Denise Lockett, an African American and Catholic grandmother, sat in the lobby of a District charter school waiting to deliver lunch to her 9-year-old grandson. “I’m Kobe’s savta,” she said with a ...

For nearly 2,000 years, Hebrew was a dead language. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, this liturgical language made a comeback as a modern tongue. Its revival is unprecedented, said Nancy Berg, a ...

What are the Jewish languages? Some are well known — Hebrew is the language of the Torah and of Israel, and Yiddish was the language of the shtetls and the great centers of European Jewish culture.

The revival of Hebrew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is often flattened into a tidy legend centered on Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Still, the historical record tells a far more complex and global ...