Through the Stained Glass: Language and Identity in Modern Israel

Image from Wix Media

Israel was established as a “melting pot”. After the 1948 war, Jews from all over the world arrived in the newly minted state with different traditions, different cuisines, and different languages. I think one of the early state’s mistakes was this melting pot. Being an Israeli Jew meant speaking only Hebrew. Speaking any other language, and even speaking Hebrew with a foreign accent, was ridiculed and led to social exclusion. My uncle—my dad’s eldest brother—speaks Yiddish, but my dad’s Yiddish was rudimentary at best. Mine and my siblings’ is non-existent. We lost so many languages during the early years of the Israeli state.

One of those lost languages is Arabic. Thousands of Jewish immigrants came from Arabic-speaking countries to Israel during the early years. But today, barely ten percent of Jewish Israelis speak Arabic. When I was in high school, the army invested resources into teaching us Arabic—not so we could talk with our neighbours but to raise intelligence agents. My school had a soldier-teacher who taught us Arabic. We learned written, official Arabic with a vocabulary strongly skewed to the military and political, rather than learning the spoken dialect and how to buy a cup of coffee.

Speaking a common language is a basic condition for understanding and cooperation. That sounds like stating the obvious. What, then, does it mean that the Israeli education system chooses to teach English, Spanish, and French as foreign languages but not Arabic? How can we have compassion for each other if we don’t speak each other’s language?

The melting pot metaphor and the “tzabar” ideal (in classic Israeli irony, the prickly pear plant being native only to America) were promoted for a reason: to create a Jewish Israeli identity. But people are hardly ever one thing. Words in Arabic, Yiddish, and English all sneak into the Hebrew language. On my visits to Israel before and during writing Until the Walls Come Down, I felt that the culture in modern Israel, especially in the last few decades, is much more open to gathering different influences into a mosaic.

This linguistic and cultural mosaic exists alongside ongoing tensions. Even before October 2023, and certainly after, being a young man speaking Arabic on the street in Israel could draw law-enforcement attention. I grew up with a fear of Arabic, a fear that was only exacerbated living in North America post 9/11. I’ve been doing some serious work to confront this fear, among other fears (did I mention I’m an anxious person?). I do this work because I’m determined not to let fear run my life.

When I wrote Until the Walls Come Down, I wanted to honour the complexity of Israeli society. I wanted the beautiful mosaic that this society could be to shine through the story. I wanted to show characters who contain multitudes of cultural influences expressed through the words they choose and the languages they inhabit.

That is why I use words from Hebrew, Arabic and Yiddish in the book. For instance, Barak, Tammar’s militant elder brother, uses ahalan as a greeting, a Hebrew mispronunciation of the Arabic greeting ahlan. Another example is my favourite word, shababnikim—an amalgamation of Arabic, Yiddish, and Hebrew. These choices reflect the larger story about Israeli society: like a stained glass window, it’s made up of distinct pieces—different languages, cultures, backgrounds—that together create something beautiful, especially if we let the light shine through. Don’t worry—I put a little glossary at the end of the book for my non-Hebrew-speaking readers. I hope that we can have a conversation on what language means for our identities and our relationships.