Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg (eds.), What We Talk About When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans). Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. x + 238 pp.
This chapter discusses What We Talk About When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) (2018). The essays in this collection address the diminishing role of Hebrew in American Jewish communal identity and practice. On the one hand, each writer demonstrates passionate commitment to the Hebrew-language, in many cases offering moving testimony of Hebrew's role in their personal and communal lives. Consequently, they propose diverse strategies for boosting the presence of Hebrew among Jewish Americans. On the other hand, they all resist romantic concepts of Hebrew drawn from Johann Gottfried Herder's conflation of language, nation, and folk, which inevitably leads to a valorization of authenticity. To put it another way, modern Israeli Hebrew poses particular challenges to Hebraists elsewhere, despite the longstanding role of Hebrew in Jewish civilization. The great strength of this volume lies in its successful severing of devotion to Hebrew (whether intellectual, emotional, or cultural) from allegiance to “authenticity” in its diverse meanings.