These events are unrelated, yet they have much in common. Thinking about the power of words—and the way the same word can feel embracing or abusive, depending on who’s saying it—made me think about when and how to teach kids about the nuances of terms that may or may not be epithets.

Here’s what I mean: gay, queer, nigga, yid, heeb. All can be used as slurs, but they can also be used as badges of in-group identification.

Josie is 9, and she attends a diverse public school in a diverse neighborhood. She’s heard the n-word used as a term of affection and identity between kids of color. She doesn’t listen to much hip-hop (at home we tend to favor show tunes, old-school punk rock, and Parliament-Funkadelic, thus covering most of the 100 Best Jewish Songs of All Time), but, like most urban kids, she’s certainly going to hear more and more of it as she gets older. And that means I’m going to have to teach her and her little sister that however much you hear the n-word, you don’t get to say it.

And yet I don’t think we should be censoring Mark Twain (or hip-hop artists, or Frederick Douglass, or Ishmael Reed). We should talk to our older kids about historical context, about why the word can be shocking and upsetting. Huck Finn has a specific setting; it’s right and proper to read the book in the frame of reference of the 19th-century South. To change the words is to throw up our hands and refuse to wrestle with our problematic historical past. We abdicate a teachable moment.

Words are complicated. I’ve talked to Josie about the fact that we don’t say “that’s so gay.” (There’s an excellent current public service campaign—my favorite ad is with comedian Wanda Sykes—with the same message.) But it will be a long while before my kids and I have the conversation I had a few years ago with my brother and his husband about the phenomenon of young gay people saying, with edgy irony, “That’s so gay.” When you get to be confident enough about your place in the world, do you get to reclaim that kind of use of language? (My brother thinks maybe. My brother-in-law thinks no.) Is using “gay” in the old-school pejorative way the next evolutionary step after reclaiming “queer”? (That reclamation took a bad word and made it a good word, but the gays who say, “That’s so gay” are using “gay” as a bad word! It makes your head spin.)

And then there’s the problem of Jewish words that swing both ways, like Yid and Hebe. In the Ashkenazi Orthodox world, of course, Yid and Yidden mean simply Jews and Jewish people; the words have a homey, positive gloss. (“Yid equals man plus mitzves,” or good deeds, writes Michael Wex in Born to Kvetch.) But reading back through American Jewish history and literature, you’ll see “yid” used repeatedly by non-Jews as a slur. “Hebe” used to be a verbal slap, too, but now, reborn as “Heeb,” it’s a hipster magazine, a fist-bump among the cool kids of the tribe. Jon Stewart, who I credit with popularizing one of my fave could-go-either-way descriptors, “Jewy,” was there early with “Hebe,” too—in 2000, long before Heeb magazine was pondering calling Joe Lieberman a dickhead (though, of course, that was before Joe Lieberman was a dickhead), Stewart titled a segment about Hillary Clinton’s alleged anti-Semitism “Hebe Said, She Said.”

“Language meaning changes,” says Sarah Bunin Benor, associate professor of contemporary Jewish studies at Hebrew Union College. “Pejoration, in which the meaning of a word gets more negative, and amelioration, in which a word’s meaning becomes more favorable, happen constantly. In Mexico City, there’s a Syrian Jewish community known as shajatos, which comes from the Arabic word for slipper and is a derogatory term; the term is now being reclaimed by young Syrian Jews. There are Shajato Pride Facebook groups.”

Even “Jew” is a loaded word. Sure, there’s the verb—to jew someone down—but the noun, too, is laden with years of history and bias, from Shakespeare to Dickens to, oh, practically everybody. “Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale says that Satan has his wasps’ nest in the hearts of Jews,” Michael Wex told me in an interview. “There’s ‘The Ballad of Little Sir Hugh’ and sundry Latin and English accounts of the supposed ritual murder of Hugh of Lincoln. And let’s not forget The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta. In the latter of case, trust me, ‘Jew’ did not mean ‘fellow citizen of the Mosaic persuasion.’ ”

Historically, Wex says, “ ‘I went to the Jew,’ would have been understood as ‘I went to the pawnbroker/moneylender.’ Likewise, the idea of the ‘Jew store,’ generally a low-priced dry goods or secondhand store, was widespread for a very long time—I can recall it from the sixties.” The word “Jew” connoted “totally unlike us.” Even today, many of us know non-Jews who go out of their way not to say the word Jew; they carefully say “Jewish person.”

“People who avoid the word Jew,” Benor says, “think of it as a negative word because they know it was used in an ugly way in the past.”

Which brings me back to my own little yidden. How do I teach them about the minefield that is the flexibility of language, with all its layers of history and sediment and love and hate?

“It’s all about context,” says Kiki Schaffer, director of the Parenting, Family, and Early Childhood Center at the 14th Street Y in New York City. “It’s not that an individual word has some magic; it’s that we have to consider how that word is going to land. You can explain to kids that words can land with affection in one context and as a putdown in another context. They can say ‘I’m like you’ or ‘I have more power than you.’ ”

Shaffer says that educating kids on the nuances of language can begin as early as age 3 or 4, when theory of mind sets in. That’s when children start to understand that other people have thoughts, feelings, and desires, and those thoughts, feelings, and desires aren’t always in line with theirs. You can explain multiple perspectives to a 4-year-old—calling people a stupidhead can hurt their feelings—and add more complexity as kids get older.

“You can tell a 9-year-old, ‘You have to be scrupulously careful with language,’ ” Shaffer says. “You could tell a Jewish joke because you’re in the in-group; the joke’s about yourself and your people. But if you joke about a group you’re not part of, even if your intentions are good, you could wind up being hurtful. There are trails of memory involved that you don’t share and don’t necessarily understand.”

Parents of kids in Jewish day schools should be particularly clueful about talking about race. Research shows that insisting “children don’t see color” and not discussing difference with them can actually reinforce racism.

Words are complicated. Should we really expect explaining them to kids to be easy? Choosing to say nothing, though, is no answer at all.

Yiddish is like many of these languages in that it is spoken more in New York City than in its historic areas—central and eastern Europe, and Russia. But unlike, say, the Istro-Romanian language of Vlashki, or Chamorro of the Mariana Islands (who knew they existed?), Yiddish is actually thriving in New York City, and elsewhere—among ultra-Orthodox communities. CUNY Professor David Kaufman, prominently featured in the article, told me yesterday, “I mentioned Yiddish as an example of a language spoken more in New York than in its places of origin—that’s all I meant by putting Yiddish in there.” He added, “It used to be a language of literature, but now it’s being kept alive by the Hasidic community—which views literature as competition to Torah.” In other words, fear not: Yiddish is nowhere near extinction. For the record, he said, his Endangered Language Alliance has not worked with Yiddish yet.

Hebrew Union College Professor Sarah Bunin Benor agreed that, whatever the status of some of the languages mentioned in the article, Yiddish, while certainly diminished from its heyday, is not going to disappear any time soon. “I think there is a sense that it’s diminishing because a lot of the speakers were killed in the Holocaust, and others moved to America and Israel and assimilated to the local languages,” she explained. But, directing me to the Modern Language Association’s interactive language map—warning, it has massive time-suck potential—she pointed out that “Yiddish is alive and well.” In fact, she added, “It’s changing. It’s becoming Americanized. It’s picking up words and grammatical structures.” Which is kind of cool, especially when you consider that American English has adopted certain aspects of Yiddish.

What, I should have to give an example?

Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages [NYT]

These are just a few findings of the Survey of American Jewish Language and Identity, the results of which were published online late last month by linguist Sarah Bunin Benor and sociologist Steven M. Cohen. (The researchers will be giving a webinar on their study tonight; they’re also publishing a more academic version of their report in a linguistics journal later this year.) Dozens of surveys about American Jews have come out the past few decades—most famously, perhaps, the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey that caused alarm in some quarters with its claim that 52 percent of Jews were intermarried—but this is a rare one that shows rather than tells. Instead of asking respondents how religious they are or whether their grandchildren will be Jewish, Benor and Cohen asked questions like, “When you say ‘Mary’ and ‘merry’ in regular speech, do they sound the same or different?” and “How do you refer to the Jewish skullcap?” By hitting the question of Jewish identity at a slant rather than head-on, the researchers have come up with an unusually nuanced portrait of contemporary American Jews.

“Patterns of language use can tell us things about identities and communities that might not even be known to the actors themselves,” said Cohen, who has been conducting Jewish identity surveys of the more direct variety for some four decades. “There are things we can see through the side door that we can’t see through the front door.”

Benor and Cohen’s survey technique, like the questions they asked, was untraditional. Instead of using a random survey sample, they employed a “snowball technique,” emailing the survey to 600 friends in July 2008 and asking respondents to forward it in turn. They make clear in the introduction to their report that this approach has both its advantages and its drawbacks. On the one hand, 41,696 people completed the survey just in the first few weeks of its life on the internet. (You can still take the survey online, though only data from those first 41,696 respondents has already been analyzed.) By contrast, the National Jewish Population Survey, conducted every 10 years by United Jewish Communities (the umbrella group of local Jewish Federations), has a sample size of about 5,000. On the other hand, Benor and Cohen acknowledge, “we know it over-represents Jews with strong Jewish engagement and social ties”—the kind of people most likely to take such a survey of their own volition.

As Benor expected from her previous scholarship (like Cohen, she teaches at Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement’s seminary, which sponsored the survey), the data suggests that for the most part, American Jews across the religious spectrum draw from the same “repertoire” of distinctive speech elements—that is, they are English speakers who use varying amounts of Yiddish or Hebrew phrasing and grammar to distinguish themselves both from non-Jews and from Jews elsewhere on the spectrum. With the exception of those ultra-Orthodox Jews who use Yiddish as their primary language, Benor said, American Jews fall somewhere on this “continuum of distinctiveness” rather than being separable into different dialect groups.

“My favorite example is ‘gmar cha-tee-MAH to-VAH,’” she said, enunciating each syllable of the traditional Yom Kippur greeting: in English, “may you be inscribed in the book of life.” “That’s the most modern Hebrew pronunciation you can get. Then there’s ‘gmar cha-TEE-mah TO-vah,’ ‘gmar cha-SEE-mah TO-vah,’ and then ‘gmar ch’SEE-mah TOY-vah.” For those in the know, each pronunciation signifies a different spot on the religious continuum: a non-Orthodox Jew would probably use the modern Hebrew pronunciation; as you move along the spectrum of observance, the greeting becomes more Yiddish-inflected.

One of the key findings of the survey was what Benor and Cohen call “the growth of linguistic distinctiveness among the Orthodox.” Distinctive strains of Yiddish-inflected English are not only still in everyday use among younger generations of Orthodox American Jews, their prevalence is growing. Take the phrase, “She’s staying by us,” which borrows a Yiddish grammatical construction to mean, “She’s staying at our place.” Fifty-three percent of Orthodox Jews who took the survey use the phrase (versus 21 percent of non-Orthodox Jews). But a full three quarters of Orthodox Jews between the ages of 18 and 24 use it, compared to 12 percent of Orthodox respondents 75 or older. According to the report, “such words and phrases are so important for Orthodox identity that many baalei teshuva (newly Orthodox Jews) make a conscious effort to incorporate them into their speech, even when some people consider them to be incorrect English.” Observant Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews—whose ancestors never spoke Yiddish in the first place—have adopted Yiddish religious terminology as well.

Benor attributes this to the fact that Orthodox communities have in general become more conservative, politically and culturally, in recent years. “Part of that shift to the right is a linguistic shift: some Jews who used to use less distinct English are now incorporating more Yiddishisms into their English,” she said.

In non-Orthodox Jewish communities, two trends are happening concurrently, the survey found: as members of an older generation die and takes certain language patterns with them, younger Jews are using more Yiddish and Hebrew than before (and certainly more than their more assimilationist parents’ generation did). But the words disappearing and those reappearing aren’t necessarily the same words. Though Jews (and non-Jews) of all ages still say “shmutz” and “mazel tov,” seniors are more likely than their grandchildren to use Yiddishisms like “haimish” (homey), “macher” (big shot), “nu?” (so?), “naches” (pride), and “bashert” (predestined). Where the younger generation is overtaking their grandparents is with religious terminology—Yiddish words like “shul,” “daven,” and “bentch” (for the blessing after meals).

“You see more Jews now identifying as a religious rather than as an ethnic group,” Benor said. “Those Yiddish words that are increasing [in use] have to do with religious life.” Thus, the phenomenon one survey respondent reported: “When I was growing up, I called it Temple. When my children went to Day School, I called it synagogue. I now call it shul. I am not sure why.”

Though Jews across the religious spectrum said they would be likely to consider Hebrew names for their children, baby names are “an important resource for Jews to indicate intra-Jewish differences.” Less observant Jews, they found, are most likely to prefer anglicized biblical names, like Jacob, Ethan, Hannah, or Abigail. Modern Orthodox Jews were most likely to choose modern Hebrew names, like Ezra, Ari, Talia, or Eliana, often substituting them for the equivalent Yiddish names of deceased relatives (so, for example, they might name a daughter Tova, meaning “good” in Hebrew, after a grandmother named Gittel). For the most part, only ultra-Orthodox Jews said they would consider giving a child a Yiddish name like Moyshe, Mendy, or Basya. In one of the survey’s least surprising findings, only two percent of Jews said they’d consider naming their baby Christopher.

Israel Bans ‘Catastrophe’ Term From Arab Schools [Reuters]

Well, okay. It’s a little better than that. (I can also say, “The cat was under the table,” “The cat will be under the table,” and, “Blessed is the cat under the table, who created the fruit of the vine.”)

I learned to read Hebrew in religious school—the usual bat mitzvah stuff. I took a fun language class a few years ago at the JCC. And I had a wonderful modern Hebrew tutor, two hours a day, in Jerusalem the last two times David and I were there. I left the U.S. talking about cats and tables; I came back actually being able to chat.

And yet, even after a few months with a weekly tutor in Brooklyn, my Hebrew is still nowhere near where I’d like it to be. I envy David, and his friends and colleagues, the ease with which they make their way around scripture and menu alike.

Language means so much to me as—at very least—an entrée into a culture. Not a unique revelation, I realize, but for me, it runs deep. Without the fluent—if Valley Girl—Spanish I acquired on my first stay with my host family at age fourteen, I would not have such dear lifelong friends in Mexico. Without my crash course in Italian before a trip to Tuscany, my friend Judy and I would not have the same memories of long, Chianti-soaked nights with the locals. Without my passable Catalan, I would not feel so at home in Barcelona. And without Hebrew, in Israel I feel like a dork: I’m the lame American for whom everyone has to switch to English, the klutz in my husband’s crowd.

But my thing for language is about even more than having cultural currency to jingle in my pocket. I was born with it. My father, you see, is a famous linguist—specifically, a famous phonologist of Spanish, which means about seven people know who he is. (Still, as a professor emeritus at MIT, he is a heartbeat away from Noam Chomsky.) Much of his work is theoretical, unlike that of, say, ethnolinguists who head off into the bush with tape recorders, or people like Stephen Pinker whose books you can actually curl up with. My Dad’s definitive work offers a “systematic description of the stress contours of Spanish words that follows from morphological and markedness considerations” along with a formulation of “the Peripherality Condition,” which is not a Robert Ludlum novel. Still, his flawless Spanish is indistinguishable from that spoken by the natives, at least in Mexico, which is where it was acquired. (In Spain or Venezuela, everyone just assumes he’s Mexican.)

While his job does not sound glamorous, it does involve a lot of world travel. When I was a child we took extended trips to Catalonia and Venezuela, where he taught at summer institutes; we vacationed in Mexico with his colleagues there. And in my early thirties, I went with my parents to the Basque country. (As I said at the time, “I’d prefer to go with my husband, but I haven’t met him yet.”)

This trip went down as the most colossal linguistic failure in Harris family history. Never mind the fact that Basque has twelve grammatical cases (versus Latin’s cushy five); it’s linguistically unrelated to any other tongue. This means—as I learned when I cracked open the textbook Dad and I had each bought—that trying to learn it is like trying to stick Velcro to particle board. I’d do the exercises, biting my lip, and get them all wrong. The moment I’d finish, I’d forget everything. You don’t know how close I came to hurling the damn book off the subway. Me? Unable to learn a language? This was a soul-challenging, humbling, deeply frustrating first.

“Bet Dad can do this,” I thought. I emailed to find out. “How’s the Basque going?” His reply: “Fucking language from hell. This is a waste of my time.”

Hebrew, to be sure, is no Basque. But to be fair to myself, it’s not Spanish either. (Hence the song I made up when David took his crash course in Spanish: “Spanish Is So Much Easier Than Hebrew.”) What do the other languages I speak have in common? Shared Latin roots, for one—and, oh yeah, an alphabet. And to be able to say just about anything in Hebrew besides “chocolate” or “Golda Meir,” you have to make rote memorization a big part of your life. That, and this: If someone says, “Oh, Hebrew is so easy, it’s all so regular,” well, hu meshaker. (He is lying.) The other night I was practicing future tense with my tutor by discussing our trip to Israel. Our conversation went something like this:

Chantal: What will you be doing this summer?

Me: We [will travel] to Israel on May 5.

Chantal: [Correcting verb.] It’s irregular. What will you do there?

Me: I [will work] part-time.

Chantal: [Correcting verb.] It’s irregular. What will Bess do while you work?

Me: We [will find] a sitter.

Chantal: [Correcting verb.] It’s irregular. What will—

Me: I [will give up.]

There is much about Hebrew that is tidy and elegant, with great appeal for linguistic nerds and poets alike. You don’t need indefinite articles; you don’t have to learn the subjunctive. And, even when they’re tripping me up, I appreciate Hebrew’s complexities as well. You want a deliberately standardized language to have some messiness around the edges, like a homemade cookie. The standard, shrugging, in-joke reply to a student’s frustration: Kacha zeh b’ivrit. “That’s how it is in Hebrew.”

It makes me think of the old Yiddish song “Oyfn Pripitchik.” (I once took a Yiddish course too, by the way, at a local synagogue. Our textbook actually taught us to say things like, “It hurts everywhere.”) The first few verses of the song tell a sweet tale of students learning to read and write. Then the teacher speaks up: “When you get older, children, you will understand that this alphabet contains the tears and the weeping of our people.” I may shed tears over irregular verbs, but these are the irregular verbs of my people. Evkeh, aval lo evater. I will weep, but I will not give up.

The question whether they had a right to this language and to this literature was a lively question. In their own eyes they sometimes felt that they didn’t have the right because they weren’t born to the manner, and American society—at least its elite Anglo-Saxon elements—told them that they didn’t come by it naturally and that it didn’t really belong to them. But the evidence of the streets was different, because a new life was forming in American society which belonged to nobody, and therefore there was no reason why an American writer should accept the words of Henry James in his book The American Scene, for instance, in which he was so distressed by the Jewish East Side of New York and by what was happening to the English language on the East Side.

But taking one thing with another and feeling that everybody in America was a visitor, a tourist, a stranger, a foreigner, and that the language was there as everybody’s resource, one didn’t know what else to do except use it with a certain spirit, and in defiance of the so-called owners of the culture and of the language. And remembering, after all, that the Jews were just as able to use Greek, or Italian, or Spanish, or any number of other languages as well as Hebrew, and that they had made a not bad record in those languages, they simply decided to override local provincial prejudices of the dominant American cultural class and to go ahead. That is what I did and this is what many others like me did.

At first there was a considerable amount of curiosity about this on the part of the Anglo-Saxon elite in the universities and in the press. When I first made my appearance, the reception I got was a little bit like Dr. Johnson’s description of dogs who walked on their hind legs, or lady preachers. What was remarkable, he said, was not that they did it badly but that they could do it at all. I felt that I fitted into this Johnsonian category and that it was not a bad thing, but I foretold that this triumph would not last very long and that there would soon be a turn against it.

And, indeed, there has been a turn against it, only the turn was in a direction I hadn’t predicted, exactly. The turn is on behalf of the blacks, of black writing, and one minority driving out another. Nothing lasts very long; the public attention has a very short span. It’s of rather fragile substance and you expect a certain amount of turnover. I didn’t expect that Jewish writers would have a very long reign in the U.S. and I was quite right about that. The only thing is, first of all, that the Jewish writers are not so often—in their own minds—primarily Jewish writers; they are writers who happen to have this particular kind of experience, that is to say, the power of American society to absorb people, so enormous that you don’t have time really to think of yourself in that way.

I will say one further thing about the Jewish writer in America, and that is that the Jewish community in America was delighted when the Jewish writers appeared on the scene because they felt it would be good for the Jews in America. This put us in a rather awkward position of doing public relations, unwillingly, for the American Jews, and we were also expected to refrain from any sharp criticism of persons who were Jews.

This was extremely disagreeable, because it seemed to me to be an imposition on truth to have to make things come out nicely, as Israel Zangwill did, and give the people a pleasing impression. Other Jewish writers bent over backwards just because there was this pressure on them and decided that they would be, out of contrariness, quite nasty in their realistic portrayals of Jews. This is an accusation that has been brought against Philip Roth, who has gone much farther in this direction than I ever dreamed of going. But he went farther in that direction because he felt the provocation or the challenge, I think, whereas I always refuse to be provoked or challenged and simply went my stubborn, mulish, narrow way, without accepting either the task of making good public relations for the Jews or reacting strongly against the demand.

The question is: What part has the Jewish reading and book-buying public played in the success of American writers? Well, I should guess that it was an enormous part. I suppose that Jewish readers represent a very large part of the Jewish public—in some cities a majority. The question would end there if I didn’t add the further question: What do we owe them for this, as artists or writers? I mean, what kind of gratitude are they entitled to for being literate? It’s their blessing! And if they’re not cheated by fraudulent writers and if they don’t read too many bad books—and I’m afraid I must enter a caveat on this subject—then they’re doing very well. But the fact is that a great many frauds are practiced upon them.

The question is whether the Jewish characters in the books of American Jewish authors really represent characteristic American experience. Well, I suppose that some do.

Are the Jews somehow characteristically American? Well, they have a certain kind of feeling for the poetry of American life quite apart from Jewish life, I think. They have the eye of the foreigner for it, that is to say, everybody in the U.S. is something of a foreigner; but it’s very good to have a kind of exotic perspective on your immediate surroundings. That is to say, it’s very good for artists to have an exotic perspective on their immediate surroundings. And Americans, or Jews born in America, were really blessed with this sense of the exotic.

I don’t see how this could have been avoided. Say in my case: I was born in a French-Canadian village of Russian-Jewish parents in 1915. We had Indians, French-Canadians, Scottish and Irish, Ukrainians, Jews, Russians and so on. Every language was spoken in the streets—from Iroquois to Hebrew. How could you avoid the feeling that you were in an enchanted place?