Forward.com

Israeli Arabs and HebrewAn unsigned e-mailer has sent me an article that appeared recently in the English-language edition of the daily Hebrew newspaper Haaretz. It’s about the use of Hebrew by Israeli Arabs, and since I had already noticed in it the Hebrew Haaretz myself and considered writing about it in these pages, the idea for this column can be said to be a joint one.
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‘Sean Ferguson,’ ContinuedThe file on Sean Ferguson isn’t closed yet. A few weeks ago, as you may remember, I brought to your attention a letter received from Forward reader Eldad Ganin with the information that a Jewish resident of Syracuse named Tracy Ferguson may have invented the tall tale of the Yiddish-speaking immigrant who answered “Shoyn fargesn” (“I’ve forgotten”) when asked for his name and was Christened by an immigration official accordingly. Tracy, it appears, was the grandson of a Jew who entered the United States in the 1860s as “Samuel Forgotson.”
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Chain GangsOne thing about the Passover Seder that never seems to change is that battles are fought between those around the table who insist on singing every stanza of the incrementally repeating chain songs at the Haggadah’s end and those who wish to make shorter shrift of them. My father belonged to the latter camp. By the time we got to the fourth or fifth stanza of “Ehad Mi Yode’a” or “Had Gadya,” he would lose patience and jump to the last one, in which all the previous ones are included.
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