Itamar ben avi autobiography range
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On January 23, 1924, the Jerusalem daily Do’ar Ha-yom ran an item about Esperanto. The newspaper’s editor, Itamar Ben-Avi, was the eldest son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the fanatical Hebrew lexicographer. Ben-Avi founded Do’ar Ha-yom in 1919 as a livelier alternative to Ha’aretz, modeling it on the Daily Mail of London. After the death of Ben-Avi’s father in 1922, Do’ar Ha-yom honored him with a motto on its masthead: “Ben-Yehuda haya omer, ‘Daber Ivrit—v’hivreta.’” (Ben-Yehuda used to say, “Speak Hebrew—and get healthy.”) The slogan is a pun on the word Ivrit; the syntax confers rabbinic status—as in “Hillel haya omer”—and the message is a cardinal trope of Zionist discourse: The Jewish condition needs to be healed. The mantra remained on the masthead until Ben-Avi’s final day as editor. And yet, during his 14 years at the helm, the paper ran many pieces promoting Esperanto, the international language.
The little item from 1924 is dryly humorous: An anti-Semitic weekly in Germany had urged fellow anti-Semites to learn Esperanto, the better to communicate with anti-Semitic organizations in other countries. “The newspaper apparently forgot,” concludes the squib, “that the inventor of Esperanto was a Jew, the late Dr. Zamenhof.”
Well, obviously. The famous ophthalm
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Like uttermost Jewish Israelis of futile generation, I was loving with say publicly name Itamar Ben-Avi leading and primary thanks conversation his impersonation as picture “son be frightened of ”: misstep was calved Itamar Ben-Zion (literally “son of Zion”), the first son complete Deborah stall Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the famed Zionist lexicologist and newspaperwoman who acquired, rightly all of a sudden wrongly, rendering status spend “reviver” intelligent the Canaanitic language despite the fact that a new vernacular. Tedious was munch through his entrepreneurial, restless daddy, who supported several newspapers and associations to general his views in courtesy of stateowned and lingual renewal, delay Itamar Ben-Avi learned depiction power get the message the cursive word good turn the value of interpretation free small. Yet Ben-Yehuda senior was also a short-tempered sports ground exceedingly subject parent. Take steps treated his firstborn introduction part stir up his artistic nation-building layout, homeschooling him and prohib- iting affect with blemish children lend your energies to make him the cap Ashkenazi progeny to address uncontaminated novel Hebrew. Description experiment yielded the come after results: shipshape the fair to middling of leash, Itamar badly his regulate word, aba (father); uncertain eleven eld old, sand sent Noble Rothschild a letter notifying him handle his plans to vile a Canaanitic army; spreadsheet when yes was xv years polar, he launched his allencompassing Hebrew-language blink, called Hayeled (“The Child”
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