Eliezer Ben-Yehuda

1900, a half of 1% of the Jews in the world lived in Israel.

And one person spoke Hebrew as their first language, Eliezer ben Yehuda, who's the founder, the resurrector of modern Hebrew as a spoken language, it was never a dead language.

His son, he raised speaking Hebrew.

I always say jokingly, he had a horrible childhood, no play dates because he couldn't talk to anyone because no one else spoke Hebrew.

He wanted the mount.

Eliezer ben Yehuda, the man who revived Hebrew as a spoken language, is there.

S.Y. Agnon, the Nobel laureate.

Henrietta Zold, who founded Hadassah, Sheldon Adelson, Robert Maxwell, chief rabbis going back to Abraham Isaac Cooke.

The idea is in Hebrew language.

So what happened? Well, there's a guy named Ben Yehuda.

If you go to Jerusalem, there's a street called Ben Yehuda Street.

and the reason he's got a street is because he's the guy that in the Zionist movement sat down with his family at the dinner table and said, we shall no longer speak, you know, our foreign language, our first language, but we're going to speak the language of Hebrew.

We're Jews.

We live in Jerusalem.

We're going to revive Hebrew language, and that's why Ben Yehuda is kind of famous because him and then his neighbors and then everybody else started speaking Hebrew, and And then it became this miraculously, never done before, a revived extinct language was revived once again.

The Bible predicted that.

Jewish communities established new towns, farms, kibbutzim, moshavim, schools, universities, hospitals, and businesses.

Hebrew, which had largely functioned as a literary and religious language for centuries, experienced an extraordinary revival as a modern spoken language under the leadership of figures such as Eliezer ben Yehuda and many others.

At the same time, Arab society also continued developing economically, culturally, and politically.

Roads, railways, ports, and public institutions expanded.

It was a construction.

Eliezer ben Yehuda and his generation built a spoken language from liturgical material, but they filled the gaps with loanwords from Yiddish, Arabic, Russian, German, and later English.

The academy's purism is fighting a battle against a language that was never pure to begin with.

Which brings us to the rarity of the revival itself.

And now, there are 10 million

speakers.

The Ben Yehuda household is the famous case.

Ben Yehuda insisted on Hebrew as the only language spoken to his son, Itamar.

And then

Eliezer ben Yehuda decided his son was going to grow up speaking it, and the whole thing went from liturgical to living in a couple of generations.

The ben Yehuda

household was a linguistic hostage situation, as you've said before.

Now, let me show you a picture of a bombing.

This was the aftermath of the Ben Yehuda street bombing, March 1948.

OK, so this is March.

We still got to get to May.

earlier.

Exactly.

Ben Yehuda Street is right downtown.

There's a picture of it there.