10 Yiddish Words That Everyone Must Know

By Arlene Swartzberg Weiss for jewishmag.com


CHUTZPA - Oh, come on - give me a break . every one knows what that means !

FARBLONDZSHET - Confused, Bewildered - Example: The U.S. Congress

KAYN AYNHOREH - Goodness gracious.this is one word is almost impossible to find in any other language! Years ago, people used this phase to ward off the 'evil eye'. Nowadays, however, this phase is said to protect someone or something. Example: "Since my youngest, Sophie got her driving license, she's been driving just great - 'kayn aynhoreh'.

KVETCH - To complain. . Wait a minute -- I take that back - not just to complain, but to complain bitterly!  -  Example: Leo Rosten's Joys of Yiddish lists eight different ways of 'kvetching' .so what do you want from ME?

MAVEN - The dictionary sys a 'maven' is a scholarly, clever person. The 'real meaning - and especially to us Jews - is actually a 'smart-aleck', or pompous 'know-it-all'

Example: You may not believe me, but the latest rocket ship to go into outer space is called MAVEN!! I kid you not. There must be a Jew there some place !

MESHUGGE - Craziness  -  Example - Every time Harry sees a picture of Rita Hayworth, he goes meshugge.

MISHEGOSS - Close cousin to meshugge - but usually in a sort of affectionate way.  --  Example: Eliot got so involved in playing golf it became his mishegoss. Let's just think of it as an obsession, like having to learn to dance.- even though you know you have two left feet.

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In Europe, Elites Create the Atmosphere That Allows Popular Anti-Semitism to Grow

The furor over the ‘quenelle’ salute mirrors the refusal of Olympic officials to commemorate murdered Israeli athletes

By Deborah E. Lipstadt for Tablet Magazine

Over the past few years, I have repeatedly been approached by a broad array of Jews worried about developments in Europe. They have pointed to anti-Israel protests, shootings, and the rising tide of extreme religious identification among young Muslims born and raised in the West; some worried over rumors, all false, that Britain had banned the teaching of the Holocaust. All asked, “Is this 1939 redux? Is it over—once again—for European Jews?” Recognizing their genuine fears, I have tried not to scoff, instead reassuring each that, while some of what we see is indeed disturbing, analogies to the years preceding the Holocaust are way out of line—and historically invalid, since the Holocaust was a unique episode in both human and Jewish history.

Yet some recent developments have left me unsettled. This week, a French soccer player named Nicolas Anelka sparked a firestorm by publicly giving the quenelle salute—a sort of reverse of the Nazi Sieg Heil, in which one stiffly extends the right hand towards the ground and with the left hand touches the right shoulder—after scoring a goal during a match. Created by Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a French comedian who has been repeatedly condemned and fined by French courts for his anti-Semitic remarks, it has quietly become a phenomenon in the past year: The Internet is festooned with pictures of people making the gesture. It’s been used by athletes in France, the United Kingdom, and even the United States, where San Antonio Spurs guard Tony Parker gave a public apology earlier this week after a photograph surfaced of him making the gesture with Dieudonné.

Dieudonné, who is friendly with longtime National Front leader Jean Marie Le Pen, has openly expressed his contempt for Jews, support for former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the belief that the Holocaust was a hoax. He has invited renowned Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson to appear on his show. Because Holocaust denial is a crime in France, where the comedian is based, he speaks of the “Shoananas”—a play on the words “Shoah” and “ananas,” or pineapple. One can’t be charged for poking fun at a putatively meaningless word.

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Jesus of Palestine?

We need to remember exactly what “Palestine” means

By Clifford D. May for Mosaic Magazine

The members of the American Studies Association care deeply about historical truth, which is why they protested so strenuously when, over Christmas, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas called Jesus “a Palestinian messenger.”

Actually, they didn’t. Why not? Perhaps the 5,000 members of the ASA — an old if not venerable “academic organization” — are so busy boycotting Israeli educational institutions that they have no time to object to propagandistic falsifications of history — in this case, the denial of the Jewish past in the Middle East as a not-so-subtle way of threatening the Jewish future in the region.

As war is too important to leave to generals, so scholarship is too important to leave to professors — or at least to the sizeable cohort that prioritizes moral posturing and trendy political activism over such mundane concerns as research, learning, and teaching. So let’s quickly review the historical record, with which ASA members may be unfamiliar — and which, we may assume, Abbas distorts out of enmity rather than ignorance.

In 130 A.D., about a century after the crucifixion of Jesus, there was a Jewish rebellion against Roman imperialism. Successful it was not. Simon Sebag Montefiore, in his masterful tome Jerusalem: The Biography writes that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed in battles with Roman forces and “so many Jews were enslaved that at the Hebron slave market they fetched less than a horse.”

The Roman emperor, Hadrian, was not satisfied. He determined to wipe “Judaea off the map, deliberately renaming it Palaestina, after the Jews’ ancient enemies, the Philistines.” And who were the Philistines? They were “Sea People, who originated in the Aegean” and sailed to the eastern Mediterranean, where they “conquered the coast of Canaan.”

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Tarshish: Hacksilber Hoards Pinpoint Solomon’s Silver Source

Hacksilber isotope analysis associates Biblical Tarshish with Sardinia

Noah Wiener for Mosaic Magazine

“Once every three years the fleet of ships of Tarshish used to come bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks … the king [Solomon] made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones.” – 1 Kings 10:22-27

“Tarshish did business with you out of the abundance of your great wealth; silver, iron, tin, and lead they exchanged for your wares.” – Ezekial 27:12 (Lamentation over Tyre)

In the Bible, King Hiram of Tyre supplies King Solomon with timber, craftsmen and gold for the construction of the Jerusalem Temple, and the alliance with the Phoenician ruler undoubtedly helped Solomon amass his extraordinary wealth. Biblical and other ancient texts suggest that the seafaring Phoenicians brought silver and other precious metals from the western Mediterranean in the 10th century B.C.E., the time of Hiram and Solomon, and archaeology has revealed numerous Phoenician mercantile colonies across the Mediterranean dating to the first millennium B.C.E.

Did the Phoenicians trade in the western Mediterranean before establishing these colonies? Where is Tarshish, the Biblical source of the Phoenician silver trade? A recent Hacksilber Project study published by Christine M. Thompson and Sheldon Skaggs in Internet Archaeology points to Spain and Sardinia as the Biblical world’s source of silver in the 10th century B.C.E., lending scientific credence to textual associations between Biblical Tarshish and modern Sardinia.

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