Jewish Word // Philistine
How Philistine Became a Dirty Word
by Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil
It’s a story nearly everyone knows: The young shepherd boy uses nothing but his wits and a slingshot...
Jewish Word / Sechel
The (Jewish) Sixth Sense
By George E. Johnson
In his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, Marlon Brando writes at length about the transformative role Jews played in his...
Jewish Word | Ghetto
Venice, Harlem and Beyond
There are few words that so acutely symbolize discrimination as “ghetto.” It was coined in Venice in 1516 to refer to a...
Jewish Word | Moser
The Jewish Snitch
by Sala Levin
Earlier this year, Nechemya Weberman, a member of the Hasidic Satmar community in New York, was sentenced to 103 years in...
Jewish Word | Tsuris
Nobody Knows the Tsuris I’ve Seen…
“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” laments an African-American spiritual. In Yiddish, this feeling is encapsulated by the word tsuris—variously...
Jewish Word | The God Gene
Finding Faith in DNA
Why do some people believe in God, while others don’t? Is it a person’s choice, the result of upbringing or simply divine...
Proud and Prickly with a Soft Heart
Muscular. Courageous. Bronzed. The stereotype of the sun-kissed sabra is Ari ben Canaan, as played by actor Paul Newman in the 1960 movie Exodus. The word sabra stems from the name of the prickly pear cactus—tzabar in Hebrew and sabr in Arabic—whose thick thorny skin covers a sweet and succulent soft flesh. An affectionate metaphor, it describes native-born Israelis whose rough and impertinent manners hide their good hearts and sensitive souls.