San Francisco, CA – Morgan Friedman loves the way people talk. He wants others to love it, too.
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The 35-year-old social media entrepreneur, formerly of Brooklyn, N.Y., and now living in Buenos Aires, launches new digital projects like marshmallows from an air gun.
Pow! Here’s Overheardinnewyork.com, a site for offbeat conversations that his team of eavesdroppers hears on the streets.
Pffft! Here’s Yiddishisms.com, Yiddish expressions culled from half-remembered witticisms of his grandmother.
He’s got a million of ‘em — or a few dozen, at least.
Now Friedman is taking that same love of lingo and combining it with his high-tech know-how to launch Urban Sefer, an online project aimed at producing crowd-sourced, slang-filled translations of traditional Jewish liturgy.
You know, Jewish texts written the way people talk.
“When these documents were written, they were written in the common language, the way people spoke,” Friedman told JTA. “But today when I read these ancient documents, I need to sit and think in order to translate it into my language. It requires intellectual work.”
And that, as everyone knows, is not what young people like to do.
“Let’s take these traditions handed down for thousands of years and make the same points, but do it in the language that’s part of our everyday life,” Friedman says.
Don’t know for sure but I smell a maskil here.
The Gemara was originally written in the vernacular, Aramaic, because that is what people spoke and understood. How ironic that today we have to break our teeth on the Aramaic, a language almost no one speaks anymore.