The events of October 7 and what followed were a rupture whose impact still echoes through everything. Not only were my senses of security trust, and faith shaken so much that it was difficult for me to stand in the classroom and teach “as usual,” my students in distant and safe Northern California also felt that something had broken. In the first days after the massacre, students told me that for the first time in their lives they were being exposed to manifestations of antisemitism and feared for their personal safety, or for their family’s highly visibly Jewish business. I was stunned by the fact that even in the small Jewish high school where I teach (180 students), students, faculty members, and their families personally knew hostages, survivors, soldiers, and fallen victims.

In the 2024-2025 school year, I planned to teach our advanced track (grades 9-12) a course in Hebrew literature. The unit with which I decided to open the year deals with multilingualism and multiculturalism, a topic that occupies me in both my personal and professional life: I am an Israeli-American speaker of three languages, living in a multilingual and multicultural home, and earning my living from teaching Hebrew, translation, and interpreting. My husband and I intentionally raised a trilingual son. I designed the unit for its intended audience—my advanced students—with the conscious goal of strengthening their multilingual identity and exploring with them the relationship between language, culture, and identity. The unit celebrates multiple languages and identities and builds awareness and pride among the students in the multiplicity of languages and cultures in their lives.

It seemed to me that now, in the first year after the disaster of October 7, the unit had acquired added force and a new justification for these goals.

Among the unit’s big questions: How does language define identity? What is the value of learning an additional language?

The goal of the first lesson of the unit (and of the school year) was, of course, to get to know one another and introduce the topic of the unit, but also to formulate the value of learning an additional language. We read and analyzed several quotations and proverbs, all dealing with multilingualism. After deciphering them, the students spoke in pairs about the quotation that spoke to them most. The homework was to write a paragraph explaining the value, in each student’s eyes, of knowing an additional language. In retrospect, I regretted not returning with them at the end of the unit to this paragraph in order to examine whether, by the end of the unit, their opinions had changed or developed.

As part of the process of getting to know one another, the students created a kind of “identity card” accompanied by a photograph or drawing of themselves. They were required to write their name, the way they wanted me to address them in class (many of my students ask me to use their Hebrew name, for example), and the languages spoken in their family by generation:

In my family, we speak: I_________the parents______ the grandparents _________.

Among the unit’s big questions: To whom does language belong? Who determines how to speak, and what is correct or incorrect? How are new words coined in Hebrew? Which languages influenced Hebrew, and how?

After we read the chapters in The Firstborn of My Father’s (a play on the acronym AV”I= Eliezer ben Yehuda) House that deal with the words coined by Eliezer and Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda, and some analysis of the methods they used to do so, I gave each student a slip of paper containing words that had entered Hebrew from the language spoken in that student’s family, according to the Academy of the Hebrew Language website. I asked them to add the slip to their identity cards, which we had hung together on one of the classroom walls. Thus, instantly, one wall in our classroom was transformed into a multilingual wall with words in English, Polish, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, and German that are also used in Hebrew. In this way, the students learned about points of contact between languages and about their influence on one another. It was also a good opportunity to introduce them to the website of the Academy of the Hebrew Language and to become acquainted with its work and its presence on social media. They were assigned to browse the site and then share with the whole class one thing they had learned from it. When I asked them whether, in their opinion, there is still a need today for a body like the Academy, an interesting discussion developed about who dictates language use: its speakers or learned scholars.

Among the unit’s big questions: How was the myth surrounding Eliezer Ben-Yehuda created?

Throughout the unit, we read The Firstborn of My Father’s House together. We read and analyzed the first two chapters together in class in order to become acquainted with the main characters and make it easier to enter the world of the novel, but also in order to teach reading strategies, such as what to do when encountering an unfamiliar word. From that point on, my more advanced students continued reading the original novel, and a few read the adapted easy-Hebrew version in the Gesher series. I divided the novel into weekly reading portions, and once a week we sat in a circle on the classroom rug and spoke for several minutes about what we had read. The conversation was fairly open, and I encouraged the students to share their emotional responses to Ben-Zion, the lonely child who loses his beloved dog, to the neighborhood children who treat him cruelly, and to Ben-Yehuda, the strict father who is distant from his children. Each time, I rediscover how deeply the book draws students in and sparks discussions about parenting, sacrificing family life for ideals, the father’s life’s work, and more. From time to time, we read scenes together, including some especially problematic ones in which the author’s own judgmental stance is evident. Throughout the unit, I also directed my students’ attention to the myth that was built around Ben-Yehuda, in part thanks to this successful novel. I emphasized to them again and again that many worthy people participated in the project of reviving the Hebrew language—some of them even mentioned in the novel.

As the reading progressed, I challenged my students to think of a class project we could undertake in order to enter the world of the characters. They suggested publishing a Hebrew newspaper at school, in the spirit of Ben-Yehuda’s HaTzvi. They divided the sections among themselves and, with evident enjoyment, produced an issue that included an editorial explaining the idea behind the newspaper, an interview with a beginner-level student, a review of the school lunches, cartoons inspired by The Firstborn of My Father’s House, jokes and riddles, an advice column, advertisements, an article about the basketball team, and more. We shared the issue with the students’ families, and the school even displayed copies of it alongside issues of the school’s official English-language newspaper in the building lobby. This class project, too, contributed to the students’ sense of pride that they had managed to produce a real product they could share with the entire community.

Among the unit’s big questions: How did Hebrew succeed in becoming the language of the majority in Israel, and what were the advantages and disadvantages of that?

I used the moment of the young Eliezer and Devorah’s arrival at the port of Jaffa to speak about the arrival of Avot Yeshurun, then Yehiel Perlmutter, on the country’s shores about forty-five years later. In his poem “Sheyihyeh Bekef,” Yeshurun lists everything he left behind: country, language, people, family. In their place, he says, “I took Tel Avivian Hebrew.” The poem is written in simple language, and the creativity in the language is clear to the students—perhaps because Hebrew was an additional, acquired language. In the poem, and also in an excerpt from an interview with him that we read together, Yeshurun highlights the fact that language is part of his identity, like country, people, and family. He recreated a new identity, with a new name and in a new language—Hebrew.

In Pictures from the Public School, Amnon Shamosh describes a hierarchy of languages, as well as spaces in which the children determine in which language they will speak to their parents (Arabic, Yiddish, Hebrew). My students, some of them children of Israeli parents, know this experience firsthand and identify with the child-narrator in the story. Shamosh describes his attraction, on the one hand, to the Sephardi synagogue with its hymns, and on the other hand, to the seashore with his sabra friends. After deliberation, he chooses the “new world”—secular and Hebrew-speaking. My students wrote him a letter and expressed their opinion about his choice; some also offered him advice regarding his identity. They used the story and the things the child-narrator says in it in order to support their opinion. The continuation of the work allowed us to discuss the tension between the Ashkenazi worldview and the Sephardi or Mizrahi worldview, and relations between teachers and students. Shamosh uses the word “pride” when describing his attitude toward his origins, and I find that the story demonstrates to students the pride that the unit seeks to cultivate in their Hebrew-speaking identity.

Another dilemma, far more contemporary, is that of Arik Aber in his spoken-word poem “Who Am I, What.” Here the struggle is no longer between languages, but between identities built on the basis of language and accent, as well as clothing and behaviors. Here, too, a hierarchy of cultures is drawn, and here, too, the speaker’s decision provides a brief moment of pride. The students discuss and compare several aspects of the two works in writing.

Among the unit’s big questions: What identity does someone have who speaks more than one language? How can one keep more than one language active, and therefore more than one identity?

I also held a special panel of Hebrew speakers who were guests in our classroom and answered questions the students had prepared. Each of them had experienced life in a multilingual environment and told the students about it: a teacher at the school who grew up in South Africa during apartheid and was required to speak Afrikaans at home one day a week; a teacher who had lived in Jerusalem and sent his son to study at the bilingual Yad beYad school; an educator who, as a child in Tel Aviv, secretly learned Yiddish from her father; and an actor in the Yiddish theater, despite her mother’s strong opposition.

Among the unit’s big questions: How and when does the use of language become a political statement?

Through analysis of posters from the National Library of Israel website, we discussed the language policy that was customary in the period after Ben-Yehuda’s activity and in somewhat later periods. We spoke about the need to create a shared language in a country where many of the residents are immigrants, and about the costs involved in that effort. We also reviewed the way the Nation-State Law defined language policy in 2018.

All of this prepared the ground for understanding the next poems in the unit. In Erez Biton’s “Shopping Song on Dizengoff,” we examined how the structure of the poem and the use of repetition describe the failure to buy the store, that is, the failure to assimilate into the fashionable place. We also wondered what the “other Hebrew” is to which the speaker returns at the end of the poem. We asked ourselves whether it is, for example, the “Ashdodian” about which Sami Shalom Chetrit writes in “So You Won’t Understand a Word.” Eli Eliahu, in “Beneath the Surface of the Earth,” also distinguishes, similarly to Amnon Shamosh, between the language and culture used in public spaces and those used in private spaces. The poem, as well as Adi Keissar’s poem “A Brief History of Love,” demonstrates the price involved in the effort to prefer a new and unifying language over the immigrants’ various languages. Inspired by Keissar’s poem, I asked the students to think about and tell about their relationship with their grandparents, and to write a creative piece about a tradition or practice that was lost in their family in the transition between generations. We concluded the unit with Almog Behar’s “My Arabic Is Mute,” which deals with the different identity created in the speaker by his different languages—Hebrew and Arabic. Through the choice of words and images, the poem also marks the private or public space that each language has and the charged relations between them.

With the exception of the text by Amnon Shamosh and the poem by Almog Behar, most of the texts we read or heard were in relatively simple Hebrew, and deciphering them did not require too much instructional time. In the texts by Shamosh and Behar, I devoted more time to learning specific vocabulary. Behar’s poem is abstract and describes a very complex idea, and I could see a difference in understanding between the younger students in the class (grades 9-10) and the older students (11-12). As I noted above, The Firstborn of My Father’s House is also available in an easy-Hebrew version, which made working with it much easier.

At the end of the unit, each student prepared a short TED-style talk on one of the unit’s big questions, referring to at least two works we had studied. The talks were presented at a special symposium event that we held, and the students were permitted to invite guests from the school and the community. Many of my students chose to invite their Hebrew-speaking parents, who were moved to tears to hear their adolescents speak with pride about an identity built through language—in Hebrew, of course. In feedback questionnaires that I distributed among my students, several of them noted components of the unit that had especially sparked their interest: one student, who did not come from a Hebrew-speaking family, noted that she had never thought of herself as multilingual or multicultural, and that the unit was a discovery for her. By contrast, another student noted that the topic had always interested him and that he was glad for the opportunity to explore it in greater depth. Some students especially enjoyed presenting their insights from the unit to an audience in the final assessment. Others noted the poetry we studied together as the most interesting part; others felt that they had learned a great deal about Israeli culture during the unit. The students who struggled more enjoyed discussing the weekly reading portions in the class setting and noted that this enabled them to make sure they had understood what they had read at home.

Part of the learning experience in a Jewish high school is the opportunity students have to explore and shape their Jewish identity. This unit enables the Hebrew speakers among them to shape that identity through language as well, and also to examine their ties to their family through the languages spoken in it, as many of the writers whose works we read do. Without explicitly addressing the events of October 7 and their political meanings, I found that studying the unit provided me with comfort, and the students’ response to it was a source of encouragement and inspiration for me. I sought to show my students that Hebrew is an asset we have the privilege to share as Jews, and that it is central to our identity.