Linguistic study about the adult acquisition of Yinglish/Yeshivish among ba'alei teshuva (and a small enough number of gerim in the study that she groups them with BTs), based primarily on fieldwork done in Philadelphia ~2001/2002, but also other places. Sort of doubles as a companion book to Frumspeak.

Interesting book, trying to appeal to the fact that, quite frankly, who on earth is the audience for a book like this, and that's a wide potential audience. Benor is perhaps best known on the internet for being the person behind the Jewish English Lexicon, which is how someone pitched me this book, essentially "hey, the person who runs the Jewish English Lexicon wrote a book".

This book is linguistically interesting and there were various parts when reading it that validated that vague feeling I had that when I went to college, I discovered I had not, up to that point on time in my life, spoken English and had to learn to speak English, which was such a ridiculous thing since I went to non-Jewish summer programs and was on the internet before college, and yet... somehow I felt like I had to learn to speak English. And then Benor drops in a number like "yeah so there's 2,000-2,500 non-English words they're using in common language" and I'm like "that seems high" and then she gives examples and it's like "just @ me next time".

On the whole, this book is Too Accurate. I did have some quibbles, as I imagine anyone would.

• In general, I feel like this book could benefit from further research and a larger sample. For instance, there were things she marked as pronunciation choices that I'm more willing to put down to being that person's accent.
  
  For another, the lack of a large sample and her assigning motivations to people and their choices on her own led her to declare that putting your sefarim in the living room is a sign of wanting to show them off vs an FFB who has his in his basement. No, absolutely not, this has everything to do with where there is space for your sefarim in your domicile. Sefarim in the dining room! Sefarim in the living room! Sefarim in the hallway! Sefarim on the stair landing! It's all about the space. I mean, I guess you can put them in your basement if you have a nice finished basement with a nice study and no chance of flooding, why not put them there. But honestly I have seen more sefarim in a living room. The only person whose house I can think of that might have had sefarim in the basement on purpose -- it's been honestly since last century -- was someone who, because of the way the house was built on a hill, the "basement" was the level below the living area and above the garage.



• Anyway, despite her occasionally trying to mindread motivations, I enjoyed this. I did skim some parts versus reading, and I mostly only read the footnotes at the end. I liked how she didn't use the term Ultra-Orthodox, noting that the folks she talked to didn't use it, because it's not a term used within the community. I personally consider it a meaningless term.



• And now I have the term "hesitation click" for the tongue click in the middle of sentences, so I'm definitely going to forget that term immediately, but hey, a term for it.



• I found myself also curious as to why she was doing this specific field work, since she's not frum or was ever BT, how did she get into this? What made her interested in studying this specifically? I had a similar ???? ???? ???? ???????????? when I read the dissertation of someone who interviewed me as part of a community I was in, and discovered that she, too, was not frum. It's not like that would have changed anything as part of the interview or my non-interview interactions with her, but it's like... why did you pick this community to study for your dissertation? I guess we're studyable and most people were like "yeah sure we'll participate to help you get your doctorate".
  
  I also never actually finished reading that dissertation but I also found myself contrasting elements from this book and from that, and one thing I liked in the dissertation is that it highlighted how the frum community moves around a lot, whereas this book I felt needed more of an understanding that the language communities are not per area, especially a place like Philadelphia has a lot of movement going on. I know two families living in Philadelphia at the time, one is still there, the other isn't. (I doubt either were interviewed for this.)



• But yeah, during my long time getting through this book, someone asked me, wait, she's not frum or ever a BT, why did she do this book? It seems like "hey, it seemed interesting to study" was the answer. In general, I feel like her being an outsider helped and hindered; further research with someone in the community would I think be a benefit. Outsider benefit: there's definitely some things she marks as specific language that I never would have (for instance, she uses "come to us for Shabbos" as being Yiddish grammar coming through, with the "to" in italics to note that that's the word that's the problem, and I had to sit for like half an hour trying to work out how she would assume you should say that in English) and so an outsider view is good. But I do think she misses stuff, including humor.



• Also part of the problem of spending two months occasionally reading this was getting near the end and wondering if she interviewed any unmarried women at all.



• I understand with this kind of thing, getting participants and getting enough out of them for research can be hard. She relied a lot on audio taping of some chavrusa sessions, and there's certainly observer effects going on. She also did interviews and asked people's opinions and that's fine, but there were parts where I really felt the impact of her sample size and population.



• Also, like, yes, true, I'm aware of the very annoying superiority complex some New Yorkers have to those they deem "out of towners", it felt like some of that was reproduced without enough awareness that it is not reflective of anything more than that person's opinion of your validity as a Jew depending on where you live.



• But I am sympathetic to the problems she probably had with data collection. That's among the reasons I'd like to see more updated research.



• There were also moments when she was talking about loanwords, and this is why it's bad I read this over months and didn't take active notes, where it seemed like she was saying that using the loanword rather than the English translation was... idk, it felt like she was saying it was unnecessary, just in-group signaling, whatever. It seemed to miss the point that the "loanword" is the actual word for a concept and the English translation is not, and that it's not, actually, wrong to want people to use, and encourage the use of, the actual word for a concept, especially when the English translation is not a precise one-for-one mapping of the concept.



• Also, sometimes what she said about FFBs was, uh. Shallow.
  
  Especially in the last chapter, I wanted to put my hands on her shoulders and look her in the eye and say, "all the FFBs you interacted with for this study were involved in kiruv. In all kiruv interactions, especially in their home, especially amongst their children, they were putting on an act. That is not to say they were lying; they probably weren't. But they were very deliberately leaving out all the mess and the ugliness going on when you were not around to see it."
  
  The most egregious sentence from the final chapter:

  "A woman entering the community exchanges her pants for long feminine skirts, learns to not yearn for the masculine leadership roles of synagogue life, and grows into her role as the mother of Jewish children."

  
  
  I have so many problems with that sentence. First of all, there is a definite forgetting at some points of the book that there are ways of being frum that are not black hatter dress code, and this is an egregious example of that. Please, Dr. Benor, I feel confident you have met a Stern girl, please act like you have met a Stern girl. I wear longer skirts than a Stern girl and I am a genderqueer lesbian.
  
  Leadership roles in synagogue life? Unless you mean specifically rabbinic, in which case I will let that go (she acknowledges the existence of Yeshivat Maharat in one footnote somewhere). But I guess all the women shul presidents past and current that I know, and all the women on the shul boards -- including in your book, does this just not exist?
  
  MOTHER OF JEWISH CHILDREN. Like. Okay. Can we talk? You are saying that hey, BT women swallow all their religious ambitions and settle down to have babies. If nothing, nothing, nothing else, frum people can be infertile, too. Sometimes famously so. What, you think the Lubavitcher Rebbe and his wife made the decision to be childfree?



• You also took a secondhand paraphrased quote about multiple generations of BT and misunderstood someone's misstatement, it honestly sounded like; if someone said that kind of clumsy thing to me about school kids, it would seem pretty obvious he means the parents and the kids are BT at the same time, that is, these are adults with children who are now BT. Which honestly from my recollection weren't in her sample? It really seemed like her BTs who were still becoming frum were all single, and the ones who were already frum for years now were married and had children. That's not always how it goes! People with kids become BT all the time! I think you missed some necessary context here!
  
  There was a mention at one point of an adult who considers herself BT who went to frum schools as a kid and how she felt about the experience, but I think Benor is ignoring that this is... a fairly common thing in Modern Orthodox (and regular Orthodox sometimes) schools to have kids whose families belong to Conservative shuls or don't keep kosher at home. Not everyone is a black hatter!!!! How many of those kids continue on to high school, I don't know, but I know in the generation above me, it was not all that uncommon.



• Is she right there's shidduch discrimination? Of course she is, but that is not specific to BTs. Discrimination is rampant in shidduchim. It would perhaps be shorter to list everyone who isn't discriminated against in shidduchim.



• Also. Plenty of FFBs do not have mothers who made gefilte fish or challah. I just need to say that. I do.
  
  I think in some ways, Benor bought into the propaganda that some frum people especially those in the kiruv movement tell about the frum world and that so many organizations exist to try to work on, fighting against the perception that since they're frum, everything's fine. But frum people are not magically immune to substance abuse, domestic abuse, child abuse, food insecurity, I could go on. There is an entire book a relative was reading once about why frum kids go OTD and I flipped through it just to see that someone wrote this entire book without mentioning "because they're queer". This is not some wonderful perfect world that kiruv tries to sell you. And there were parts in the book where I wish that had been acknowledged.
  
  This is not a fairytale world. This is a world where many shuls have signs up in the womens bathroom stalls about spousal abuse. My shul's are currently about recognizing financial abuse. Do all shuls do this? No. Do enough do it that I notice when they don't have signs in the bathroom? Yes.



• But yeah. Sample population. I get it, black hatters do kiruv. But please talk to non black hat Orthodox folks.



• I don't want to make it sound like all I had were quibbles. I don't. This is a good book. But. There were moments where I went "please get a frum co-author" or "please get a frum woman co-author who can record casual conversations with other women about things other than learning and childcare".



• I leave this with a note that while reading the book, I definitely heard myself say things and went "oh no", like that time I was talking to someone and said "so it cost six hundred dollars the phone". I was very self-aware sometimes! Too self-aware!
  
  Also, the footnotes to the Artscroll Schottenstein gemara are written by various different rabbis and have various tones, and they are walking a very interesting tightrope in terms of intended audience and translations of terms and I can imagine they had a lot of heated meetings about their style guide and intended audience, but this footnote came up while I was reading the book and I just to screenshot it to remember to put into this post as an Example Of Probably Unconscious Phrasing:
  
  

  Bava Basra 84b, footnote 36:
  
  36. [No one owns the public thoroughfare that he should rent it from him.] If, however, the Mishnah speaks of produce in a jointly owned courtyard...

  
  (the bracketing in the original)
  
  The rabbi who wrote that, probably: what do you mean that's not how you're supposed to say that English.