Speaking English Like American
Hilma Kolin
Today, I want to share some advice for pronouncing English more like a native U.S. speaker of the language. You may have never heard some of these tips before. But following them will help you reduce your accent when speaking English.
I hope these tips will soon have you speaking English more like a U.S. native. To keep improving your accent, be sure to get plenty of conversation practice with your U.S. colleagues and friends and to pay attention to how English is spoken in what you read and watch.
Generally speaking your presentation above will be very helpful for our students learning English as a second language. I am sure it will help us to use more easily American English.Thank you very much.
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When those words are stressed, the vowels are also stressed. Americans tend to draw out their vowels longer than other English speakers. At the same time, they also rush speaking certain words, especially articles the, a, and an.
There are more than 500 idioms, or common expressions, in the English language. Americans tend to use idioms in their daily speech. Knowing a few idioms will make you sound more like a native American English speaker.
Slang differs depending on gender, age, race, and ethnicity. Teens have different and probably more slang than people in the 30s and older. People in their 30s use different slang from people in their 60s.
Not only do Americans use slang and idioms in their speech, but they also use a lot of phrasal verbs. In fact, if you listened to an American speaking naturally, you probably would hear at least one phrasal verb in every other sentence.
Phrasal verbs are verbs with a preposition or prepositional phrase. Phrasal verbs typically use common action verbs like get, go, take, hang, bring, come, hold, break, and start with common prepositions like up, down, with, back, and over. Phrasal verbs can have one or two prepositions.
The way to pronounce it is all in the tongue. Curl your tongue up on the sides so it touches the area of the gums where your gums meet your teeth. The lips make an almost kissing shape but more clenched together with the tongue. Your tongue never touches the roof of the mouth.
For instance, people in Miami whose families are from Caribbean Spanish-speaking countries tend to sound at times like people who live in New York City or northern New Jersey. And Chicano English is spoken in areas where many Mexican-Americans live, like Chicago, Texas, and Southern California.
Both speakers of Miami English and Chicano English use patterns of Spanish in many ways. They tend not to pronounce the TH sound or use long vowel sounds for short vowel sounds. And they tend to drop the -ed ending from regular verbs in the past tense
Many states in the South are part of the Bible Belt, a religious and mostly conservative area of the country. Southerners value being polite and warm to others. They tend to speak slowly and draw out the vowels.
Want more help speaking like an American? Take my free Master Class on how to speak English like an American. It's Wednesday, Aug. 12 from 10:30 am to 12 pm Pacific. I will guide you in all these tips and more.
GENE DEMBY, HOST: Just a heads up, y'all - the episode you're about to hear contains some strong language.What's good, y'all? You're listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm Gene Demby, and joining me in the co-host chair today is CODE SWITCH's senior editor, Leah Donnella. Leah, what's good with you?LEAH DONNELLA, BYLINE: Hey, Gene.DEMBY: All right. So let's get right into it. Where are we going? Where are we going?DONNELLA: OK, so let me ask you something, Gene. Have you ever sat shiva?DEMBY: I have not. But I know it's a Jewish mourning ritual, right? And you go...DONNELLA: Yeah.DEMBY: ...Over to somebody's house after a loved one has died, and you sit with them, and you share memories. Is that right?DONNELLA: Yeah. That's exactly it. There's often a lot of food around - at least when my family does it. And, you know, different people have different traditions. But generally, it's observed for seven days. Shiva means seven.DEMBY: OK.DONNELLA: And in my experience, it's a really comforting ritual that's kind of both communal and very intimate.DEMBY: Huh. It sounds like it can be kind of intense for the grieving family, too, maybe?DONNELLA: Oh, yeah, it can be very intense. And earlier this year, I went to a shiva that was intense.DEMBY: OK.DONNELLA: But besides that, it was kind of unlike any other that I had experienced before.DEMBY: How so?DONNELLA: Well, a big thing was that it involved a lot more chanting than the shivas I'm used to.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: What do we want?UNIDENTIFIED GROUP #1: Cease-fire.UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: When do we want it?UNIDENTIFIED GROUP #1: Now.UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: What do we want?UNIDENTIFIED GROUP #1: Cease-fire.DEMBY: Huh.DONNELLA: Yeah. So this shiva was organized by IfNotNow, which is a group that tries to organize American Jews around issues of justice and equality for Palestinians and Israelis. And the shiva was meant to be a space where people could publicly mourn the lives of the tens of thousands of people who had been killed in Gaza and Israel since October 7. It took place outside of Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff's LA residence. So that day, out in the pouring rain, we said the Mourner's Kaddish, which is the Jewish prayer for the dead.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING).UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking non-English language).DONNELLA: But also Muslim and Christian mourning prayers as well, each led by Palestinian women who were there as allies.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING).UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Speaking non-English language).UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: In your hands, O Lord, we humbly entrust our brothers and sisters. In this life...UNIDENTIFIED GROUP #2: (Singing in non-English language).DONNELLA: And Gene, I don't know if you know this, but it's actually illegal for Jews to get together and not sing. Like, it simply isn't done.DEMBY: Wait, are you joking? Is that for real? I did not know that.DONNELLA: I'm dead serious (laughter).DEMBY: OK.DONNELLA: You know, so throughout the day, there was a lot of singing.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Singing) Cease-fire now.UNIDENTIFIED GROUP #3: (Singing) Cease-fire now.UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Singing) Not in our name.UNIDENTIFIED GROUP #3: (Singing) Not in our name.DONNELLA: And a huge part of the shiva was focused on the idea that there are a lot of Jews who are horrified with Israel's bombardment of Gaza and want to reclaim space as Jews to protest what's going on.(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Unfortunately, our culture has really been captured by this sort of politics around unconditional support for Israel, and it's created a sort of litmus test where you can only be "Jewish," quote-unquote, if you're willing to support Israel in that way.UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Our Jewish tradition was formed through thousands of years of telling and retelling stories of our persecution and liberation.WILL ALDEN: Our identity as Jews, our Jewish pain and our history of persecution are actually the basis for solidarity with other marginalized peoples.DONNELLA: That last voice you heard was Will Alden. And his speech stood out to me because I thought it really captured some major points of tension. He talked about the fear that gets passed down in so many Jewish families from one generation to the next.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)ALDEN: One of my earliest memories is of my mother, her horrified face after I drew what she thought was a Swastika on my school notebook. It was not a Swastika. I was trying to draw the Stussy symbol, or the Cool S. It was the early '90s in LA.(LAUGHTER)ALDEN: But the fear I saw in her eyes is something I so carry deep inside me. We carry our people's trauma in our bodies.DONNELLA: But Will also talked about the way that trauma can be channeled into meaning and action. He said that, for a long time, he felt resigned to the state of the world. But when his son was born, Will said his heart expanded and so did his sense of his own obligations.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)ALDEN: How can the experience of Jewish parenthood not cause your heart to ache for Palestine? I feel there's pain in my body, and all I can think about every day is the children of Gaza.DONNELLA: And, you know, Will ended his speech with a pretty intense thought. He said that the soul of the Jewish people is being poisoned by the idea that Jewish safety requires unconditionally supporting the Israeli government and military.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)ALDEN: The question is whether we accept this poison or stand up in our fury and demand a different way. All of us together, saying not in our name.UNIDENTIFIED GROUP #3: Not in our name.ALDEN: Not in our name.UNIDENTIFIED GROUP #3: Not in our name.DEMBY: So Leah, you and I have talked offline about the ways that Jewish American identity has been tied to the state of Israel for a long time. So I imagine for the people, you know, observing the shiva, that this is a very fraught place for them to be in.DONNELLA: For a lot of people, it was. And that's why this shiva - this very unusual shiva - to me, felt like a small window into something much broader that's been happening for a while now. There's a generation of Jews who are trying to break away from what used to be a given in many Jewish spaces - that if you were Jewish, you would support Israel, and that was that.DEMBY: And that's what we're talking about today on the show.DONNELLA: That's right. In the wake of October 7, it's clear that that mainstream consensus no longer exists and probably hasn't for a long time. Jewish belief ranges from the staunchest support of Israel to the most blistering critique of the state. And as more and more Jews speak out against the actions of the Israeli government and military, it's exposing deep rifts within Jewish communities, including ones that are threatening to break friendships, families and institutions apart.DEMBY: Wow. OK. That's coming up. Stay with us, y'all.DONNELLA: Gene, part of the reason I wanted to do this episode, and also part of the reason that I was very nervous about doing this episode, is that, almost immediately, in the days following October 7, I started to realize that there was a divide within my own family when it came to Israel. Different people had really different perceptions of what was going on, who was to blame and what was at stake.DEMBY: Hmm. I'm sure. Did that surprise you?DONNELLA: The positions, no, but the intensity, yes - and it did make me curious about how this was going down in other Jewish families since I did not want to interview my own family for the show.DEMBY: (Laughter) Understandably, yeah.DONNELLA: And I was particularly curious about what this was like for the growing number of Jewish people who were going against the grain and questioning the actions of Israel.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)DONNELLA: So I started asking people if they had stories they were willing to share about how all of this was affecting their relationships, friendships and communities. And even though the people I spoke to had a wide variety of life circumstances, there were definitely some consistencies in what they told me.DEMBY: What kind of stuff did they have in common?DONNELLA: Well, for one, they were all devastated by what Israel is doing to Gaza, and they all felt implicated in it to a certain degree. Almost everyone brought up the word complicit. They've all been in the midst of really painful, intense arguments with friends and family, some of which have led to severing relationships, and they are all trying really hard to figure out what to do as human beings, as Americans and, again, as Jews specifically.DEMBY: OK, so tell me a little bit more about each of these people you spoke to.DONNELLA: OK. I'll start with Eli Klein (ph), the youngest of the bunch. They are 26, trans, from Texas, and this is what they wrote to me in an email.ELI KLEIN: Most members of my queer community are not Jewish and are loudly and proudly pro-Palestine. I also consider myself a loud and proud pro-Palestinian. The difference, though, is that I do see the nuance, and yet I feel like I am not allowed to point out these nuances or else I will be labeled as complicit in genocide.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)DONNELLA: I called Eli up to get a little bit more of their backstory, and they told me that, growing up, they learned to love Israel.KLEIN: I can still recite the Israeli national anthem from memory and even went there twice. Growing up, I was only ever around Zionist Jews. I didn't even know it was possible to be Jewish and not love Israel.DONNELLA: That all changed around the time they went to college. They moved to a new city, started meeting people who were openly critical of Israel and eventually took a class by a Palestinian professor, which gave a fuller perspective of the creation of Israel, and that was kind of a turning point.DEMBY: Ah, so the classic college bubble-bursting experience.DONNELLA: Classic, yes. So now, Eli is a vocal critic of the war in Gaza and a supporter of Palestinian rights. But as you heard them say earlier, they've kind of been taken aback by a lack of nuance that they've experienced in some places.KLEIN: Many of my non-Jewish friends who only have learned about the history of the region in the last few months have shared calls for a total dismantlement of the state of Israel, some even calling for all the Jews to go back to whatever country they came from. It's as if they think the state of Israel was created in a vacuum.DONNELLA: But Eli still remembers well what they learned about Israel growing up - that, in the years following the Holocaust, it was a place that many Jewish refugees went when they felt there was nowhere else for them to go, no home country to return to. So now, Eli is kind of in a fraught position, attending protests and events in support of Palestinian rights, but, in some personal conversations, feeling a pretty constant vigilance to try and bring context and push back on some of the things that they find problematic.KLEIN: On one hand, I am not anti-Zionist enough. On the other hand, I am too anti-Zionist.DONNELLA: That's the position that Matt Kopans (ph), from upstate New York, finds himself in, too - only, for Matt, the fault lines are around age more than anything else.MATT KOPANS: I think there's a clear generational divide among American Jews, at least in my family.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)DONNELLA: Matt is 43, and he's way more critical of Israel than his parents' generation, who he says think Israel can basically do no wrong. But he's way more sympathetic to Israel than his kids' generation, who he says are at the far other end of the spectrum, which he says all kind of came to a head at Thanksgiving last year.KOPANS: We all knew we were going to discuss it 'cause, you know, we're a large Jewish family. We talk about everything. We talk loudly about everything. And at some point, like, you know, is anyone not discussing Gaza?DONNELLA: There were about 50 people at this dinner, ranging in ages from, you know, mid-90s to young kids. Matt felt pulled in different directions during what became an intense night of arguing, and it's something that's still keeping him up at night.KOPANS: When you know something bad is happening, but you don't know what you can do about it, and it feels like it's - especially since it feels like it reflects on you personally or you're somehow complicit in it - it's awful. It's not like, well, Matt, if you think about this long enough, you can actually create peace in the Middle East. Like, so it just - it - I just - I'm just agonizing over it because I'm Jewish and, like, we agonize over things, I guess.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)DEMBY: All right. So we just heard from a Gen Zer and a Gen Xer. But you spoke to an older person, too, right?DONNELLA: I did. Yeah. Her name is Eva Hutt (ph).DEMBY: OK.DONNELLA: She's 71. And she's a retired physician who lives in Denver. And she also describes herself as mixed-race.DEMBY: And is Eva stuck in the middle somewhere, too?DONNELLA: Yes and no. Here's how she described her situation to me.EVA HUTT: My kids in Israel are as opposed to what the current regimes are doing as I am. I have a son in the U.S. whose reaction is more Zionist than mine. He's visibly Jewish and so much more aware of antisemitism in his daily and work life than I am.DONNELLA: She said she works hard to keep lines of communication open about Israel with her son and two of her brothers. But...HUTT: My third brother is a settler in the West Bank. Israel-Palestine has not been open for discussion between us for more than 30 years.DEMBY: Mmm. OK.DONNELLA: So Eva is navigating a lot within her family, but she's pretty clear about what she believes herself. She's been involved in antiwar activism and protesting Israel for more than 50 years now - from the time she was, you know, a mouthy teen getting into fights with her rabbi at her confirmation classes.DEMBY: OK. So Eva's been a rabble-rouser for a long time.DONNELLA: She has. And she said she's seen how things wax and wane.HUTT: I'm thinking about - the first time I took a very public stance in Denver was during the massacre in Lebanon at Sabra and Shatila.DONNELLA: That was in 1982, and it was just one of the many times that Eva would see tensions around Israel's action spike. And right after October 7, Eva said, suddenly, all of the arguments and raw nerves of the past were right at the surface again.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)HUTT: You know, Jews just go from - they just go to that scared place, which is such an ugly place. You know, it's like your limbic system just kicks in automatically. And that's what makes it so difficult.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)DONNELLA: Despite the difficulty, Eva has kept trying to push the conversation forward. Most recently, she organized a dialogue series at her shul to get people with different views to start listening to each other. She says it was heated at times but still powerful.HUTT: So some of it is an act of will. You know the Gramsci expression, pessimism of the mind (ph), optimism of the will? That's where I'm at. And that despair is really not an option.DONNELLA: And since October 7, she said she's heartened by seeing more Jews call for limits on the U.S.'s military support of Israel, from everyday people to powerful politicians like Chuck Schumer.HUTT: Like, you know, before the war, that would not have happened. It needed to happen, but the only people who were talking about that were Jewish voices for peace, and now lots of people are talking about it. That energizes me.DONNELLA: Gene, one of the people who's talking about this stuff now, who wasn't always, is Will Alden.Hi.ALDEN: Hey, Leah. How are you?DONNELLA: Good. How are you doing?ALDEN: Good, thanks. Thanks for coming over.DONNELLA: Oh, thanks for having me.DEMBY: OK, so Will Alden - he's the dude we heard at the shiva.DONNELLA: Yeah. I met him at his house on his lovely little back patio in LA because, following that powerful speech he had made, I wanted to know if he had the secret to talking to other Jews about his beliefs. And I was a little surprised to find that he was actually somewhat new to activism. The first time he attended an IfNotNow event was actually only in the spring of 2023. It was a workshop called Unpacking Antisemitism.ALDEN: I remember driving home from that event and feeling almost euphoric. I felt - which is kind of strange for an event about antisemitism.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)DONNELLA: He said he felt like he'd finally found a community.DEMBY: Which had been hard for him to find until that point, I take it.DONNELLA: Exactly - in part because he didn't totally know what to look for. Growing up, Will had a lot of Jewish friends and family and celebrated Jewish holidays, but the biggest part of his Judaism, he said, came from his mother.ALDEN: Who, you know, when I was very young, instilled in me a fear of antisemitism and a fear particularly around the Holocaust.DEMBY: Yeah, we heard him talk during the rally about that Stussy S example.DONNELLA: Mmm hmm. And Will wasn't sure what to do with this fear. On the one hand, he didn't feel like his mom's fears were really mapping onto his life as a relatively privileged white kid growing up in Santa Monica. But then, when he becomes a young adult, Donald Trump is elected. And then shortly after, Charlottesville happens.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)UNIDENTIFIED GROUP #4: (Chanting) ...Will not replace us. Jews will not replace us.ALDEN: That event sort of gave me a new awareness of myself as Jewish. And what was interesting about that is it kind of corresponded to the way I'd been taught to think about Jewishness when I was young.DONNELLA: But as Will kept engaging with Judaism over the years, his perspective changed. He started reading and writing about Jewish identity - you know, trying to form his own adult relationship with this ancient religion with thousands of years of culture and practice that go far beyond antisemitism. And when Will's son was born in 2022...ALDEN: I wanted him to have at least some kind of Jewish community growing up. And - but I also wanted him to have a Jewish community that I could feel really excited about and proud of.DEMBY: Yeah, man. Having a kid - it forces you to really think hard about which parts of your life you want to pass on and which stuff you really need to get a handle on and figure out real quick, especially around these issues of identity. But Leah, I'm curious - how does Israel factor into all this?DONNELLA: As Will is learning more about Judaism, Israel is coming up quite a lot, and it actually becomes a big point of discussion between Will and one of his good friends because they're both really concerned with the question of Jewish safety, but that leads them to having kind of opposite perspectives on Israel.DEMBY: Huh. OK. Say more about that.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)DONNELLA: Yeah. So Will's friend thinks that a highly militarized Israel is necessary as a safeguard against global antisemitism, and Will is starting to believe the opposite - that the actions of the Israeli government are directly making the world less safe for Jews everywhere. And then October 7 happens.DEMBY: And that, of course, is a cataclysm.DONNELLA: Yep. And what these two friends had been talking about somewhat distantly was now playing out in real time, and Will said his friend was getting increasingly upset about the antisemitism that he was starting to see on social media and in the news.ALDEN: And yeah, I was also upset by that, but that wasn't foremost in my mind. I was more thinking about the stuff Israel was already doing, which was dropping bombs on Gaza.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)DEMBY: So yeah, October 7, I imagine, could be seen as evidence by either of them - right? - to make their point.DONNELLA: Right. And the more time that passes after October 7, the more Israel's response escalates, which makes Will even more confident that he needs to fight against Israel's treatment of Palestinians.ALDEN: I'm not going to accept actual oppression of another group of people in the name of some hypothetical future security for our people.(SOUNDBITE OF VASCO AND PATRICK TALBOT RICHARD WEST'S "ROADS LESS TRAVELLED")DONNELLA: So Gene, Will leans into this new role for him of being an activist and speaking out against Israel. And when we come back, we're going to talk about how that role fits into a long and sometimes tortured history of American Jewish critics of the Jewish state.DEMBY: All right. Stay with us.(SOUNDBITE OF VASCO AND PATRICK TALBOT RICHARD WEST'S "ROADS LESS TRAVELLED")DEMBY: Gene.DONNELLA: Leah.DEMBY: CODE SWITCH. So Leah, before the break, we were talking about these tense, painful divisions that are coming to the surface in Jewish communities over the question of Israel. But obviously, this isn't brand new, right? So I'm curious - like, do we know where these divides begin?MARJORIE FELD: The truth of it is that as early as Jewish nationalism was on the scene in American Jewish life, so were questions about the role that that might play in American Jewish life.DEMBY: Oh, OK. So who is that we're hearing?DONNELLA: That is a woman named Marjorie Feld.FELD: I'm a professor of history at Babson College, and I just wrote a book that's coming out in May called "Threshold Of Dissent: A History Of American Jewish Critics Of Zionism."DEMBY: Damn. So she's, like, the perfect person to talk to. And her book is not even out yet?DONNELLA: I know. That's why you have to read the press release email chain.DEMBY: Right. Right.DONNELLA: Anyway, I wanted to get a scope of how these discussions have played out over time, so I asked Marjorie how common it was for American Jews to be critical of Israel throughout history.FELD: Oh, it's always a very marginal population - a very marginal number of American Jews - especially in the early 20th century and, obviously, especially in the mid-20th century - right? - after the Holocaust.DONNELLA: There have always been vocal anti-Zionist Jews, she said, but they haven't had a really prominent voice in mainstream Judaism until more recently, which is one of the reasons why she says every generation of Jews that speaks out against Israel thinks it's the first.DEMBY: Mmm. Wow. OK. I know we're going to get into this. But because you just used the phrase anti-Zionist, I feel like now is probably a good time to get some definitions out the way since different people use the term Zionism and anti-Zionism really, really differently.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)DONNELLA: Yes, good point. OK. In her book, Marjorie really talks about three different groups, Zionists, anti-Zionists and non-Zionists. So Zionists, super broadly, are people who believe in the need for a Jewish nation-state in the land of Israel. Non-Zionists believe that Israel is an important cultural and religious center for Jews, but that it doesn't need to be a country.DEMBY: OK.DONNELLA: And anti-Zionists are specifically against the idea of a Jewish nation-state. And as you just heard her say, those last two groups have always been fairly small.DEMBY: OK, so where does the history of anti- and non-Zionist Jewish thought begin in the United States?DONNELLA: Well, in her book, Marjorie really starts the story in 1885, with something called the Pittsburgh Platform.FELD: The Pittsburgh Platform was one of those central platforms to American Reform Judaism, which is one denomination within American Judaism, and it was an antinationalist platform that really saw American Jewish peoplehood as grounded in religious life.DONNELLA: In other words, they were arguing Judaism is a religion, not a race or a nation, and that idea is then championed by this group called the American Council for Judaism. And they're one of the groups in the U.S. that's consistently vocally critical of the idea of Zionism. Marjorie says this is all happening in the early 20th century, in the context of xenophobia and Jim Crow and state-sanctioned antisemitism.FELD: So this is, you know, a perilous time. And this was a group of relatively elite Jews who rejected Zionism as it was emerging so central to American Jewish life because they felt that it would make Jews vulnerable to accusations of dual loyalty, which has been a long-standing, you know, sort of antisemitic accusation - that Jews aren't loyal to the United States.DONNELLA: So actually, assimilation was a huge factor that shaped a lot of anti-Zionist thought amongst American Jewish communities. A lot of Jews wanted to really stake a firmer claim in whiteness, and they thought that focusing on Israel would be counterproductive. It might, as Marjorie writes, serve as a racializing force, separating them as a people and preventing them from the security of full integration. It might even make them seem - gasp - more Middle Eastern.DEMBY: Mmm. So obviously, we've done a lot of episodes about immigration and immigrant populations and the way people form their identities, and this comes up all the time - right? - leaning into Americanness as, like, an avenue into whiteness. OK. So today, it seems like the leftiest (ph) Jews are the most likely to be anti-Zionist, but what Marjorie is saying is that was kind of reversed in the early 1900s. It was, like, a respectability thing - a more - small C - conservative impulse.DONNELLA: Mmm hmm.DEMBY: Huh.DONNELLA: Yeah. Meanwhile, the Jews who were talking about a Jewish state in the early 1900s were not generally as concerned with blending in. A lot of them were like, no, we're not the same as white Christian Americans, and we don't want to be.DEMBY: Fascinating. Huh.DONNELLA: Now, mind you, this is still decades before the state of Israel would actually be created. So among Zionists, there was a diversity of ideas about what that state could look like. Would people speak Hebrew or Yiddish? Would it be in the Middle East or Europe or the Americas? All the dreaming and debating and politicking around this was still somewhat hypothetical in those days.DEMBY: Right. And of course, you're talking about the late 1800s to early 1900s, so, relatedly, this is all, obviously, before the Holocaust.DONNELLA: Yep. And after the Holocaust, the conversation totally changes.FELD: Almost all organizations really mute the criticism. Maybe mute isn't the right word. I just think they have to see everything through the lens of the tremendous destr