opinion
Six Jewish Words No Journalist
Can Live Without
BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
hilip Roth’s character Alexander Portnoy
captured the insecurity of second-generation
immigrants in two priceless sentences.

“I was asked by the teacher one day to identify
a picture of what I knew perfectly well my mother
referred to as a ‘spatula,’” Portnoy complains. “But
for the life of me I could not think of the word in
English.” The joke is about a child of immigrants whose
parents mix vocabulary from the Old Country into
their everyday English, and pity the kid who has
to figure out which is which. My parents weren’t
immigrants, but I feel his pain. When I was grow-
ing up the few Yiddish words that sprinkled their
vocabulary had essentially entered the English
dictionary. I developed my “Jewish” vocabulary
later in life, after time spent in Israel, classrooms,
synagogues and in a series of Jewish workspaces.

I’m Portnoy with a difference: I know which
words are Yiddish and Hebrew, but I can’t think of
the words in English that do as good a job.

This comes up in my work at a Jewish media
company. Journalism has its own specialized
vocabulary, with talk of “ledes” and “nut grafs,”
“sigs” and “kickers.” But there are also Jewish
words for which there are no satisfactory substi-
tutes in the newsroom.

Consider “nafke minah,” a Talmudic phrase that
means something like, “What is the practical dif-
ference?” It’s a useful tool for examining in what
ways the thing you are writing about is fresh or
different from some other thing, or if it advances a
developing story. It’s a close cousin of “hiddush”
(or “chidush,“ not to be confused with kiddush),
Hebrew for a fresh insight. If something doesn’t
pass the nafke minah or hiddush test, it may not
be news.

Similarly, “tachlis” (“tachlit” in Modern Hebrew)
is indispensable in describing the main or opera-
tive point of something. Think of “brass tacks” or
“bottom line” in English. I want to use the word
whenever I am reading a story with a meandering
opening and am restless to get to the main point,
or if I suspect a source is dancing around a sub-
ject. It’s the difference between an organization
saying “It is our goal to actualize new modalities
for young Jews to engage in lasting relationships”
and “We are a dating app.”
“Pshat” (rhymes with spot) is the plain meaning
of something, stripped of “drash” (rhymes with
“wash”), or interpretation. It’s essentially the who,
what, where and when without the why. Reporters
18 APRIL 14, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
can be itchy to get to the interpretation of a news
event; editors can be cranky in demanding that
they first stick to the facts. Just give me the pshat.

(Not that I am allergic to drash: It is also the role of
journalists to interpret an event or phenomenon
for the reader, once they have lined up the facts.)
“Nisht ahin nisht aher” is a Yiddish phrase my
father used, meaning “neither here nor there,” or
maybe, “neither fish nor fowl.” To me it describes
a piece of writing that doesn’t know yet what it
wants to be. Is this a profile of a bagel-maker or
a story about the inexplicable popularity of the
cinnamon raisin variety?
I polled my colleagues for the Jewish vocabu-
lary they either use only in Jewish settings, or wish
they could use outside the bubble. There were
the untranslatable usual suspects like “davka”
and “mamash” and “stam” and that Swiss Army
knife of interjections, “nu.”
Which is not to suggest that my colleagues share
a vocabulary or frames of reference, Jewish or
otherwise. Hebrew Union College’s Sarah Bunin
Benor studies the language of contemporary
American Jews and has written about the ways
their vocabulary tracks with their Jewish biog-
raphies: the older Jews steeped in Yiddishisms,
younger Jews who have brought more Hebrew
into the Jewish-English vocabulary, devout Jews
who speak a Hebrew/Yiddish/Aramaic patois
known as Yeshivish. There are proud Jews who
have very little “Jewish” in their language and
“insiders,” like me, who slip in and out of different
Jewish skins depending on their audience.

And Benor’s latest project, tracking historical
and living Jewish languages, demonstrates the
linguistic diversity of the Jews beyond Ashkenazi
Europe. (Benor’s side project, the indispensable
Jewish-English Lexicon, introduced me to the
Ladino gesundheit: “Bivas, kreskas, enfloreskas!”
[“Live, grow, thrive!”])
Because of that variety of experiences and influ-
ences, I am hesitant to inflict my Jewish vocabulary
on my colleagues – or, for that matter, on our read-
ers. It is a challenge for anyone working in ethnic or
specialized media: How much jargon do you use?
In our case, do we use or need to explain words
like shul, shiva, haredi or havurah? Is too much
untranslated and unexplained specialty language
just one more barrier to readers accessing not just
our Jewish news sites but Jewish life as a whole?
Or, if you get too “explainy,” do you sacrifice
your own credibility — and perhaps come off as
patronizing to your readers?
The trick is hitting on a vocabulary that flatters
the intelligence of readers without leaving them
behind or on the outside — which, I might add,
should probably be the guiding principle of any
journalism enterprise, and any Jewish organiza-
tion or institution that wants to remain relevant.

Otherwise, bishvil ma litroakh? JE
Andrew Silow- Carroll is editor-in-chief of The New
York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency.

Or Hiltch/Flickr Commons
P



opinion
BY RUTHIE BLUM
Fear Terrorism, Not the Israelis
Defending Against it
Lobro78 / iStock / Getty Images Plus
A t a Tel Aviv café on April 11, I overheard a couple
talking about the terrorist surge responsible for
the fact that the normally packed establishment was
as relatively empty as the adjacent Carmel Market.

On such a beautiful day, and with Passover
fast approaching, both venues ought to have
been teeming with Israelis taking a time out from
grocery shopping to sip espresso in the sun.

But the shooting spree on April 7 at one of the
White City’s popular pubs, as well as other deadly
attacks by Palestinians and like-minded Arab
Israelis, has people on edge.

This makes perfect sense. Less logical was the
conclusion that the husband and wife reached
about the perilous situation.

In their view, the greatest threat to their safety
at the moment is not a potential assault from res-
idents of the Palestinian Authority or their Arab-
Israeli brethren. The danger lies, rather, in the
slippery trigger fingers of Israeli security forces
and members of the general public in possession
of firearms.

The conversation turned to Prime Minister
Naftali Bennett’s recent call on licensed gun
owners to carry their weapons. That this directive
came on the heels of heroic acts by armed civil-
ians against terrorists on a rampage didn’t enter
the discussion.

They cited two examples, both of which occurred
on April 10, to justify their fears. The first involved
the shooting to death of an unarmed Palestinian
woman in the town of Husan. The second was the
killing of a Jewish-Israeli man at an intersection
near Ashkelon.

It’s not clear whether the spouses had bothered
to learn the details of each case. Their unified
position, which they indicated by nodding and
sighing at each other’s comments, was that the
specifics were irrelevant.

Such an attitude, though far less rampant in
Israel than the far-left would have one believe,
provides fodder for the foreign press. This is not
to say that publications like The Guardian and The
New York Times need any help crafting headlines
and concocting news stories that completely dis-
tort reality. But it sheds light on the tendency of
Israeli liberals, like their counterparts abroad, to
place blame where it doesn’t belong.

Unable, as an eavesdropper, to set the record
straight in real time, I am taking the opportunity
to do so here for anyone who has a similarly false
sense of the above events.

Let’s start with the first instance, which took
place at a makeshift checkpoint. Widowed moth-
er-of-six Ghada Ibrahim Ali Sabateen charged
at Israel Defense Forces soldiers in a suspicious
manner and refused their order to halt. Following
standard procedure, the soldiers first shot in the
air. When Sabateen ignored the command, they
shot her in the leg.

As soon as she fell to the ground, the soldiers
administered first aid and called an ambulance.

Palestinian medics quickly arrived and rushed
her to the Al-Hussein Governmental Hospital in
nearby Beit Jala, where she died of blood loss
from a torn artery in her thigh.

If anything, this incident illustrates the care that
the IDF troops took to avoid killing Sabateen,
whose behavior indicated that she was seeking
to die that afternoon as a “martyr,” rather than by
suicide due to deep emotional problems. Now her
family is eligible for a hefty monthly stipend from
the P.A.

The second tragedy in question was equally
unavoidable. Though it would subsequently
emerge that the victim was not a terrorist, but
rather a patient who had escaped from an institu-
tion for the mentally ill, his death wasn’t the result
of some frivolous error.

In the first place, he was wearing pants resem-
bling military fatigues and waving what later turned
out to be a toy pistol. Secondly, he assaulted a
female IDF soldier at a bus stop and grabbed her
rifle, spurring witnesses on the scene to shout,
“Terrorist! Terrorist!”
At this moment, IDF Binyamin Brigade
Commander Col. Eliav Elbaz happened by and
called out in Arabic to the perpetrator to put down
the weapon. It was only after the man ignored the
command and kept running that Elbaz shot him
dead. Even if the above IDF actions hadn’t been
taken under the current circumstances, with a
Ramadan-spurred terror wave that claimed the
lives of 14 innocents in the space of less than
three weeks, they would have been completely
justified. Contrary to the aspersions cast by exter-
nal or internal ill-wishers, Israelis are far from
trigger-happy. Indeed, it’s the jihadists who should be feared,
not the men and women in uniform — or jeans —
defending against them. JE
Ruthie Blum is an Israel-based journalist and
author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter,
Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.’ ”
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