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February 23, 2023

How Transliterated Hebrew Shaped American Jewry

Having your cake and eating it too.

Apart from some who have spent their lives exclusively in ḥaredi communities, most American Jews have encountered Hebrew or Aramaic prayers transliterated into the Latin alphabet for the benefit of the English-speaking reader. Jenna Weissman Joselit traces the origins of this practice—an inversion of the much older and more widespread Jewish habit of rendering the vernacular in Hebrew characters—to a work published in 1908:

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