Mishegas

Oy vey ist mir

7 thoughts on “Oy vey ist mir

  1. Right, rather than re-branding, perhaps what Israel needs to do is end the occupation. Its not a PR problem, its a human rights problem, which, thankfully, has some PR issues attached to it. If it didn’t we would be in even bigger trouble.

  2. “unless Israel manages to solve or at least play down its problems with the Palestinians, it could become a pariah state.”
    agreed with CoA. it’s not about doing whatever is necessary to not be a pariah state, be it fixing the problem, or covering it up; it’s about behaving decently, lishmah. and perhaps a good kick in the tachat from external sources will help. unfortunate.

  3. nah, it’s a weird passive construction…it’d be ‘vey iz undz’, but i don’t think anyone actually says that. so much for collective suffering.

  4. I remember the last time the topic of Anti-Semitism in Germany came up someone living there said I was niave for believing the NPD had any semblence of power or influence….Unfortunately now ignoring the trend of East German federal states voting in NPD politicians is the truly naive mistake. If they pick up traction in Bayern, which is FAR from out of the question, and are then able to parle that into making a serious run at nation wide congressional elections, we could see NPD members in the Bundestag, a SCARY thought.

  5. It should be “Oy vey iz mir” — Woe is me! (Not “Woe is I” or “Woe is we”)
    Sam: here, mir is the first-person dative [case used with prepositions] singular form that means “[to/for] me”, not the first-person nominative [case used for subject of a sentence] plural form that means “we” — you are correct, though, that zaynen (or zenen would be the form for the plural verb IF mirhad been the nominative plural “we.”
    Learn Yiddish already!
    What you’ve written is like writing “Woe be-est me” or “Woe art me” (the kind of thing my students & others have written when trying & miserably failing to write Shakespearean English…which is, incidentally, related, since these are all Germanic languages with common forms that modern English has since lost):
    a mish-mash produced by those who don’t understand what “olde-tymey” endings go with which forms/persons:
    2nd person singular verbs end in -st
    Yiddish bist (not ist: the verb is irregular) is like Elizabethan “beest” (pronounced be-est, not like the word “beast”!): “you are”
    3rd person singular verbs end in t (Yiddish & German)/th (Old, Middle, and Early Modern [Renaissance] English)
    Yiddish lakht = “s/he laughs” (from verb lakhen
    Elizabethan English = she or he laugheth (laughs)
    …but “I laugheth” is nonsense, because that’s not the 1st-person form
    (conjugation: I laugh, thou laughest, s/he laugheth, we laugh, you laugh, they laugh)
    For further clarification/ranting against massacred Yiddish, please see my comments on another blogpost here

  6. Had a look at the piece re: a report claiming that Israel used some sort of uranium munitions in Lebanon. When you get to the last page of the piece there is one sentence:
    “Despite the denial, the Independent report, written by Robert Fisk, asserted that “Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth about its use of weapons in Lebanon.”
    Oh, you mean the same Robert Fisk who has continually lied about his experiences in the region? Hardly seems like a reputable source to me.

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