What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) ed. by Naomi B. Sokoloff & Nancy E. Berg (review)

You would be forgiven for mistaking the story of poet Robert White-hill-Bashan for a magic-realism novella: deep in the heart of Texas, an American-born poet teaches himself Hebrew as a teenager, produces four books of admirable Hebrew poetry in the following four decades, then moves to Hollywood to launch a successful career as a septuagenarian actor. The story is true: Whitehill-Bashan is the sole American-born poet writing in Hebrew today, decades after the zenith of Hebraist culture in the United States, with its small constellation of Ivrit B'ivrit teacher training institutes and Hebrew-immersion camps, its dedicated coterie of Hebrew writers and thinkers. This heady, seemingly improbable poetic flowering in the American heartland—a "literary miracle" in the words of scholar Michael Weingrad—suggests that Hebrew has not yet exhausted its astonishments in the New World. Indeed, the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) proposes that teaching, studying, and even writing Hebrew stateside is an endeavor ripe for reclamation, reconsideration, and renewal. The writers, educators, and scholars between its covers promise that the story of Hebrew in America is yet unfolding.

As the introduction by editors Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg, and the volume's subsequent material, makes clear, the problems besetting Hebrew within the academy, and in the larger Jewish community, are manifold. Hebrew faces particularly cumbersome obstacles among modern languages: a Jewish populace that is increasingly diffuse and assimilated; a pedagogical environment, in the college classroom, complicated by Jewish "heritage" learners with little to no actual facility with the spoken or written language; declining enrollments in languages and the humanities generally; and a political landscape in which Hebrew, as the language of modern Israel, is bound up with vigorous, sometimes hostile critiques of its place on the contemporary campus. Consider this grim scenario: in the last decade, enrollments in Hebrew, along with ancient Greek, have declined more precipitously than any other languages of study. In light of this reality, is there a path forward for Hebrew? This book answers a decisive "yes," and considers the most meaningful and probable ways to ensure Hebrew's future in the United States. The essays in this volume propose new forms, new frames, and new connective pathways for doing so. This includes embracing Hebrew-language-related blogs, podcasts, streaming video, and other new media; amplifying the process of translating Hebrew within the classroom, as a resonant and indispensable pedagogical and intellectual experience; and privileging a flexible admixture of Hebrew and English in Jewish communal spaces, over the more purist linguistic goal of proficiency.

Not surprisingly, the question of authenticity looms large, and many contributors make a compelling case for the distinctive vantage point of the non-native adept of Hebrew. In his memoir-essay of devoted apprenticeship to Hebrew, personal and professional, the late literary scholar Alan Mintz writes of "near-nativeness" as a fruitful position from which to wrestle with Hebrew language and literature. "There is a lot that I miss by virtue of not being a native," he concludes, "but as a near native there is a lot that I can see that the native will never appreciate." (226) In a similar vein, Adam Rovner finds in his students' mis-readings of Hebrew literature an opening up of the field of meaning—a spur to engaged classroom discussions and fuel, too, for his own thinking about what it means to mediate art in academic settings. This book vigorously argues for the intellectual and cognitive benefits afforded by a degree of perpetual outsider-ness to the Hebrew language.

What is more, many contributors insist that studying Hebrew per se, especially against the grain of nativeness, provides unique advantages to teachers and...