Israel News Insights - Now on Elephant
We’ve added the Israel News Insights to Elephant. This is a twice-weekly newsletter with updates on the situation in Israel and the effects of Oct. 7 worldwide. For those who want to receive the newsletter directly into their mailbox, you can subscribe at http://eepurl.com/iFphtI .
This week we focus on two issues, yesterday’s drone attack that killed 4 and wounded 67 young Israelis and the level of fake news in mainstream media throughout the west on both the right and the left. We lead with the drone attack because as of noon here in Israel (3 AM EST) there are still no reports in the mainstream U.S. media. There are however headlines about the deployment of the THAAD missile defense system, which looks like they were were written by the Biden Administration’s press secretary and printed as-is.
This leads to our second focus (Look to the Right, Look to the Left -Fake News on Parade) - the indoctrination that has replaced investigative journalism in the mainstream media in the U.S. and Europe. This may or may not be true of most domestic political issues - we don’t really know - but it is true when it comes to reporting on the Middle East, especially when it comes to coverage of Israel and the Palestinians, and anti-Zionism as a politically-correct façade for pure antisemitism.
We will then touch on hostages because we fear that the hostages are being put on the back burner. Whether this is intentional or not doesn’t really matter - time is running out for 101 hostages and their families. This is not only true for Israelis, but Americans as well - because some of those hostages are United States citizens left to rot as the world marches on.
The biggest news over the past week has been about the war in Lebanon and how Israel should or will respond to the missile attack from Iran. If this were any other week, we would probably focus on the media bias and misinformation over these two issues. But we’ve decided instead to give you a taste of the issues that are bubbling under the surface and that does not even receive biased coverage outside of Israel. These are not the “top headlines” in Israel this week, but they have been coming up off-and-on over the past year and Israelis all feel them constantly.
Giving credit to Bibi is not easy, but he finally did make a good decision. This doesn’t make up for making Oct. 7 possible or mismanagement of the war in Gaza, but he was Prime Minister on Friday and it was his call to approve the bombing of Hassan Nasrallah’s bomb shelter. So he deserves credit. He also deserves credit for the last minute ruse that allowed Nasrallah and many of his top people to feel safe just a few more hours until the bombs dropped.
So before you to read this newsletter, open a bottle of Champagne or whatever else helps you celebrate and enjoy the moment before we delve into the wrong reasons and their potential costs down the road. And maybe, just maybe… his moment of glory might guide him to make a few more good decisions (but most likely he will once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory).
Time for New Leadership - Call for Volunteers
It is time for a new leadership to replace me. In addition to the great work that Mark Levinson is doing, we have a new volunteer, Eitan Greenberg, who will manage the Event and Course Calendars. There is definitely a demand for meetings (any volunteers to start organizing them?) We also need a volunteer to take over the Job Opps section and post jobs (with preference for listings with salary information and jobs from the actual employer/customer and not intermediaries).
Translation, proofreading and writing organizations/mailing lists that would like write permissions to use elephant.org.il as a resource to promote their events should contact me directly.
Cover credits for translators?
Should a translated book name the translator on the cover? If you something to say about it, join the discussion here.
Building a megalist of translators/editors
The folks over at CIWI are attempting to build a comprehensive list of translators of all stripes, as well as editors and copywriters working in Israel. It’s being maintained on a Google Sheet and anyone is free to write/edit/comment. Link here. It will be a great resource for anyone looking to hire someone quickly. Share widely.
A slangy way of translating nim’as li uses“over,” as in “I’m so over this place” and “I’m over your patronizing tone, okay?” I think that’s a recent usage; I don’t remember it from when I was young. And speaking of getting old, “getting old” is another way of saying nim’as about something.
“Netanyahu hasn’t learned the lesson of five months ago, that drinking up too many of his so-called natural partners’ votes can hurt him,” said a Jerusalem Post article. But there’s a better expression in English, and it’s been in use since well before this election year. “Ralph Nader was siphoning votes from Gore,” a 2004 book by William Saletan notes.
The dictionaries have more to say about translating hekel as applied to a problem — alleviate, mitigate, palliate, etc. — than as applied to the person who has the problem. If you find a software program complicated to use, and the company supplies shortcuts to reduce that difficulty, then actually none of the dictionary definitions of hekel can describe what the shortcuts do for you.
Yeshayahu Ben-Porat’s book about the Yom Kippur War, called HaMekhdal in Hebrew, was published in English translation under the title Kippur. English-language journalists and scholars never did come up with a thorough consensus on what to call the Mekhdal, and sometimes we see it transliterated from Hebrew and glossed in English.
Morfix defines hitlabet as “to have doubts, to be uncertain, to weigh possibilities; to think over, to deliberate, to ponder, to mull, to debate.” Still I think of the meaning as commonly more specific than that. When I leave the house, it’s not so much that I mitlabet about whether I fed the goldfish. I mitlabet about whether or not to go back.
Young animators bring Israeli animation to a new level!
The Fenesta Family is a high quality animation series created by group of young Israeli animators with the support and help of the Kan Digital incubator. With only the first two episodes out, the series has already gone viral.
Animation is a time consuming art, especially when done at the level of this series. In my opinion, they have brought Israeli animation to world class level. Hopefully this is only the beginning. In Israel the Kan Digital link is recommended. Outside of Israel you may need to find the episode on facebook.
For Hebrew speakers read
Jennifer Croft, who translated Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk from Ukrainian, has announced that next time if her name won’t be on the cover, she won’t be translating. And together with novelist Mark Haddon, she started a petition. Columnist Pamela Paul believes that better visibility for translators can also lead to better pay.