Honoring Hebrew Language Day 2023

Hebrew Language Day is officially celebrated in Israel on the birthday of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who is known as the father of modern Hebrew.

Given the centrality of the Hebrew language in preserving the Jewish people, the building of the Israeli society, and its ability to connect Jewish communities globally, we will be marking the occasion with a fascinating lecture on the language: 

Hebrew 101: The Origins, History, and Importance of Our Language

Presentation by Dr. Stanley Dubinsky
PhD in Linguistics, Cornell University
Current Professor at the University of South Carolina

Class description

This talk will take us all the way back to a time before there was a Jewish people to discover where the Hebrew alephbet (and all other Western writing systems) came from. We will consider what language was like for the Tribes of Israel and the surrounding nations, and then examine how the Hebrew language came to be the center of our identity in the Babylonian Exile. We will then briefly consider its importance in the Maccabean Revolt and the establishment of the Hasmonean Kingdom, and how our Hebrew language texts preserved the Jewish people through 2000 years of the Diaspora. Finally, we will examine how Hebrew came to be chosen by the Zionist movement as the language of modern Israel and how it was successfully revived – more successfully so than any other language in human history.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Stanley Dubinsky got his PhD in Linguistics from Cornell University, and us currently teaching at the University of South Carolina. His primary area of research is syntactic theory and the syntax-semantics interface. He has produced three books, four edited volumes, and several dozen articles and book chapters on a variety of topics – largely on the syntax and semantics of various languages, including English, Japanese, Korean, Bulgarian, Hebrew, and two Bantu languages (Chichewa and Lingala). Dubinsky's 2004 Blackwell book, co-authored with William D. Davies, is titled The Grammar of Raising and Control: A Course in Syntactic Argumentation, and was followed in 2007 by an edited collection with Springer, New Horizons in the Analysis of Control and Raising. My two most recent co-authored books are Understanding Language through Humor (2011, Cambridge University Press), and Language Conflict and Language Rights: Ethnolinguistic Perspectives on Human Conflict (2018, Cambridge University Press).

chance to win a prize

We are excited for you to join the call, and want you to know that three webinar participants will be randomly selected at the end of the class to receive* one of these wonderful gifts:

1. Book "Fulfillment of Prophecy: The Life Story of Eliezer Ben Yehuda" 

2. Hebrew Phrasebook & Dictionary 

3. Hebrew Alphabet Coffee Mug 

(*The gifts will only be available for shipment in the USA)

Watch the Recording