Sharon Avni maps Hebrew’s pull on American Jews in new book

Sharon Avni built Speaking of Hebrew: What Language Does for American Jews on more than 100 interviews with adults she calls “Hebrew enthusiasts.”

The professor of academic literacy and linguistics at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College published the book with Wayne State University Press and spoke to JTA from her New Jersey home.

Avni, 56, sets out a single argument. “The main argument of the book is that Hebrew is doing important work for American Jews, whether they’re talking about it and discussing their concerns, their values and their commitments, or whether they’re talking in it and just trying to figure out what kind of American Jew they want to be,” she said.

What does Hebrew do for American Jews?

Avni treats Hebrew as a working language of American Jewish debate, connecting it to identity, communal anxiety and the contested place of Israel within that debate. In her JTA interview, she said: “I started to just see that the American Jewish community talks a lot about Hebrew.” She added: “It shows up all the time, just constantly in all sorts of other topics.”

Avni writes that “[a]ny discussion about American Jews and Hebrew can never be wholly untethered from American Jews’ relationship to Israel and Israelis.”

For Avni, Hebrew earns its place in American Jewish life through argument and belonging, not only through prayer.

Why do adults return to Hebrew?

The JTA writer gave up Sunday mornings and Wednesday afternoons to “Hebrew school,” learning to read and pronounce Hebrew without understanding the words. Later, a three-month immersion “ulpan” at a moshav outside Jerusalem, and subsequent ulpanim, mostly taught the writer that the language is really difficult.

A larger vocabulary then brought sharper readings of Jewish texts and prayers, better understanding of Israel and, in the writer’s account, a more authentic Jewish identity.

Avni followed a similar route. She learned the letters in a Conservative synagogue in Westchester County, New York, and is not a native speaker despite her Hebrew-sounding name. Her teachers gave her a solid foundation in reading and writing, but years and several false starts passed before the language itself began to make sense.

As a teenager, she attended Young Judaea camps where Hebrew formed part of the culture, and she later coauthored a scholarly book on summer camp Hebrew. A gap-year program took her to Israel, where she lived nearly eight years and earned a graduate degree in language education at Tel Aviv University.

Back in the United States, Avni found Hebrew central to communal argument. Educators, rabbis and communal leaders loaded anxieties about assimilation, identity and “the future of American Jewry itself” onto the language and its absence, she writes.

Both the author and the scholar describe persistence rather than mastery.

How did Hebrew become a test of authenticity?

Jewish thinkers have mourned the lost proficiency of English-speaking American Jews for decades. In the 1930s, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan argued that Hebrew was essential to connect American Jews to their tradition and to one another. In the 1990s, the literary scholar Ruth Wisse called Hebrew a “Jewish imperative.” The critic Leon Wieseltier warned in 2008: “Jewish tradition will not disappear entirely in America; but most of it will certainly disappear.”

Those arguments cast Hebrew as religious, cultural and historical inheritance, the language of the Bible, rabbinic texts and the prayerbook. Avni challenges the resulting deficit model, which measures American Jews by the proficiency they lack and treats a Jewish life lived in translation as inauthentic or lesser. She accepts that critique only in part.

“If English is the means by which American Jews feel like they can engage with this incredible textual tradition,” she said, “the insistence that English is somehow inferior can leave people wondering where that leaves them.”

Avni also notes the strain on supplementary school teachers, who compress Jewish history, Israel, the Holocaust and Jewish texts into a few hours each week. She hears adults who remember “Hebrew school” as a form of punishment for having been born Jewish.

Zionist educators still insist on Hebrew’s primacy, and Jewish day schools boast of their immersion curriculums, the JTA feature notes. Many of those adults returned to Hebrew later, without any “practical” purpose, Avni writes.

Why is Hebrew political now?

Modern Hebrew is the living language of Israel, and Avni ties its study to the joys and controversies of attachment to the Jewish state. The language war of the early 20th century, when Hebraists vanquished Yiddishists in developing a national language for the budding Jewish state, has returned to argument as Jewish anti-Zionists have embraced Yiddish and dismissed Hebrew as the language of a nationalism they reject.

The JTA feature reports that Jewish readers recoiled “just last month” when a new book claimed that punctuation marks in Hebrew “are relics of a brutal colonial system.”

Avni keeps both camps in view. “I think people are looking to language to do their political work, whatever side they’re on,” she said.

For American Jews, Hebrew now carries political work on both sides, even where fluency stays out of reach.

What happens in Hebrew classes?

Avni attended Hebrew clubs and classes on Zoom and in person. Some participants wanted to understand the prayerbook better or read an Israeli poem in the original. Others sought a stronger connection to the Jewish past, or a version of Jewish community among “meshugayim l’devar,” Hebrew for people who tend to geek out over a topic or hobby.

That last route mattered most to people seeking a Jewish identity outside the synagogue and other establishment institutions. Avni writes of one 58-year-old Bostonian: “Hebrew filled a Jewish space in her life, but the boundaries and content of this space were unclear, as she was not observant or affiliated with a synagogue.”

Avni told JTA: “They see it as a way to do their American Jewish life.” She added: “They don’t need to be fluent for it to be meaningful for them as American Jews.”

Partial command can carry that meaning. Learners read a prayer, recognize a word in a Jewish text, take a class or drop a Hebrew expression into an otherwise English conversation. The linguist Lewis Glinert calls the use of a few token words “smatteracy.”

The JTA writer uses terms such as “balagan” for a big mess and “Al lo davar” for don’t mention it with like-minded Jews, and describes the resulting sense of kinship as a secret handshake, a password at the speakeasy, a key to the VIP lounge.

Avni saw the same function in her subjects. “They might not be fully experts, but they’re part of something,” she said. “And I think that’s really important.”

Avni’s evidence gives Hebrew clubs and schools a practical test: keep serving adults who value partial fluency, because belonging, not expertise, brought them back.