Any interest in improving Hebrew fluency among non-Israeli Jews?

There’s a great book called “A Passion for a People: Lessons from the Life of a Jewish Educator” by Avraham Infield. He argues that we’re an ancient people, and not just a religion or ethnicity – we may be different from one another but we all belong to the same tribe.

As a Jewish people we are usually seperated from each other by the language of our host country. For example, most of us here are North American or British and cannot speak easily to the Jews who live in say France or Russia, etc. In English countries, most secular Jews and Haredi Jews don’t have much interaction (sometimes ultra-orthodox only speak Yiddish).

It’s a shame that casual Hebrew isn’t more readily taught and practiced throughout the Jewish world everywhere. By adopting the language of our host nations in order to fit in it comes at the expense of our ancestoral language, we risk being gradually diluted away. It’s the slow way of killing off Judaism – it’s no coincidence that Hebrew is now being labelled a “colonizer language” by the Melon Mafia in order to try distance Jews from our identity.

So I propose that world wide we could start a movement to get every Jew who has interest to a basic conversational level of Hebrew. The idea is to easily communicate amongst us all, keeping the lines open and the links to the homeland alive.