“We didn’t learn grammar, we learned Hebrew: Divisions and displacement in the language classroom”

Résumé

The author explored her personal history of feeling stranded in anomie and displacement between two languages, cultures, and identities through her ethnographic research on the subject in a university modern Hebrew language class in Canada. She discoverd a clashing divide between two community sub-groups of “Canadian” and “Israeli” students who based their stereotypes and Othering on their definitions and relationships to the Hebrew language as primarily literary and text-based or oral and speech-based. As the author discoverd the roots of this in-group Othering, she ultimately came to terms with her own feelings of displacement