Hillel Smith, “Who Brings Forth Bread from the Land” (2016) (image courtesy Brandeis University Press) “A beautiful Hebrew letter, as I understand it, needs to have not only surface beauty but also an ...

Spoken by millions of Jews in Israel and around the world today, Hebrew was “literally nobody’s mother tongue” at some point of time in medieval history. Interestingly, Hebrew was a regular spoken ...

In the 1980s, the king of minimalist fiction, Raymond Carver, published a story titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Both the story and the title have so permeated literary culture ...

Linguists tend to imagine language as a phenomenon outside human agency, its processes, like language change and acquisition, explained by deterministic rules. Dartmouth linguist Lewis Glinert, author ...

Professor Gershon Galil of the department of biblical studies at the University of Haifa has deciphered an inscription dating from the 10th century BCE (the period of King David's reign), and has ...

Did you know that the ancient scrolls of the Torah don’t contain any vowels? Unlike English, where vowels are explicitly represented as letters (A, E, I, O, U) and are fundamental to every word, ...

One of the curiosities in “The Story of Hebrew” by Lewis Glinert (Princeton University Press) is that the author manages to write a history of the Hebrew language without using a single Hebrew letter ...

This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives. For the past 643 consecutive ...

53% of Arabs rated their Hebrew as “good” to “very good,” compared to 91% of Jewish-Israelis, according to the survey. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics released results of a 2020 survey on the ...

I'm sure you can think of words that come from Hebrew or Yiddish — religious words like rabbi and torah, food words like bagel and latke, cultural words like chutzpah and verklempt. But there's a very ...

Gal Gadot schools us in Hebrew slang. From "ma ani, ez?" to "tachles," Gal will leave you saying "ores" after this episode of Slang School. This is an easy one. It says [speaks Hebrew]. [speaks Hebrew ...