This Week
For Openers
A Yiddish Guide For Politicians
14-Efi&i?
out linow
Los An eles
he speaker of the California State Assembly
has published a 36-page booklet for the
benefit of the 90 percent of Assembly
members who are not Jewish — as well as
other Yiddishly challenged politicians.
Robert Hertzberg's "Yiddish for Assemblymembers"
contains a selection of words drawn from the mama
loshen — with examples of their possible uses in the
legislative process — as well as a brief guide to Jewish
holidays.
"I want to make sure members don't get farblondjet
when us alte kahkers of the Assembly make a megillah
about our bills," Hertzberg wrote. A sanitized transla-
tion would read, "I want to make sure members don't
get mixed up when us fussy old guys make a long
story about our bills."
In a phone interview, Hertzberg said he owed his
own Yiddish vocabulary to his grandparents, who
came to America from Latvia and Odessa, Ukraine.
Here are a couple of excerpts from the booklet:
Klutz — Clumsy person. Example: I'm such a klutz;
I smashed my finger when I banged the gavel for
order.
Mitzvah — Commandment, a meritorious act.
Example: You did a mitzvah when you passed the fam-
ily health insurance bill.
While Hertzberg's booklet signals the advance of
Yiddish in the legislative branch, its increasing use in
the judiciary was noted some years back in the Yale
Law Review. In an article titled "Lawsuit, Shmawsuit,"
Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals and UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh
noted the growing use of the word chutzpah in legal
pleadings and opinions.
"There are two possible explanations for this," the
authors wrote.
"One is that during recent years there has been a
dramatic increase in the actual amount of chutzpah in
the United States — or at least in the U.S. legal sys-
tem.
But, they wrote, "The more likely explanation is
that Yiddish is quickly supplanting Latin as the spice
in American legal argot."E
—Tom Tugend/ITA
By Goldfein
D
uring the summer, travelers visit Rehoboth Beach,
Del., or Mizpah, N.J. What are the biblical connec-
tions of these names?
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SUEQUI qvcIz. zpv FEJsi wapotu ul sE ipi sE samidps aLIQIDLIE
UT Alp E `10A0Lp)i Joj paLLIELI SI LIDEDq ipoqoLigu :.1.901SITV
Yiddish Limericks
I)
GRAPERWZ
02001
A mother once told her son, Scott,
"My marriage demands weren't a lot.
I said I'd be willin'
If he'd layg tefillin,*
And that's why your dad tied the knot."
— Martha Jo Fleischmann
- don phylacteries for prayer
Quotables
"People here don't want to remember. You can see it in their
faces that they are embarrassed that nothing more was done
to help the Jews."
— Shoah survivor/lecturer Hana Greenfield, 75, of Israel on the
mood in the Czech Republic village of Kolin, where 1,000 Jews
were sent by train to German death camps in Poland after
Hitler's chief SS official in Prague, Reinhard Heydrich, was
assassinated, as quoted by JTA.
"I'm for anything that creatively reinvents and infuses
Judaism with meaning, whether that is a new musical service
or the use of the arts. Harnessing technology to bring this
experiential virtual reality world, to bring people into Jewish
spiritual-reality, is a wonderful goal."
— Richard Gans, artist-in-residence at Digital Media Center
for the Arts in New Haven and creator of the patented Gans' Life
Imaging Projection System, hoping to combine the technology
with Jewish artistic expression, as quoted in the Connecticut
Jewish Ledger.
BY Mendel
I APPEAL TO JOO FOR
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SOURCE BEHIND ALL
This WEEK'S seRmok31 CREATIVE (DEAS!
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TENDER
271 WEST MAPLE
DOWNTOWN BIRMINGHAM
248.258.0212
Monday-Saturday 10-6
Thursday 10-9
6/29
2001
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