In the Jewish suburbs of North America, there is often more Hebrew etched onto synagogue façades than spoken inside their walls. On the ark: Da lifnei mi ata omed, “Know before whom you stand.” And yet, if you asked the average congregant – middle-aged, generously tithing, politically active – what those words actually mean, you’d get a smile, a shrug, and perhaps a comment about their son’s bar mitzvah.
The tragedy is not the ignorance. The tragedy is that we no longer think it’s tragic.
What happened to us?
We who once sang Psalms in the Judean hills now outsource our tradition to transliteration. We who once debated Maimonides in the original, now tweet our identity in English.
We who gave the world the idea of the word have forgotten how to use it – at least in our own language.
This is not an indictment. This is a reckoning.
And it’s why I’ve come to believe in the urgent necessity of Hebraization – not as cultural nostalgia or Zionist romanticism, but as civilizational repair.
Let me be clear: Hebraization is not about becoming Israeli. It’s about becoming Jewish again: Fully, fluently, without subtitles.
Language is not just a way of communicating; it’s how a people organizes reality. Hebrew doesn’t just say things – it sings them, encodes them, weaves centuries into syllables.
The Hebrew word for “history” is historia – a borrowed term. But the word for “memory” is zikaron, rooted in the soul. Because Jews don’t remember what happened, we remember who we are.
When we lose Hebrew, we lose the wiring. The hard drive. The sacred code that once bound Torah to table, battlefield to lullaby. And without it, we are not Jews. We are just people who like being Jewish.
Ahad Ha’am [Asher Hirsch Ginsberg, 1856-1927, the founder of cultural Zionism] warned us. He wrote that a people without a language of its own lives only on the surface of history. And make no mistake, we are drowning in that surface now, with Instagram captions of Shabbat candles, Reform synagogue newsletters written like corporate memos, Zionist TikToks soundtracked by Drake. That is not culture. That is branding.
We don’t need branding. We need breath.
Hebrew breath.
The kind that says ivri anochi, “I am a Hebrew,” and means it. Not as a slogan. As a status.
We must start in the cradle: Hebrew-speaking nannies, immersion preschools, lullabies in lashon hakodesh [“the holy language”]. If the Catholic Church can teach dead Latin, we can teach living Hebrew.
If the Quebecois can protect French in a sea of English, surely American Jews can find the resolve to preserve our language before it becomes a museum piece.
And schools. Why is it that in the average Jewish day school, a student can ace calculus but can’t read a verse of Isaiah without a dictionary? Hebrew is not a “subject.” It is the operating system.
Every class – science, literature, history – should be taught in Hebrew. Otherwise, we’re teaching Jews to be guests in their own tradition.
You want Jewish continuity? It starts in the tongue.
Not with slogans. Not with Zoom panels.
With children asking for water in Hebrew.
The early Zionists understood this. [Eliezer] Ben-Yehuda raised his own son to speak only Hebrew, even when it made them pariahs. He was mocked and ridiculed, but he was right.
Today, we quote him but do not follow him. Because following him would be inconvenient, it would mean tearing out the English-speaking infrastructure we’ve built to keep Judaism palatable, American, and under control. It would mean demanding that Jews work for their identity again.
But isn’t that the point?
Jewish survival has never been easy. It’s been real. It’s been raw. It’s been uttered in Hebrew – on Sinai and in secret, by rebels and rabbis, warriors and widows, prophets and poets.
So let’s speak it again. Let’s teach our children to speak it – not as an extracurricular, but as a birthright. Not just in the synagogue, but in the sandbox. On the soccer field. At the Friday night dinner table. Let Hebrew return, not as memory, but as mother tongue.
Because if we don’t Hebraize the Diaspora now, there won’t be much left to save later.
The word was always with us.
Let it be of us again.
The writer is founder and CEO of The Israel Innovation Fund.