Israel Culture & Language

Israeli culture is young, loud and assembled from immigration, laid over a religious inheritance that is several thousand years older.

A revived language

Hebrew is the only substantially successful revival of a language with no native speakers. It survived as a liturgical and scholarly written language for eighteen centuries and was rebuilt as a spoken vernacular from the 1880s, largely through the obsessive work of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who raised his son as the first native speaker in that time. Modern slang, technical vocabulary and pop lyrics now all run in it.

The kitchen

Israeli food draws on Levantine Arab cooking and on what Jewish immigrants brought from Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Poland, the Caucasus and Ethiopia. Hummus, falafel, shakshuka, sabich, malabi and the Friday-night table are the common ground, and the country’s chefs have exported the style worldwide over the last two decades. The question of whose dishes these originally are is itself a live argument.

Music and screen

Mizrahi pop, with its Arabic and Turkish inflections, went from marginal to dominant within a generation. Israeli television formats and drama have been widely adapted abroad, and the documentary tradition is strong and often critical of the state.

The kibbutz

The collective agricultural settlement shaped the founding generation’s self-image profoundly. Most kibbutzim have since privatised, but the idea and the aesthetic persist.

Religious life

Synagogue traditions differ sharply between Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi and Ethiopian communities. Alongside them, Israel’s Arab citizens maintain Muslim, Christian and Druze practice, and the Baha’i world centre is at Haifa.

Hebrew is the official language, written right to left in its own alphabet, usually without vowels — which is why signage is hard to decode for visitors even after learning the letters. Arabic has special status and is the first language of around a fifth of citizens.

English is very widely spoken, particularly in cities, tourism, business and among younger people. Road signs and most public information are trilingual in Hebrew, Arabic and English, and a visitor will rarely be stuck.

Russian is common because of large immigration in the 1990s, and French and Amharic are heard in particular communities.

A few words are easy and appreciated: shalom for hello and goodbye, toda for thank you, bevakasha for please, slicha for excuse me — used constantly — and yalla, borrowed from Arabic and used by everyone, meaning let’s go.