Emet
Suppose you’ve made a golem, a man-shaped figure of clay, and you want to bring it to life.
Jewish Word | Bark Mitzvah
The first known bark mitzvah took place in 1958 in Beverly Hills, California.
Jewish Word | The Wandering Jew
Every autumn, Jews all over the world read the Torah portion Lech Lecha, in which God instructs the future patriarch Abraham to abandon his native land for a promised one
Jewish Word | Is Everyone a White Supremacist?
The term, historically used to describe an adherent to the ideology of white supremacy, is now thrown around so often that it no longer is always clear what it means. That’s a dangerous trend.
Jewish Word | Israeli Elections Slogans Get Personal
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.
Jewish Word | Shamash
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.”
Jewish Word | Fake Jews
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.”
Jewish Word | Maven
“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.
Jewish Word | When a Knish Is More Than a Knish
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?