Artificial intelligence (bina milahutit) came in second place, while hope (tikva) came in third.

By Pesach Benson, TPS

In solidarity with freed hostages and evacuated families returning to their homes, Israelis selected the word “homecoming” (habaita in Hebrew), the Hebrew Language Academy announced Thursday.

“In the context of the past year, the word home symbolizes, in the eyes of many, the return of the abducted to their homes — after two years of threats, pain, and anticipation.

Throughout this period, the word has risen again and again in public discourse, and it has even moved hearts in a song made for one of the symbols of struggle and expectation.

It also represents the return (and the aspiration for return) to the [Gaza border area] communities and the northern communities,” the Academy said.

“Artificial intelligence” (bina milahutit) came in second place, while hope (tikva) came in third.

More than 125,000 Israelis were forced to leave their homes near the Gaza and Lebanon borders, while 11,000 more had to evacuate during 12 days of Iranian missile barrages in June.

Around 1,200 people were killed, and 252 Israelis and foreigners were taken captive by Hamas during the October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel.

Most were freed in a series of exchanges with Hamas as part of a ceasefire, though soldiers recovered the remains of others in Gaza. The body of Israeli Police Master Sgt. Ran Gvili remains in Gaza.

The academy announces its annual word of the year on the Hebrew birthday of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a linguist who was the driving force behind reviving Hebrew as a modern spoken language.

Born in present-day Belarus in 1858, he moved to Israel in 1881. Living in Jerusalem, he wrote the first dictionary of modern Hebrew and published a Hebrew-language newspaper.

His initiative was controversial, with many people believing that using Hebrew for everyday conversation profaned the language.

Ben-Yehuda died of tuberculosis in 1922.

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The HonestReporting watchdog accused the paper of antisemitism.

By JNS

The New York Times published an opinion piece this week suggesting that the millennia-old Hebrew language represents “far-right Israeli militarism,” drawing ire from Jewish organizations and advocacy groups.

Titled “Yiddish Is Having a Moment,” the Sept. 2 essay by Ilan Stavans focused on the “miraculous” survival of Yiddish, once the vernacular of Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe.

Stavans wrote in part: “Hebrew, which officially became the national language of the state of Israel in 1948, is spoken by about nine million people around the world. For some, the language symbolizes far-right Israeli militarism.”

The HonestReporting media watchdog group accused the Times of Jew-hatred.

“Singling out and maligning the language of the world’s only Jewish state (that’s spoken across the political spectrum) is antisemitic,” the organization charged in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Gilead Ini, a researcher at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), pointed out that the Grey Lady has published numerous articles that condemned anti-Arabic prejudices.

“The newspaper and its writers know exactly what to think of those who recoil at hearing Arabic,” wrote Ini, adding: “They might want to self-reflect on they sound so much more sympathetic to other prejudices.”

“When did [the Times] become anti-Jewish poison?” posited veteran Israeli journalist and JNS columnist Caroline Glick on X.

“I mean, they were always bad. They hid the Holocaust, demeaned Jewish immigrants to the U.S. and were always anti-Israel. But when did they begin a policy of actively inventing and disseminating mind-bendingly hateful slanders?” Glick asked.

Hebrew, the language of the Bible, has been spoken by Jews for thousands of years before being revived as the official language of the modern Jewish state.

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With thousands of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Israel, the key to their success heavily rests on their ability to speak the language.

The post WATCH: Free intro Hebrew lessons for all Ukrainian refugees appeared first on World Israel News.

As Israel celebrates 73 years of existence, it’s important to highlight something that has a history deeply intertwined with the nation, and has evolved alongside it since the country’s founding: modern Hebrew, ILTV reports.

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Hebrew Language Day is “an excellent opportunity to advance reading among students and the young generation,” says Education Minister Naftali Bennett.

By David Jablinowitz, World Israel News

Thursday is Hebrew Language Day. Its aim is to advance the modern use of the ancient language, both in Israel and around the world. Many events are scheduled to mark the occasion, including in Israeli schools.

This year’s theme is “Hebrew – an innovative language.” Education Minister Naftali Bennett says that the day is “an excellent opportunity to advance reading among students and the young generation.”

The Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem is to hold an open house that will include lectures, professional workshops, tours of the Eliezer Ben-Yehuda room, and a glimpse at the academy archives.

Ben-Yehuda was considered the driving force behind the revival of the Hebrew language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The occasion marks his birthday, 21 Tevet on the Hebrew calendar, but was brought forward this year because the actual date falls on Saturday.

One of the major battles is to prevent the creeping infiltration of English into modern Hebrew. The academy is fighting against the Hebrew University’s intention to conduct M.A. and Ph.D. classes in English. The academy argues that “modern Hebrew is qualified to be used in all walks of life and for all needs, including research and scientific study, without exception.”

The academy even objects to the use by Israeli politicians and others of the term ‘Fake News’ that was made popular by U.S. President Donald Trump, insisting that there is a perfectly accurate way of saying it in Hebrew as well.

As the schools mark this special day, state religious educational institutions are launching an ambitious project called “Reading until a million,” with a stated objective of reading a million books between Hebrew Language Day and State Religious Education Week in May. Some 100,000 students from about 400 schools are said to be taking part. The aim is to stress that reading is pleasurable.

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Aharon Appelfeld, a child Holocaust survivor, was one of Israel’s foremost writers, with dozens of collections of short stories and novels to his credit that were translated into 35 languages.

By: Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Aharon Appelfeld, a prolific author whose latest work was published just last year, passed away Thursday at the age of 85. He was considered one of Israel’s greatest writers, receiving the Israel Prize for Literature in 1983 as well as a host of other honors, including the National Jewish Book Award twice and the Prix Medicis.

Appelfeld was born in Romania in 1932 to an assimilated family of intellectuals. The Nazis murdered his mother when he was eight years old and then he was deported with his father to a concentration camp in Transnistria. Both escaped from the camp, but at different times. Appelfeld spent the next three years wandering, surviving as a shepherd boy while hiding his Jewish origins. It would be 20 years until he and his father were reunited.

At age 12 he joined the Russian army as a junior cook and made his way to Palestine via Italy in 1946. He then went to school for the first time since first grade, eventually graduating from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and beginning his writing career by publishing stories in the Hebrew press in the 1950s.

Appelfeld is considered a pioneer of the modern Hebrew language. In a December 1982 interview in the Boston Review while on sabbatical in the United States, he told interviewer Ann Parsons, “You know, I’m lucky that I’m writing in Hebrew. Hebrew is a very precise language…no over-saying. This is because of your Bible tradition. In the Bible tradition you have very small sentences, very concise and autonomic. Every sentence, in itself, has to have its own meaning.”

‘To be a Jewish writer is a heavy obligation’

He was a quintessentially Jewish writer, with strong biographical elements in his works and much related to the Holocaust and Jewish life before and after World War II.

“To be a Jewish writer is a heavy obligation,” he told Parsons. “My close family was killed. My natural environment, my childhood, my sweetest memories were killed. And so it’s a kind of obligation that I feel; I’m dealing with a civilization that has been killed. How to represent it in the most honorable way–not to equalize it, not to exaggerate, but to find the right proportion to represent it, in human terms.”

Some of Appelfeld’s most famous books are Badenheim 1939, The Immortal Bartfuss, and his autobiography, The Story of a Life: A Memoir. As almost no author can make a living solely from writing, he was also a literature professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev for 31 years.

Appelfeld is survived by his wife and three children.

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