Monday, September 25, 2006

Dershowitz, Chomsky, and Camp Massad

Noam Chomsky who is no friend of Israel went to Camp Massad, together with Alan Dershowitz, during the 1940's--Chomsky was a counselor, and Dershowitz a camper there according to The Forward.

Camp Massad was an interesting place in its own right.

Marcel Silberman writes
in order to ‘keep the purity of the Hebrew language and its completeness without the necessity of introducing foreign and unattractive expressions,’ Massad produced a practical dictionary which covered the vocabulary needed for camp life. It had Hebrew words for different foods, clothing, everyday activities, and also sports, and it came up with Hebrew baseball, basketball, and American football terms. I don’t know how many words in the Massad dictionary about those sports have survived or been adopted.”

...Massad was a unique place, a combination of an American summer camp, a kibbutz and a Soviet gulag. The gulag part had to do with the fact that speaking Hebrew all day long was not only mandatory...
To the degree that Camp Massad influenced Chomsky and Dershowitz, it did so in very different ways.

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