The New Yorker faces backlash for reviewing a book that links Hebrew punctuation to colonialism and the history of Jewish migration to Israel.

Words matter. Words of truth convey values, culture, tradition. False words tear at the fabric of society, creating a chaotic biblical Tower of Babel. For believers, the world was created by Divine ...

Tammuz was a Mesopotamian fertility god, Adar may have meant gloomy and several familiar month names came from Akkadian after the Babylonian exile; rabbis later found distinctly Jewish meanings for th ...

This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives. For the past 643 consecutive ...

As I begin writing this article, I think it is important to note that I am not a Hebrew scholar. However, as a lifelong student of the Bible, which is what we are all called to be, it is important to ...

The crux of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, now a splashy Netflix miniseries, is a Hebrew word that doesn’t exist. At one ...

If you spend enough time on social media, you’re likely going to come across claims about Hebrew that will make your head spin: Hebrew is a European language. Hebrew is actually stolen Arabic. There ...

Linguists tend to imagine language as a phenomenon outside human agency, its processes, like language change and acquisition, explained by deterministic rules. Dartmouth linguist Lewis Glinert, author ...

Despite years of Jewish education, countless individuals find themselves unable to speak Hebrew with any real confidence. Over and over, I hear the same sentiment: “I spent 12 years in Jewish school, ...

Did you know that the ancient scrolls of the Torah don’t contain any vowels? Unlike English, where vowels are explicitly represented as letters (A, E, I, O, U) and are fundamental to every word, ...

One of the curiosities in “The Story of Hebrew” by Lewis Glinert (Princeton University Press) is that the author manages to write a history of the Hebrew language without using a single Hebrew letter ...

Modern Hebrew, which can now be heard everywhere on the streets of Israel, has continued to evolve since it was reintroduced as a living language. At the top of a steep winding driveway, in a hidden ...