Now she works in a temporary consulting job. With a growing, diverse population, language, like jobs, is becoming a dividing line between Israel's haves and have-nots. A century ago, almost no one spoke Hebrew, a dead language like Latin, used only in prayer and ritual. But in 1881, an immigrant from Lithuania, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, made it his life work to reinstate Hebrew. The odd result is that, since Hebrew originally was written without vowels, no one really knows how the language they speak every day was pronounced by the ancients.
Spelling is haphazard, with street signs using one spelling on one corner and another on the next.
The town next to Tel Aviv may be spelled Jaffa on one map, Yaffo on another and Yafo on a third. But Hebrew, confusing as it is to outsiders, has taken on life in Israeli society. Hebrew and religion united the pioneers, who arrived speaking a hodgepodge of European languages and perhaps Yiddish. Now, Hebrew is what identifies Israelis as Jews with a homeland and language of their own. Many Israeli writers and philosophers say they can't capture the nuances of Israeli culture in any other language.