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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Nancy Drew and the Case of the Politically Incorrect Children’s Books

The young sleuth’s early mysteries were racist and anti-Semitic. Can problematic vintage texts still be valuable for kids?

By Marjorie Ingall for Tablet Magazine

When I was 10, I loved the The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries on TV. My first seditious Jewish act was playing hooky from a Holocaust memorial service, pretending to be sick so I could stay home and watch a rerun (a rerun!) of an episode in which Shaun Cassidy’s shirt was unbuttoned.

But I turned up my nose at the Hardy Boys books. I was a Nancy Drew girl, all the way. In print, when not being played by the floppy-haired 1970s equivalent of One Direction, the Hardy Boys were boring as Weetabix. They were upright Boy Scouts, doing what boys were supposed to do. Nancy, on the other hand, was singular. If Harry Potter was The Boy Who Lived, Nancy was The Girl Who Dared. She was brave, rash, fierce. She had a snazzy car. She solved crimes that flummoxed the cops, snuck around in old abandoned houses, got locked in closets by bad guys … and she always kept her cool. Her mom had died when she was little, but her dad adored and trusted her and gave her free rein to save others. She was in charge, not her boyfriend, Ned Nickerson. She was beautiful, but she wasn’t an object. She was a doer.

Little did I know Nancy Drew had such a troubled past.

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More than 200 million Nancy Drew books have been sold in the United States since their debut in 1930. Nancy has starred in numerous movies and updated reboots, graphic novels, and electronic games. Earlier this year, when Ruth Bader Ginsberg was asked who her heroes were, she said, “I suppose mine was Nancy Drew, because she was a girl who was out there doing her work and dominating her boyfriend.” (Back in 2010, she said more seriously, “I think that most girls who grew up when I did were very fond of the Nancy Drew series. Not because they were well-written—they weren’t—but because this was a girl who was an adventurer, who could think for herself, who was the dominant person in her relationship with her young boyfriend. So, the Nancy Drew series made girls feel good, that they could be achievers and they didn’t have to take a back seat or be wallflowers.”)

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Britain’s refusal to defend Christians in the Middle East is shameful

Ed West for Mosaic Magazine

I have an ebook published called The Silence of Our Friends, on the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and the apathy of the West about this tragic and historic event. (A link will appear at the top of this page – in the meantime please spread the word.)

I say apathy, but lots of people are concerned, and in the past year and a half such books as Christianophobia, Persecuted and The Global War on Christians have tackled worldwide persecution; there has also been increasing awareness following violence in Syria and Egypt over the summer, and last month Baroness Warsi became the first minister to raise the subject.

Not that the British Government will actually do anything, as was made clear last week when Foreign Office Minister Mark Simmonds told MPs that Britain will not defend persecuted Christians. Responding to backbenchers who said that Christians were being singled out for attack, the minister said that all groups were suffering under intolerant regimes, a logic Alan Johnson of the Telegraph calls ‘universalise-to-minimise’. The less you specifically focus on an issue, the easier it is to ignore.

Simmonds stated that ‘our response to the persecution of Christians should not be sectarian. We should not be standing up for … Christians in particular, we should be supporting the right to freedom of religion.’

He also argued that ‘there is a risk of isolating them from the wider populations, identifying them as something of a fifth column and even exacerbating the persecution’, which has been the line used by Britain and America for many years.

Taking aside the issue of ‘freedom of religion’, which is interpreted very differently by the Foreign Office’s friends in the Organisation of the Islamic Conferences to how it is by westerners, this argument doesn’t really stand up.

Islamists see Christians as a fifth column, whatever the West does, because that’s their mindset. Anti-Islamist Muslims meanwhile have an active personal interest in preventing Christian persecution and expulsion, since it will make life worse for them too.

But Muslims of all shades, who see western Christian leaders abandoning Christian minorities before discriminatory laws and state-inspired violence, aren’t going to think ‘oh wonderful, the British don’t believe in discrimination’; they are going to think that these people have no faith, no courage and no decency – in short, they’re decadent. And they would not be wrong.

The British and Americans have been doing this ‘let’s not be seen to take sides’ act since the invasion of Iraq. When the bombing of churches escalated in 2004, and when the Baghdad government denied basic services to Christian villages, religious freedom advocates like Nina Shea pressed the Americans to do something.

As Shea told me, ‘A number of us tried to bring it to their attention, and basically Condi Rice told me that the US just did not want to appear sectarian… Yet of course they removed a Sunni government and helped the Shia, and then championed Sunni appointments because they didn’t want Sunnis left out. But they said nothing about smaller, less violent minority religions, they just didn’t count.’ That has been repeated with US policy towards Egypt.

What a ‘non-sectarian policy’ therefore entails is discrimination in favour of the strongest and most aggressive groups. Iraq’s pre-war Christian population of 1 million has now fallen to 150,000, many of them elderly; still, the Foreign Office tells us, this issue is being taken very seriously and the issue is raised through the appropriate channels etc etc.

There’s an old saying attributed to the Arabs – better to be the enemy of the English, for that way they will buy you, for if you are their friends they will most certainly sell you. In its foreign policy, Albion remains as perfidious as ever.

Sir Nicholas Winton

Nicholas Winton is known for organising the rescue of 669 Czech children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia during the 9 months before war broke out in
1939. The story became known to the public in 1988 when it featured on That’s Life, a BBC TV programme hosted by Esther Rantzen. In 2003 he was
knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for Services to Humanity for this work. There are many websites which tell this story in detail.

This site is maintained by the family of Sir Nicholas to give information about his recent activities and to facilitate contact.  Please visit and spread the word.