A beginner-friendly Turkish phrase list with IPA cues, early pronunciation notes, and why Duolingo basics miss what you actually need first.

Family recollections about a missing Rambach portrait by Fred Green, his early work with Boston police photography, and his boxing ties, recorded as oral history pending documentation.

A genealogical and family-history note on Fredrick Philip Green (Shraga Feivel), tracing his origins from Lithuania to Sweden and the United States, and distinguishing between documented records and family memory.

How Kabbalah became woven into normative Judaism despite disputed origins, and why disciplined restraint beats revisionist erasure.

Featured image by Roy Lindman, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A critique of Elon Gilad’s confident pop-Judaism: how narrow philological claims about sufganiyot, meat-and-milk, and Mishnah variants get inflated into sweeping takedowns while ignoring broader sources and transmission. The piece argues for proportion—respecting evidence, the weight of commentary, and oral tradition instead of cherry-picked “gotchas.”

Some signage from my recent trip to Djerba

A source-driven reconstruction of Avrum Saranduk’s line, weighing Revision Lists from Talne and Torgovitsa and the open question of whether “Avrum Nikhem” is the same man.

I will now start a weekly vlog in Hebrew - similar to what I do with the Daily Derja.

What I do when a word refuses to stick—why brute force fails, and how I hack the brain’s tagging system.

For Nerds! Tracking Elul in Obsidian: Logs, Charts, and Scripts