Writer Claims Jewish Studies Programs in American Higher Education Are a Waste
Shared by citizenwald, 1 save total
McWhorter Three resilient myths about English[bizarre names for groups of animals; languages become simpler with time; Appalachians speak Elizabethan English]
"
August 6, 2026
Pablo Delcan
Farewell to ‘flamboyance’
By John McWhorter
Three things that people often mention to me, as a linguist, leave me wondering whether to just nod politely or disappoint them with the truth. In this space, I feel that I should deal only with the truth, so if I may, prepare for some fun-fact disappointment! Here are those things people share with me with bright eyes.
English has a long list of fancy names for groups of animals. Not just the boring old herd of cows, flock of birds and gaggle of geese. There is also a murder of crows, a flamboyance of flamingos, a tower of giraffes, a charm of goldfinches, a conspiracy of lemurs, an ostentation of peacocks, a dazzle of zebras and so on.
These collective words always seemed a little suspicious. Almost none of them are actually used. When is the last time you heard someone talking about a smack of jellyfish?
In fact, many of these words were made up. The collective fun was kicked off back in 1486 by a prioress, Juliana Berners, in an arch tome cataloging the activities of a gentleman, “The Book of Saint Albans.” In the list of animal collectives, Berners was clearly having a little fun, as in coming up with group names for humans like a “blast of hunters” and a “melody of harpers.” There were new editions of the book into the 17th century. The ones about flamboyant flamingos and ostentatious peacocks are of later vintage than the original book.
These words are certainly fun, but ultimately most of them are less words than jokes. Comprehensive dictionaries list neither a peacock-related definition of “ostentation” nor one of “bloat” referring to hippopotamuses. These words are a part of the English language in much the same way that I possess an Estonian translation of the book “Ragtime” and an ocarina, neither of which I ever touch, though I am vaguely pleased that they are around.
Languages get easier over time. It’s easy to suppose so. We can hear things wearing away because of how quickly we talk — “What did you do that for?” becomes “Dja do that for?” We see the distinction between “lie” and “lay” eroding and people using “infer” to mean “imply.” Even if you know that such things are inevitable as a language changes, it looks like decay. Especially if we compare Old English — a much busier grammar that was essentially a flavor of German — with the modern language.
But actually, English’s story was unusual as the world’s 7,000 languages go. Normally, languages do not simplify over time; they morph. Some things go, but new things are always coming in. It’s like a lava lamp: The blob doesn’t get simpler or more complicated; it just changes. Old Church Slavonic was an ancient Slavic language. It was incredibly complicated, and adult learners would have found it gloriously frustrating. A modern Slavic language is Russian. It is incredibly complicated, and adult learners find it gloriously frustrating. That’s how language changes normally.
If vast numbers of adults learn a language at some point, it gets somewhat more streamlined because adults aren’t great at mastering the heavy-lift bits of a language the way children are. But there are always new things happening under the hood. If you say “Let’s try it and see” at normal speed, it often comes out as “T’stry it and see.” Once it’s just “t’s-,” “let” is lost to the ages, and English has a new prefix: “T’s-” means “join me.”
In the end, the reason we know languages don’t just simplify over time is common sense. Human language has probably existed for at least 100,000 years and possibly almost a million. If languages had all been getting ever easier over all of that time, humans worldwide would just be yelling “ah,” pointing at things and gesturing frantically. Despite occasional appearances otherwise, we are doing better than that.
In the Appalachians there are people still speaking Elizabethan English. Goodness, wouldn’t that be nice? It would mean that in those mountains, we could visit places where people were speaking the English of Shakespeare’s time. But wouldn’t that be on YouTube by now?
Yet it makes sense that this idea holds on, as smart people have been broadcasting it since the late 1800s. The idea is that Appalachians were traditionally so isolated that their English stayed the same while everybody else’s moved on. “The Southern mountaineers are the conservators of Old, early and Elizabethan English in the New World,” the folklorist Josiah Combs taught us in 1916, and “isolated from the outside world, and shut in by natural barriers, they have for more than two centuries preserved much of the language of Elizabethan England.”
People like this man meant well. They were trying to portray Appalachian English as exotic rather than broken. But language change never stops. Why would people’s language freeze in place just because they don’t interact much with outsiders? Plus, by the time white people got to the Appalachians in the 1700s, they weren’t speaking Elizabethan English anymore.
Understanding why this myth exists takes just a simple change of lens. Promulgators of the myth hear ancient past tense verbs like “holp” for “helped” and “fotch” for “fetched” and think of Appalachian speech as antique because verbs like that were a part of Elizabethan English. In mainstream American English, we replaced “holp” and “fotch” with “helped” and “fetched” long ago.
But forms of a language in different places hold on to some things and shed others, largely for reasons of chance. In Appalachian speech, people can let go of “caught,” “taught” and “knew” and say “catched,” “teached” and “knowed.” “Caught,” “taught” and “knew” are the forms that trace back to Elizabethan English and beyond. Here’s the lens change: Appalachian linguists hearing mainstream speakers use “caught,” “taught” and “knew” could easily decide that those forms are (sound the trumpets!) relics of antiquity.
So those are the truths. As is the fact that Berners’s is one of the earliest known English texts by a female author. And after the Civil War, some Southerners fled to Brazil. In one enclave called Americana, their descendants today can speak a 19th-century Southern American English.
Maybe that holp a bit?
"
Shared by citizenwald, 1 save total
How a United Nations study shatters the Gaza starvation narrative - The Jewish Chronicle
"How a United Nations study shatters the Gaza starvation narrative
The UNICEF-led survey found child malnutrition in Gaza to be exceptionally low by regional and even Western standards. The findings also undermine the key argument used to justify last year’s famine declaration
August 3, 2026 10:58
Humanitarian goods on their way to Gaza at the Israel border crossing (Image: COGAT/X)
3 min read
Add us as a preferred source
Anewly released UN-led nutrition survey of Gaza's children completely shatters the narrative promoted by advocacy organisations that continue to claim that its population – and children, in particular – is being deliberately starved. Equally important, it also deals a final blow to the highly controversial "famine" designation issued one year ago by the Famine Review Committee of the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system.
The survey, carried out under the coordination of the Nutrition Cluster – the UNICEF-led body that runs Gaza’s nutrition-surveillance system – measured the children’s weight, height and mid-upper-arm circumference. The data were then used to calculate the weight-for-height z-score, or WHZ – the standard indicator used by the World Health Organisation and other bodies to compare levels of acute malnutrition across populations and over time.
Contrary to the prevailing narrative, the survey found that acute malnutrition measured by WHZ ranged from merely 0.2 to 0.8 per cent across Gaza’s regions. For comparison, Gaza’s pre-war rate was 0.8 per cent – an already relatively low rate comparable to those seen in developed countries and well below those reported in nearby countries such as Egypt (2.9 per cent) or Jordan (2.0 per cent). In other words, the measured level of acute malnutrition is not only well below critical levels – it is exceptionally low by both regional and even Western standards.
The new findings don’t just completely debunk the latest iteration of the relentless narrative claiming Israel isn’t allowing enough food into Gaza – they also undermine the key argument used to justify the original famine declaration, which advocacy groups still cite as their evidentiary anchor.
To formally declare a Phase 5 "Famine", as the IPC did in August 2025, one required key condition is that at least 30 per cent of children under the age of five show acute malnutrition as measured by WHZ. Since WHZ data were not available for Gaza when famine was declared last year, the IPC relied instead on the more readily available mid-upper-arm circumference (MUAC) measurement. It further argued, on the basis of earlier global comparisons between the two indicators, that WHZ generally identifies roughly twice as many cases of acute malnutrition as MUAC, and hence that a much lower MUAC prevalence of 15 per cent could supposedly be treated as equivalent to the 30 per cent WHZ famine threshold.
As I wrote at the time in the Jewish Chronicle, this assumption was questionable even before any new data came out. The approximately 2-to-1 relationship between the two indicators invoked by the IPC was derived largely from comparisons involving countries in Africa, where WHZ frequently produces substantially higher malnutrition estimates than MUAC. However, evidence from the Middle East suggested that this relationship did not generally hold in the region. Moreover, some limited earlier data from Gaza itself indicated that it might actually be reversed there, with MUAC rates higher than WHZ rates rather than lower. In other words, there was no justification for treating a 15 per cent MUAC figure as “equivalent” to the 30 per cent WHZ famine threshold.
The new Nutrition Cluster survey now supplies the conclusive local comparison between the two malnutrition indicators and shows that the IPC’s central assumption was indeed wrong: WHZ rates in Gaza are not twice the MUAC rates – in fact, in this survey, they are consistently lower than MUAC rates in every area measured.
More from the JC
ISRAEL
Israel did not agree to Gaza withdrawal plan, says Netanyahu
By
Melanie Swan
1 min read
GAZA
Trump’s Hamas deal deserves credit – but the true test is whether the terrorists will disarm
By
Jonathan Harounoff
3 min read
GAZA
Donald Trump says Hamas disarmament agreed under Board of Peace plan for Gaza
By
JC Reporter
3 min read
The 2-to-1 ratio on which the IPC relied to justify its controversial 15 per cent “famine” threshold simply does not hold. And once that assumption collapses, so does the statistical basis for concluding that Gaza had crossed the catastrophic malnutrition threshold – a claim that was key to the August 2025 famine classification.
Advocacy groups continue to describe Gaza's children as facing a starvation crisis engineered by deliberate policy. The new nutritional data – collected under UN supervision using the same rigorous methodology applied in humanitarian settings worldwide – flatly contradict that narrative.
Malnutrition in Gaza today is not just low; it is at or below where it stood before the war and much lower than in nearby Egypt or Jordan. Moreover, the same findings also completely destroy the already shaky foundation on which last year’s “famine” designation was built.
Many researchers, including myself, argued at the time that the famine label was incompatible with what the data actually showed. Now, the UN’s own findings show unequivocally that our criticism was, indeed, correct.
Dr Mark Zlochin is a researcher and data analyst"
Shared by citizenwald, 2 saves total
Masochism or emancipation? Pinkwashing, resistance and solidarity with Gaza - K. Jews, Europe, 21st Century
"Masochism or emancipation? Pinkwashing, resistance and solidarity with Gaza
This week, our colleague Karl Kraus looks at the strange tendency of a considerable number of ultra-progressive, even revolutionary, activists to defend movements whose stated aim is to destroy them. Read about talking chickens, Queers for Palestine, lying and perfidious Jews, pinkwashing and the new concept of an old-fashioned avant-garde.
Alexander Rodchenko, extract from his poster Promotional poster for Rezinotrest, 1923, wikiart
An attentive reader of Roberto Bolaño’s monumental novel, 2666, will recall an episode towards the end where, in one of the dystopias that the book spins out, a young boy is abducted by aliens and dropped off in New York, where he meets a jazz musician. The musician tells him about “talking and probably thinking chickens” intelligent enough to rule the world. “The worst thing of all”, the musician told him, “is that the governments of the world know this very well, and that’s why there are so many chicken farms. The young boy objects that chickens are bred to be eaten. The musician replies that this is exactly what the chickens want. And he concludes by saying: Fucking masochistic chickens, they’ve got our leaders by the balls”.
Is the musician himself one of these chickens? A metonymy? Is he speaking on their behalf, expressing precisely the kind of omnipotence fantasy that drives the true masochist, the one who lives for being hurt while enjoying the idea that the person inflicting the pain would be nothing without the person experiencing it? Literary exegesis is of little importance here, the fact is that Bolaño, with the genius proper to great poets, captures in this little playlet the curious world of the masochist. It is true that suffering is being inflicted on him. But the fact that it is inflicted proves that it is the masochist who has got his torturer by the balls. The intense pleasure that the true masochist draws from his pain stems entirely from this conviction: the one who enjoys doing harm would be powerless without the one who suffers it and groans under the blows. So it’s the tormented one who actually holds all the power.
This feeling of power, which is part and parcel of the suffering being experienced, is the only somewhat rational explanation that can be found for the behaviour of certain factions of sexual minorities across the globe: Queers for Palestine, Gays for Gaza, Sexworkers support a free Palestine, Black Lesbians for Free Palestine – all slogans (and the list is far from complete) that leave anyone with the slightest knowledge of the real living conditions of non-heterosexual minorities in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, dumbfounded. Feminists, for their part, are not lacking in their support for the cause (https://www.instagram.com/palestinianfeministcollective/?hl=fr) without saying a word either about the condition of women in Palestine or about the rape of Israeli women and girls by the valiant fighters of the “Palestinian resistance”.
Fortunately, there are a number of justifications for this astonishing solidarity with those who lock up, or even simply kill, members of sexual minorities, keep their own women under a heavy yoke, and rape, sometimes to death, those of the ‘Zionist enemy’, on the part of those who constantly defend these minorities and women in the West. The first is given by Judith Butler, the leading light of the radical feminist and queer movements. The argument is worth summarising: Hamas is a resistance movement; as such, it is merely reacting to the violence that originated in Israel 75 years ago. It is therefore hypocritical and politically harmful to say that the violence of Hamas is barbaric and that of Israel legitimate. This is all the more true because at the moment this violence by the “Zionists” – Butler insists on saying “Zionists” and never “Israelis” – is aimed at civilians. Since civilians are being targeted, we have to speak of genocide in Gaza.
Everything is factually wrong in this argument, which calls for the expulsion, to say the least, of the Israelis from Palestine. But let’s try to understand how it works, since Butler is a world-renowned intellectual whose influence is still growing. This first line of justification for solidarity with a political regime that would normally be pilloried by someone like Butler and her followers is a movement in support of a liberation struggle. Israel is an imperialist and colonial force – which is why the state of Israel is never named, but only referred to as ‘Zionists’ – that must be driven from the land of Palestine. This liberation struggle takes precedence over all other struggles. Marxism in the 1960s had a word for this position, which at the time was precisely supposed to silence the emancipatory demands of working-class women: “principal contradiction”. The theory was that class society alone was the basis of all inequalities, and that the condition of women (a secondary contradiction) would be resolved naturally after the revolution. So, please be patient…
Judith Butler, who has never been particularly interested in exploitation or the poor in her own country, precisely because she argues that the condition of women, homosexuals and queers is not secondary and must be thought of independently of the ‘social question’, seems to believe that when it comes to Palestine, on the other hand, we must temporarily sacrifice women, homosexuals and gender minorities, because everything will be better after Palestine is liberated anyway. Just as the Communist Party of the 1960s theorised the inferior condition of women, including in the workers’ movement, as a consequence of the capitalist system and thus made it a subject not to be dealt with here and now, Butler theorises the hatred of sexual minorities and the situation of Palestinian women as caused by the Zionist occupier. Logically, we should not deal with them here and now, but support the struggle for liberation at all costs. Let’s all cheer for the artist who, by drawing inspiration from a way of thinking that has been out of date for over fifty years, has created a new category of intellectual: that of the old-fashioned avant-garde.
However, there is a second line of justification for such solidarity. It is based on a much more complicated fantasy. Not that of Israel as the cause of every inhuman act the Palestinians can commit, but that of a perfidious Israel. Perfidia judaïca, as ever, but this time in a new guise. Here, it is argued that the absolute freedom and rights granted to sexual and gender minorities in Israel, as well as the total equality between men and women in Israeli civil society, are merely a devious strategy by the “Zionist entity” to divert the attention of global emancipation movements from what it is inflicting on the Palestinians. Just as other emancipatory movements accuse multinational corporates of “greenwashing” when they over-publicise their poor environmental protection measures, the vanguard – this time the least old-fashioned – of the emancipatory movements of sexual and gender minorities, in collaboration with a certain branch of feminism, declare that Israel’s policy in their favour is nothing more than “pinkwashing”.
The idea is that Israel paints itself pink to camouflage the bloodstains that cover its entire existence since 1948. In neon pink we presume, otherwise the colour would be particularly ill-chosen to cover such dark stains… Anyway, what they are saying is that if women and LGBT+ people enjoy full rights in Israel, it is certainly not because Israel is a democratic state under the rule of law. Not at all. If they are granted these rights, it is only to lure the international LGBT+ and feminist community into falling into the trap of Jewish perfidy and forgetting the fate of other victims of injustice. “You don’t hurt me, you must be a bastard” seems to be the hard (or twisted) thinking behind this form of denunciation of Israel.
Here is a line of the solidarity shown with Gaza and its political regime that really does come close to the structure of masochism – whereas Butler’s argument is more a case of the typical narcissism of the well-established and well-off American academic, convinced that it is her who decides what is true and what is not, whatever the cost in terms of coherence of thought. The ‘pinkwashing’ argument is more curious, and therefore interesting.
Its masochistic structure gives it a twist that allows for a renewal of the accusation of perfidy today. Superficially, one might think that this masochism can be summed up in a preference for the one who guarantees, in no uncertain terms, the mistreatment of sexual minorities and women, and not only Israeli women when its fighters manage to make them their prey, namely the political regime in Gaza. For a simple-minded masochist, this must be a reassuring option. But why accompany the expression of this perfectly legitimate personal preference with a ferocious hatred of the democratic rule of law? Why suspect him of double-dealing and perfidy in order to legitimise his preference for those who do harm? Quite simply because that’s precisely the point. Solidarity with Gaza, or even Palestine, is of no interest whatsoever to these emancipation movements. What really happens there is basically irrelevant to them. The passion that drives them is to uncover the perfidy, the double-dealing, the deception that, in truth, lies at the foundation of all democratic societies. This quest for truth cannot fail to focus on the greatest liars of all time: the Jews.
There is in fact a political pathology of our time. It’s as if some of these emancipation movements no longer know what to do once their fight for rights has been successful. Of course, for a time, one can and must continue to fight against a society that, in its inward-looking attitudes, continues to discriminate against sexual minorities, while the State, i.e. the legislation that has succeeded in respecting the freedom and equality of individuals, no longer does so. But what can be done when society itself has become tolerant, even welcoming, in this respect, as is the case in Israel? What can you do when nobody wants to hurt you anymore, and when suffering is no longer a sign of power, because nobody wants to make you suffer any more? Remember, the masochist does not enjoy his suffering, but the power that comes from being the object of a violence that the other absolutely wants to exercise. When the other no longer cares about causing pain, the suffering disappears, of course, but so does the feeling of power.
Isn’t this what part of the vanguard of emancipation movements yearns for? Of that place where the other absolutely wants to hurt, and where you get him “by the balls” because you are the object of his irrepressible violent impulse? Accusing Israel of “pinkwashing” is nothing more than objecting to this society that we don’t believe it, that we know its darkest instincts, and that, armed with this knowledge, we haven’t lost our omnipotence just because we have rights and are no longer discriminated? Unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian cause is an opportunity to find a practical way out. What else is there, in fact, than trying to put oneself once again in the place of that hated object without which the other cannot live, breathe or come to pleasure?
What is frightening about this solidarity is not that those who express it claim to be loyal to their real persecutors – at that level, we are dealing with nothing more than stupidity, and stupidity dismays, but does not frighten. It’s rather that certain advanced emancipation movements, the proclaimed vanguard, as soon as the groups for which they are fighting are equal before the law, are radically incapable of committing themselves to the progress of justice for the global society of which they are now a full part. They prefer to put all their energies into occupying the place of the mistreated object, wherever they are given the opportunity to do so; that they prefer, comfortably installed in their rich and democratic societies, from campuses whose admission fees far exceed the lifetime wage of a Palestinian from the territories, to identify themselves imaginatively with the latter, perceived exclusively as suffering objects, and above all never as real political subjects and actors. Enjoying the idea that they got the world ‘by the balls’ by resolutely siding with those who suffer at the hands of someone who cannot live without doing harm is what they prefer to thinking about a common world that might be fairer than it is – especially, undoubtedly, for the real Palestinians.
As for the question of what kind of conviction is behind the idea that the Jews, perfidious as they are, cannot live without making someone suffer, the astute reader will certainly be able to name it.
Karl Kraus
"
Shared by citizenwald, 1 save total
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo