# Feminist trends in Hebrew speech



## Zeevdovtarnegolet

I know that there is a good amount of feminist activity and advocacy in Israel, and was wondering what sort of manifestations this would have in the language when such users speak or write.  Obviously Hebrew is completely gendered - all nouns are one or the other and verb forms tend to be used based on whether speaking to a man or woman.  


I know that in English for example, there has been a movement to provide feminist alternatives to seemingly sexist words, even when their etymology has nothing to do with gender:  history and herstory is a good example.  

Outside of this more extreme trend, there has been of course an effort to make things more egalitarian and gender-neutral.  

I am assuming some of these sentiments have affected Hebrew in some way, at least in how it might be used in certain specific circles in Tel Aviv lol.  I would think that the more gender-neutral / less sexist word usage trend would be more widespread, and the more extreme history / herstory would be on the fringes?


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## utopia

One of the renowned feminist characters in contemporary Israel - Merav Michaeli - used the female endings for men.

There are other women who used to talk amongst themselves in masculine (verbs and attributives).

This trend goes qiuite hand in hand with the Politically Correct culture: parents check children books for homophobic and violent characterisations, and decide wheather to buy them according to their findings.


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## origumi

utopia said:


> One of the renowned feminist characters in contemporary Israel - Merav Michaeli - used the female endings for men.


Michaeli's attempt to speak a feminist Hebrew is a grotesque. She always reminds me this Egyptian movie of several decades ago in which a wife wouldn't permit her husband say words like butter or cheese because their grammatical gender is feminine and it may cause him thinking about other women.


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## utopia

That's what we have to cope with! LOL


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## Zeevdovtarnegolet

LOL! Well I think very few people are in the cheese butter area lol.  OK, so outside of sometimes using male verb forms for oneself are there other manifestations?


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## Zeevdovtarnegolet

utopia said:


> This trend goes qiuite hand in hand with the Politically Correct culture: parents check children books for homophobic and violent characterisations, and decide wheather to buy them according to their findings.



People check for such things in Israel? LOL How different things are here.  People here seem to want some of that content in their childrens books here lol


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## Egmont

When I was a kid, a long time ago, recipes and preparation directions on food packages all assumed the reader would be female: הוסיפי את המלח for "add the salt" and so on.

At some point after that people started using the non-grammatical, but gender-neutral, infinitive instead of any of the imperative forms: להוסיף את המלח. This would be correct if preceded by נא (literally "please to add the salt," which works in several languages even if not in English), but nobody adds נא in front of Hebrew recipe steps any more than one writes "please bake for 20 minutes" in an English recipe.


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## Zeevdovtarnegolet

wow! How times have changed, eh?  So this is really widespread now on food packaging and such?


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## ks20495

Most recipes use משפט סתמי...
"מוסיפים את המלח" for example.


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## Zeevdovtarnegolet

What about it in books where the author refers to the reader.  He he he he he he is the usual trend in books before the 1980's.


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## Egmont

There's a picture of a package of Israeli felafel mix at this link. Right on the front of the package, in the blue stripe at the top of the photo of the food, it says רק להוסיף מים (just add water).


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