Apart from some who have spent their lives exclusively in ḥaredi communities, most American Jews have encountered Hebrew or Aramaic prayers transliterated into the Latin alphabet for the benefit of the English-speaking reader. Jenna Weissman Joselit traces the origins of this practice—an inversion of the much older and more widespread Jewish habit of rendering the vernacular in Hebrew characters—to a work published in 1908:

The Hebrew Hymnal for School and Home . . . was compiled and edited jointly by Mathilde Schechter and Lewis Isaacs, with a helping hand from Henrietta Szold. Widely advertised in the Anglo-Jewish press, the 67-page collection was touted as “just the book that has been wanted for some time. It is not too long, it confines itself to the best known Jewish hymns . . . and is clearly printed and moderate in price.”

Its “get-up,” as much as its selection of tunes, made the Hebrew Hymnal particularly attractive to the American Jewish public, “meet[ing] its approval.” For the very first time, or so it was proudly maintained, transliteration loomed large on the page, side by side with musical notations, Hebrew text, and an English translation. By making the melody and the lyrics accessible, explained its compilers, this volume “sounds the echo of joy and sorrow, in jubilation and wailing, in merry and plaintive, yes, heart-breaking tunes, [of] these Jewish folk-songs of the centuries gone by.”

Thanks to its newfound association with both song and Jewish tradition (all those “echoes”), transliteration now acquired a new lease on life. . . . Once heralded as a boon, it didn’t take long before transliteration migrated once again, this time from the hymnal to the siddur, where it was linked to those moments in the prayer service when the congregation—especially its female members, whose access to formal Hebrew training left a lot to be desired—sang out to God.

The linguistic equivalent of having your cake and eating it, too, transliteration made it possible for legions of American Jews to experience Hebrew without having to learn it. Of a piece with so much else that was characteristic of the American Jewish experience, this practice similarly celebrated—and prioritized—emotion at the expense of literacy, feeling Jewish at the expense of cultural immersion.

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.