Hebrew U. Embraces English

By Liora Halperin. A vote to officially allow English at the Jerusalem institution is part of a longer history of Zionist concessions. Early on Wednesday, the senate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem voted to allow Ph.D. students to submit their dissertations in English, raising the hackles of the Hebrew Language Academy—Israel’s homegrown equivalent of the Académie Française. The substance of the academy’s protests implies that the pure Hebrew of bygone days is being sullied by a new linguistic permissiveness that can only end with Israeli students speaking English in their classrooms—which many already do. The defense by university administrators, in turn, suggests that Israeli students and scholars facing the pressures of the new global economy need to be able to write and work in the global lingua franca. While up to half of Hebrew University’s Ph.D.s have requested and received individual permission to submit their final work in English, the shift from de facto tolerance of English to de jure policy that “Doctorates are to be submitted in Hebrew or English” seems to Hebrew’s defenders a deeply symbolic blow to the primary status of the language. Read more...