As we raced to finalize our arrangements for our granddaughter’s birthday, we passed the study center surrounded by black-hatted men who looked away as I passed, and then made our purchases at the bakery and the pharmacy where the salesmen and pharmacists spoke Arabic to each other.  And as we were leaving, I whispered to Ezi, “you realize we’re a minority wherever we go…”

I had just left the hairdresser where the guy replacing my hairdresser who needed a vacation spoke mostly German and English.  And now I too look a bit German. 

So, since someone asked me the point of this discussion, it is that Hebrew speakers are becoming a minority.  That whole big fight for Hebrew from the beginning of the twentieth century that killed Yiddish seems to be in danger of being lost.  And the worst part is that the Yiddish spoken is dirty and limited and garbled.  It’s the Yiddish you learn on duolingo.  If it were the complex and intellectual Yiddish like Lithuanian Yiddish it wouldn’t be so bad.  The Arabic spoken here, on the other hand, is something we can learn from.