I’ll soon be coming on five years of Israelihood, and of course every day I’ve added new academic and obscure Hebrew to my arsenal. But expanding vocabulary is more than just learning new words; it’s about knowing what even the most familiar words mean in new contexts.
For instance: being a mom.
Here is part of a growing [...]
I always thought when it came to my childbirth experience here in Israel, I’d end up automatically speaking, pleading and moaning in my native tongue. Despite Israeli hospital staff. I figured they probably get that all the time, and who doesn’t speak English in the medical field?
Well… it didn’t happen that way. I birthed my [...]
I’m sure someone already realized this and mentioned it… but…
I learned today that with Barack Obama in the White House, and Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, the Americans will be led by… thunder (רעם - Rahm) and lightning (ברק - Barack).
Hmm.
I’m sitting on my couch and I hear a scratch at the door. My first thought is, did a jackal from the forest across the street come all the way upstairs to haunt me?
My second thought is, it does, however, sound like a dog.
After peeping through the door, I realized it was a dog. [...]
Here’s how you know you’ve developed as a student over years of Israeli grad school:
First semester of Israeli grad school, three long years ago, you were told to write an end-of-term paper using the proper guidelines of the university’s thesis policy. You scrambled to find it after being told it was ’somewhere on the website.’
After [...]
I’m in New York City for the next three weeks.
On one stretch, between my office on 35th to the bus on 42nd, I hear not one - not two - but three Hebrew conversations.
I get on the bus, there’s a six pack of hard lemonade in my seat; former passenger leftovers. I drop everything and [...]
I went for an interview today for an internship possibility for my conflict management course. Details about the interview and the internship itself aside… I walked away from the experience with a totally separate outlook.
After we established that I could give the internship a shot - it’s an intense task, in short organizing mediators and [...]
Isn’t it kind of funny that different cultures - aside from having different foods, traditions and rituals - also have different spam?
Once in a while I glance over my spam folder and usually about 40% of the subject lines are in Hebrew. The Israeli spam is also different because it seems to cover a wider [...]
In the past week I have read articles and received emails concerning the strike-affected academic schedule and peppered among all of them is the word בכיר (bachir), meaning ’senior’, as in ’senior professor’.
Only senior professors are striking, because they are the ones being affected by the paycheck problems. Other professors get paid according to a [...]
I have good days and bad days. Lately they’ve been bad, but today is alright. I’m referring specifically to that still-beating juk I call: “speaking Hebrew without a complex.”
I made a pact with myself last week to only email my Bar Ilan professors in Hebrew from now on. Writing in Hebrew has never been a [...]