email #62 -- from the other side of the language barrier
Leon Kraiem
Before you read: It is Primary Day in New York on Tuesday. I urge you, if you live in the 12th Congressional District, to vote for Alex Bores. He is serious and sophisticated about regulating AI, which I’m convinced is the most important problem facing humanity, and one for which we are dramatically – maybe catastrophically – unprepared.
Of course, I’m also hoping that Goldman beats Lander – the latter is an ultra-Zionist’s caricature of the Diaspora, just as Ben Gvir is the antizionist’s caricature of Israel – and that Espaillat trounces Chevalier, who celebrated the October 7 attack in Times Square while the last Hamas fighters were still actively carrying it out. But it’s good, in my own home neighborhood, to have a reason to support someone that has nothing to do with Israel.
We’ve kept the republic for 250 years; let’s not give up on it now.
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Hi friends,
When I started my current editing job a couple years ago, the biggest concern was my Hebrew. I had just crashed-and-burned at a nonprofit job required leading weekly meetings over Zoom, and everyone correctly suspected I was missing much of what my colleagues told me. What I really couldn’t play off was failing to ask useful follow-up questions, because I was thinking at a college level but speaking like an eight or nine year old.
Sure enough, my first few months on the newsdesk were tough. I was constantly looking up words, and playing short clips over and over again at 0.8 speed, and frantically texting Israeli friends to double-check my translations. My boss, after one or two occasions when I tried to spin as ambiguous what were actually just normal Hebrew statements, made clear that this had to improve or else we’d have a problem.
But, he said – ‘when I started, my Hebrew was worse than yours. Just watch the TV news every night, read a lot of newspapers, you’ll pick it up. For this work, you don’t have to sound like a newsman – you just need to know what the Israeli newsmen are saying, and that’s a lot easier.”
I was skeptical, and anxious; when he’d pop his head into my office every few days for the next months, asking: ‘How’s the Hebrew coming along?’, I’d resent it, because language acquisition as a non-native 20something isn’t the sort of thing in which rapid, straightforward progress can be measured from week to week. But, lo and behold – he was right.
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Last week, ToI published the transcript of an interview with Naftali Bennett, covering a whole range of topics, from the war with Iran to Haredi draft exemptions to the future of Israel’s economy. In the transcript, everything is in English, just like alwys on the site. But when I watched the video of the interview itself, I noticed there were a few exceptions.
Every now and then throughout the sit-down, Bennett would use a Hebrew word rather than an English one – but that’s to be taken for granted; after all, it’s so common, even among native speakers, that you’ll often hear recent immigrants do it accidentally on purpose, to pretend they’re so caught up in the new language they’ve (implausibly) forgotten their own.
There was only one moment when Bennett – who is the son of two Americans, and speaks at a basically-native level – actually changed languages. It happened when David asked the ex-prime minister about settler violence in the West Bank.
Here’s what Bennett said – whatever I’ve rendered in italics was said in Hebrew.
DAVID: Shabbat after Shabbat – and other days as well – people set out from settlements, and they attack innocent Palestinians. That’s terrible. And the Yesha Council – and believe me, we try to get their ‘This is terrible, this is not in our name’ – they don’t denounce it.
What has become of this movement and, more broadly – a short answer, I know it’s a very long question – like, Orthodox Judaism, the liberal side of it is in such remission in Israel. What has happened to Orthodox J-... are they still out there, the silent majority, of Judaism as a religion of tolerance and love of your fellow man? What has happened to that?
BENNETT: Look –
DAVID: You were answering in English before, it was good.
BENNETT: First of all – what?
DAVID: [Again] You were answering in English before, it was good.
BENNETT: Ah, you liked it? [As though they hadn’t been exclusively speaking English for half an hour straight.]
DAVID: It was good, yeah.
BENNETT: Oh- okay, I’ll try.
First of all, I want to be clear: the vast majority of the Israelis living in Judea and Samaria are normativim, are good citizens, they serve in the army, they abide by the law, and they don’t apply violence. That’s the vast, vast majority of the 550,000 Israelis, and they throughout the years encounter severe terror. I condemn – in the strongest terms – violence against innocent people, against soldiers, and violations of the law. We didn’t come – we didn’t return to the State of Israel, to the Land of Israel, after thousands of years, to have phalangists, to have militias – that’s not a thing.
There must be law and order everywhere in Israel — whether it’s the Negev or Bnei Brak or the Galilee or Judea and Samaria. And I will restore law and order in Israel.
Then, he went back to English for the rest of the interview, without any trouble. Now, I don’t think this was a conscious choice on his part, but I do think it was intentional, the way habits of mind can be intentional when you’ve trained yourself well enough to run the relevant algorithm on autopilot. It certainly wasn’t random.
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It is frequently said of Palestinian leaders that they say one thing in English and another thing in Arabic. This is also true of anti-Israel protesters – the classic example being “From the river to the sea,” which in English ends “Palestine will be free,” but in Arabic ends “Palestine is Arab.” I’ve heard both versions shouted by students at Columbia.
Netanyahu can’t get away with that level of dishonesty, but he does the best he can. The prime minister didn’t sit for a single Hebrew interview for something like a year after October 7, all the while doing hour-long podcasts with wacky MAGA moms and reality TV hosts every other day, and every now and then facing down a major US network.
The rationale made sense – to the world, he could posture as Churchill, who ignored the bleeding-heart critics and did what had to be done; in Israel, he had to answer for himself as Chamberlain, who’d struck truce after truce as Hamas built its tunnels over the preceding decades, and who vetoed the assassinations of the terror regime's leaders so as not to start a new war.
Consider, then, what it means for a politician to switch into his own nation’s language precisely to say what that he thinks they don’t want to hear, when he’s just spent thirty minutes in the language of precisely the people who do want to hear it. (It’s worth noting, the Times of Israel is exactly where you want to invoke ‘Jewish values’ and distinguish between Israel and its current government – Bennett had, teed up for him, a party line that liberal Zionists are just begging to have someone tow, and that’s when he chose not to swing.)
There are a few explanations of why he did it (again, I think it was intentional, though probably not conscious): he may, as a religious Zionist with settler bona fides, think about this issue in more personal or emotionally loaded terms, that make it either harder or, in some sense, less integrous to answer it in PR-mode. More likely, I think, he views what’s going on as a conflict “within the family,” which is consistent with his message-disclipine on foreign TV.
That impulse has its downsides – not everything should be swept under the rug, and daily, unpunished violations of the human rights of noncitizens whose lives you control is precisely the sort of thing that shouldn’t – but at least it evinces a care for Israel’s reputation that is a welcome change from the bloviations of Smotrich and Ben Gvir, while the content of his answer (after switching back to English, he called the national security minister a “clown”) represents an Israel that’s actually worth defending.
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Steven Abraham, a rabbi in Ohama whose Substack is the only voice I need when it comes to Jewish world discourse, wrote a response the other day to a Shaul Magid essay about the reluctance of the Renewal movement to throw its lot in with the New Jewish Left against Israel. In Abraham’s words, Magid’s is
an elegant essay. It is learned, it is genealogically tidy, it moves with the confidence of a man who has been in the room for forty years and wants you to know it. And its purpose, beneath the scaffolding of Ahad Ha-Am and Buber and Sorkin and Pianko, is to inform Jews who became more protective of Jewish life after the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Shoah that they are suffering from a spiritual disorder. That is the essay. Everything else is nonsense.
Magid is part of a constellation of American Jewish figures who, having laid the groundwork of the antizionist turn over the course of the decade preceding October 7, have become an intellectual engine for the movement – providing it, as Abraham alludes to above, with names to drop and historical vignettes to invoke and religious terminology to more or less get right – a whole emergent lingo you might compare to an impressive Jewish bookshelf, whose pious charm almost compensates for not being able to read it.
Peter Beinart’s “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza” represents for that world the sort of moral courage that Magid finds absent in Renewal. Recently, Ariel Beery wrote his own book, “Being Israeli After the Destruction of Gaza,” and Beinart – to his great credit – invited him on to talk. Beery wrote a reflection on that interview:
When Peter Beinart reached out to interview me about my new book, Being Israeli After the Destruction of Gaza, I was curious what he would ask. I wrote it, after all, to respond to what I believe is the main failure of his Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: his omission of the Israeli Jewish experience. I just couldn’t understand how one could write a book about being Jewish without taking into account the experience of Jews in the thick of it all. It felt like a moral failure that had to be corrected. Yet it wasn’t until Beinart interviewed me that I understood why he did it.
In a sentence, what I learned from the interview is that Beinart just doesn’t care about Israeli Jews. Whether they live or die, survive or thrive, is not really discussed in his book. Our experiences leading up to Oct 7th and those after are besides the point. They get in the way of his narrative, so must be ignored.
The Beinart/Beery call-and-response is exactly the same as the Magid/Abraham one, which are in turn exactly the same as the publication of, and discourse about, Molly Crabapple’s new book about the Bund. This dynamic has played out a thousand times, and it will play out a thousand times more, because it’s just what the Venn Diagram looks like between American Jews whose antizionism is mainstream enough to read it, and Israelis whose English is good enough to respond.
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The trouble, of course, is that purporting to know what someone believes is a toxic way of arguing, even when you’re right and even when it’s relevant. I’m not in Shaul Magid’s head. I’m not in Peter Beinart’s head. And while I don’t know either of them personally, we’ve got plenty of mutual friends who attest that they’re good and sincere people. I don’t doubt it.
But if Israelis, under existential threat, are expected to have an open mind to Americans who think they’re responding to it wrong, then American Jewish critics can reasonably be expected to meet them halfway, and demonstrate some basic amount of care – like showing up and talking to them, which Beinart didn’t do until his book was already published, then apologized afterward for having done.
As I’ve written to this list before: I didn’t take Israeli citizenship in order to spite my college classmates, nor did I plant myself here to try to change the system from within. But living here solved a terrible problem that stared me down in America, which was the prospect of having to become a Pro-Israel Guy™, just to stop myself falling down the slippery slope from righteous indignation into petty, indignant self-righteousness.
The way I averted that disaster wasn’t by physically moving here – for me it’s been basically costless, and the cred gained by doing so is only really cashable in America. But here, I gained access to the conversation in Hebrew, in which your words come off quite differently, because the cost of expressing your ideas is a stake in the consequences of applying them.
Magid – to his credit – gave an interview to Haaretz in 2025 that was mostly conducted in Hebrew – he’s certainly capable of it, much like e.g. Noam Chomsky, who was reading his father’s dissertation on Hebrew grammar when he was ten. Unfortunately, the more significant trend in the Diaspora Left these days is to rally around Yiddish precisely as an alternative.
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If you’re expecting to hear me on Israeli TV any time soon, don’t hold your breath. At least one of you on this list has run up against my repeated refusal to speak Hebrew in your presence, so embarrassed am I of my accent and flubbed conjugations.
But – while I do occasionally have something to say, as is confirmed when one of these hammered-out rants drops into your inbox now and again – I’m reconciled, and maybe even grateful, that my late-ish in life, journalistically-organized language learning process has put me in a position where I am forced to choose between speaking and sounding silly, or listening and getting smart.
I’m disappointed that ToI didn't put subtitles on that short little bit of the Bennett interview. I don’t know what viewers around the world will assume he’s saying when he switches languages, but I suspect they’d be surprised to find out. And -- very relevant as elections here get closer each day -- even more surprised by who it is he's making sure will know.
US friends: My flight to JFK is on Wednesday, returning July 16th. Let’s make plans.
As always, I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are.
Leon*
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*(though, apropos language-changing: I’ve been using my Hebrew name – Yehuda – more often now, and it was brought to my attention over the weekend that this is auspicious timing to make the change. For all my pretensions to rationalism, I am not averse to making major life decisions on the basic of numerology, so more on that to come.)