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Hebrew As She Is Spoke

December 25th, 2008 · 21 Comments · Culture and Ideas

Haim Watzman
Is Hebrew the language of the prophets or the language of modern Israel? The question is symbolized by that well-known phenomenon of the new speaker of the language, fresh from her ulpan course, who sets off on a crusade to correct the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation to the benighted native speakers she encounters on [...]

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Mahmoud Darwish, Zionist Poet

August 13th, 2008 · 7 Comments · Culture and Ideas

Haim Watzman
What’s a Zionist to make of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet whose funeral today in Ramallah will be a celebration of both Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian culture?
Darwish was a refugee. His family came from the village of Birwa, near Acre, and fled to Lebanon in the wake of Israel’s War of Independence. They [...]

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Tel Aviv Ennui: Yael Hedaya’s “Accidents”

May 30th, 2008 · 2 Comments · Culture and Ideas

Yael Hedaya’s Accidents is an intriguing, maddening novel of contemporary Tel Aviv-intriguing in its astute portrayal of the relationships between its characters, maddening in the shallowness of its vision. During the weeks I spent reading it, I wanted it to end so that I could move into a different, more profound fictional world-but neither could [...]

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