Graffiti! The armpit of culture.

The bus I rode home in tonight was the most graffiti'd I'd ever seen, including such gems as

I AM AN DRUG ADICCT AND I AM PROUD

SXE = LIFE, DXA = DEATH

and
Jonathan Pollard is a Zionist dog (this last one in Hebrew)

Most of them were sports related:

Hapo'al is a whore

Maccabbi Haifa is a whore

Maccabbi TA is a whore

... all written by one guy, presumably a fan of Beitar Jerusalem (soccer).

But then at a certain point the artist (clearly the same one) goes with a more political (well, racist) message.

Gaza is a whore

and
A Jew is a spirit
An Arab is a son of a whore
Death to Arabs!

Sports loyalty and nationalism? It seems plausible that they spring from the same graffiti-ing place inside of us.

By the way, "spirit" (נשמה) colloquially means "pretty decent person" and you can use it to address people with cool respect, in much the way you'd use "dude" or "man" in English. The first two lines of that little triplet rhyme, and have a /x/x/x/ prosodic meter, so that they practically chant themselves.

On the way to the bus, I saw (in English)

HOMOSEXUALS IS DANGEROUS FOR CHILDREN

Please take a moment to appreciate the artist's heartwarming concern for the well-being of children. Which reminds me, I have two sets of pride-march photos to post. I'll put them on the intenet just as soon as I get them off my camera!

And just to avoid being too depressing, I'll end with the night's cutest bus graffito, which was written close to the one that links the mysterious mysterious entities SXE and DXA to life and death. It laments the tragedy of unrecognized generosity:

I brought you a shnitzel but you did not want it.

שדות מוקשים סמנטים

(continued from here)

Political correctness is a hot topic here in the Ulpan. By my lights, it’s incredibly important to spend class time developing a politically-sensitive ear, because Hebrew's ֿsemantic [mine]field is studded with complicated and potentially hurtful connotations.

For example, people here use two different words for Palestineans: “falestinim” and “falestinayim.” I’ve heard that among younger Hebrew speakers, the first pronunciation connotes support for the Palestinian people, whereas the second pronunciation is either neutral or negative in connotation. The city-name of Haifa does a similar sort of thing. Some speakers use the original Arabic pronunciation (which sounds very close to the English). Others use the Hebrew-ified version: “chey-fa.” You can probably guess what pragmatic payloads those pronunciations tow.

Students in advanced Ulpan classes need to learn able to control the allegiances expressed by our word choices. But it’s not always clear how to do so. Sometimes my American political awareness serves me well: I have no problem saying מאיותגר (challenged) instead of מפגר (retarded) — and, indeed, avoiding both of them and using a more specific word if I can.

But often enough, my political conscience seems to misfire. For example, Hebrew uses adjectives that express group membership as singular nouns to refer to individual people — “that Sephardic” — and as plural nouns to refer to groups — “those Filipinos.” In English, I would absolutely never use an expression like “that Black,” or “those gays.” In Hebrew, even conscientious leftists seem to regard those expressions as wholly unproblematic — just like “that Muslim” or “those Americans.” (And even there, I prefer “that Muslim guy” or “those American tourists.”)

It gets worse. “Those Filipinos” are only sometimes an ethnic group. Hebrew also uses “Filipino” to refer to anyone who takes care of elderly people in private homes, regardless of their race. Apparently, an overwhelming majority of Filipino residents of Israel work in those sorts of caretaking jobs, and conversely, occupants of those jobs are overwhelmingly of Philippine descent. Modern Hebrew has evidently integrated that trend right into the lexicon. Problematic? (!)

Here's another example. I asked one of my cousins how to say “queer” in Hebrew. His first suggestion was הומו (“homo”) — a word that leaves out most of the queer spectrum, especially when you consider that only men can be “homo-im” here. Then he suggested LGBT. (In Hebrew, that comes out as a pronounceable acronym: להב"ט (“lahabt”). But it still doesn't include plenty of the gender identities and sexual identities included under the queer umbrella. And what's more, it doesn't do well as a label for an individual. It makes sense to talk about a lahabt movement or march or support group, but an individual can only be הומו, לסבית, טרנס/ית או ביסקסואל/ית.

And that doesn't even begin to touch the issues arising from Hebrew's gendered grammar, or the taxonomic mess of its racial/ethnic/national terminology. More on that tomorrow.

תקינות פוליטית

Alongside regular Hebrew classes, students in the advanced levels of Ulpan are required to take an additional course called “Textim,” where we read and discuss longer texts on some particular topic. I signed up for Textim in political science, which means that alongside everyday phrases like “prescriptive Hebrew grammar” (עברית תקנית), “personality cult” (פולחן אישיות) and “blood libel” (עלילת דם), I’m learning how to say “NGO” (ארגון לא ממשלתי) and “multilateral agreement” (אמנה).

Incidentally, my baby cousin Alma says “multilateral agreement” instead of “tomato.” It's easier to pronounce!

In Textim today, we talked about the two different meanings of the word להכיר, “to recognize.” Just as in English...

• you can recognize a person. Hebrew expresses this meaning by using להכיר with the direct-object marker, את.
• or, you can recognize the legitimacy of a claim, a governing body, or a movement. In Hebrew, you’d use להכיר with “in,” -ב.

“Can anyone give me an example?” the teacher asked. No one spoke up, so he suggested, “you can say, the state of Massachusetts recognizes in homosexual marriages. Or, the United States recognizes in China’s government.”
Then a student from South Africa piped up with, “the Palestinians don't recognize in Israel’s legitimacy?”
He winced and then smiled. “Eh, no. Say Hamas instead — you’ll have said something true.”
The girl answered, “Oh, excuse me. That was —” she switched to English “politically incorrect.”
“No.” he said. “It’s not politically incorrect, it’s factually incorrect. Let’s move on.”

ARRIVED SAFELY!

Here I am! (can you see the jetlag in my eyes?)

The flight was sleepless, but my neighbor was a nice Israeli man who said that my Hebrew is fantastic (but that I should say anatzel et hahisdamnut — "take advantage of this opportunity" — instead of ecach et hahisdamnut — "take this opportunity," as in English.)

Anyway — we just had dinner at my grandmother's house, with almost everyone. Kisses, rejoicing, hora NTBG-im,* hora jetlagim, etc.

(lyrics, translated)

*see WWZ's explanation & commentary on "NTBG" as an abbreviation for Ben Gurion Airport, here.

Tomorrow:
The Israel Museum
The Kotel
The Old City
Mt. Scopus
Talpiot
Armon haNatziv in Ramat Rachel
Jerusalem downtown
for dinner, Steikiat Chatzot (Midnight Steakhouse?) for me'orav (cat meat??)

MUCH MORE SOON!

desert island books

The suitcases are filling up, and I still haven't touched my bookshelves. Since I'll have internet access and borrowing privileges at HUJI, I have every reason to minimize my book-transporting. My goal is to bring no more than five books. But which five?

One book that's coming with me is שבע מידות רעות by מאיה ערד (Sheva Midot Ra'ot, or Seven Sins, by Maya Arad). This is the Israeli novel I've been trying to slog through this summer. (The slogging has been so slow that I've put it down to read two other books before even getting as far as page 15. Especially unimpressive given that the book starts on page 11. But I'm trying!)

A second book I'm probably bringing is Contractarianism/Contractualism, a collection of essays edited by Stephen Darwall. I just need to check whether those articles are available online.

And I also want to bring my bilingual book of poems by Yehuda Amichai, if I can squeeze it in.

So that leaves me with two or three more book-shaped slots in my luggage. Some candidates:

• Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
• The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard
• Emotional Reason, Bennett Helm
• The Rationality of Emotion, Ronald de Sousa
• Practical Reason and Norms, Joseph Raz
• The Morality of Freedom, Joseph Raz
• Human Agency and Language, Charles Taylor
• Games of Strategy, eds. Dixit and Skeath (so huge, it should count as two books)

Before you go judging me for my selection of desert island books, I should mention that this list has already been pared down. I've eliminated all the books that I would have brought purely as comfort-objects: books that aren't related to Israel or to my research in any way, but that I just want to have around.

What I need to do next is find my way to the HUJI library and the Library of the Knesset websites, to check which of these books will be available to me in Israel. There is reason to be pessimistic: Judy tells me that HUJI's library system lost some funding battles, leaving it unable to stack its shelves adequately. Furthermore, for some of these books, library copies won't do me much good, since what I really need is the notes in the margins of my well-loved copies.

(3 days and 5 hours left.)

ETA: Fellow fellowshipper Steve's response at Blog For No One.

הערות שוליים

In just over a month, I'll arrive in Israel. I'll spend two weeks with my family at Kinneret¹, and then I'll move in with my grandmother and enroll in Ulpan² from August 6th to September 25th. The semester starts on November 2nd.³ [ETA: I had my itinerary all wrong. I'll post an update soon.]

Right now it is 9:05 p.m. in Jerusalem. At HUJI's⁴ Institute for Advanced Studies, two floors below the Center for the Study of Rationality⁵, Joseph Raz⁶ is approaching the podium to give a talk on "The Guise of the Good," kicking off an international conference on metaethics.

But I'm in the US for 31 more days. Eizo fashla! ⁷

---

¹ Kinneret is the Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee. Kinor means violin; the lake is called Kinneret because it's shaped kind of like a violin. See? →
The words "Kinneret" and "Kinor" have the same shoresh (three-letter root): KNR. More on this soon; Hebrew morphology gets a post of its own.

² An ulpan is an intensive, immersive Hebrew school. Ulpanim are one of Israel's main ways of absorbing and assimilating of its new immigrants. The one I'll be attending is run by the Rothberg International School (RIS) at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (HUJI), so I expect there to be some study-abroad American undergrads there. But I'm hoping to meet students and immigrants from elsewhere, too.

³ The school year always starts much later in Israel than it does here, but this year it's pushed back a little extra because of a 90-day higher-ed strike last fall, which delayed the beginning of their fall semester until January 20th. Their spring semester began during our final exam week, and won't end until August 4th.)

⁴ HUJI is short for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem Israel: my host institution! They pronounce it ['hu.dʒi], except that [dʒ] is not a permissible onset in Hebrew, so sometimes it's pronounced ['hu.ʒi]/['hud.ʒi]. (Adorable!)

⁵ The Center for the Study of Rationality is my academic home next year. It's a multidisciplinary association of scholars (economists, psychologists, biologists, mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, academic lawyers, ed. theorists, academic lawyers, and philosophers) working on problems associated with the method and application of game theory. It's housed on HUJI's Givat Ram campus, in the third floor of the very-pretty Feldman building. The first two floors belong to the Institute for Advanced Studies.

⁶ Raz an Israeli expat and one of the most important philosophers — if not the most important — in the field of practical reason. He's also one of the philosophers I got the most exposure to as an undergrad, because my thesis adviser is a good friend of his and a loyal adherent. Getting to hear him give this lecture would have been such a תענוג for me.

⁷ My Hebrew-English dictionary translates fashla (פשלה) as "mistake" or "fuck-up." But that's not exactly right. In this case, no one made a mistake; things just hammered out in a disappointing way. It's still a fashla because I narrowly missed out on something awesome.
Incidentally, Esperanto has a stem with a similar meaning: fushi means bungle or fuck up, which is only the at-fault meaning, but fushita means "spoiled" (which may be no one's fault) and fushkontakto means short circuit. Which goes to show, maybe Zamenhof didn't completely forget about the Semitic languages?