Posts Tagged Dictionary of Jewish Words

This article by Joyce Eisenberg  & Ellen Scolnic is crossposted from Interfaithfamily.com.

When a sportscaster on local network news reports that a baseball player has a lot of chutzpah asking for a salary increase, you know that Jewish words have made their way into mainstream conversation. “It represents the integration of Jews and Judaism into American culture,” says Rabbi Robert Rubin of Congregation Adath Israel in Merion, Pennsylvania. “When different peoples and cultures live together, words are often borrowed from one language to another.” But not everyone knows what all these different words mean. What is a “Jewish” word anyway? Judaism is a religion and a culture. How can a word be Jewish?

It’s a question we debated for more than a year, as we compiled a list of 1,400 words to include in our book, The Dictionary of Jewish Words: A JPS Guide. We defined “Jewish words” –whether Hebrew, Yiddish, English, or even one Hungarian word–as those associated with some aspect of Jewish life: holidays, rituals, life-cycle events, prayer, modern Israel and food, of course.

We wrote the dictionary for people like us. We’re Jewish moms, married to nice Jewish guys, raising Jewish kids. We’re both published writers, editors and researchers, but we’re not fluent in Hebrew and we’re not scholars or rabbis. Although we consider ourselves fairly knowledgeable and moderately observant, we kept coming across unfamiliar Jewish words. For example, when the flyer came home from Hebrew school asking us to participate in Mitzvah Day, we knew what tzedakah projects (raising money for charitable causes) were, but we were unsure about derekh eretz (respect for peers).

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