A couple of weeks ago I went to a presentation by the co-executive directors of A Land for All, an Israeli-Palestinian coexistence group promoting a new approach to the two-state solution via confederation.
Instead of two separate states with hard borders, the group something like the European Union. The Jewish state would sit roughly within Israel’s original 1948 borders, Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, with Jerusalem as a shared capital. The twist is that Palestinians, including returning refugees and their descendants, could live inside Israel and Jews inside Palestine as non-citizen permanent residents — so long as they accept the other’s sovereignty.
“We are pro-Israel and pro-Palestine because that's the only way to be pro-Israel or pro-Palestine,” said May Pundak, a Tel Aviv lawyer and peace activist who leads the group along with Rula Hardal, a Palestinian-Israeli political scientist.
“Israelis and Palestinians wear the same chain with the same map,” Pundak said. “One says ‘Israel’ and one says ‘Palestine.’ When Rula wears it, she’s called an antisemite, and when I wear it, I’m a fascist.”
This got me thinking of a new idea for Forward merch: pendants and tote bags and T-shirts with the word “nuance” in Hebrew, English and Arabic.
But when I reached out to Israeli friends to find out the right Hebrew word, they were stumped. Turns out they mostly use a cognate — ניואנס, pronounced noo-ANCE. One found a listing in the Academy for the Hebrew Language reference to גונית, gonit, a term added in 1955 that seems to have its roots in music, but said: “I’ve never heard this word being used in my life.”
The Hebrew linguist Shlomo Bolotzky, an emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts, explained that this word — which nobody knows — is connected to the word גון, gaven, which means hue. He also mentioned the phrase “hevdayl dak,” or slight difference, but said “noo-ANCE sounds better.”
In other words, there is no Hebrew word for nuance. (Nor, famously, is there a single word that means “accountability,” but that’s another story…)
Arabic does not seem much better. The best several translators I reached out to could come up with is “fariq baseet”— slight difference. Which is … slightly different than “nuance.”
And so I return to the mamaloshn, Yiddish, and to kneytsh. I asked Rukhl Schaechter, our inimitable Yiddish editor, how the term was used in Yiddish literature, and she found this from Sholem Aleichem’s posthumous autobiography:
“People that you see on the street that you might think are regular folks,” the great storyteller wrote, “and yet each one of them has his own unique nuance, his own spangle, his own baggage.”
Each person on every street, in Gaza and across Israel. That’s the kind of nuance we need right now.
