The word "slave" cannot be found in the Torah. After all, the Torah was written in Hebrew, not English. But more still, the Hebrew version of the word for slave actually can mean a lot of other things, too: worker, servant, subject, intimate. Were the Hebrews who built the pyramids really slaves or just "laborers"? Why is an English dictionary so much bigger than a Hebrew one? Did Moses speak the same Hebrew as Gal Gadot? To answer these questions and more, I spoke with a scholar of Classics and Biblical Hebrew who is himself a native speaker of Modern Hebrew, Professor Azzan Yadin-Israel.

When Richard Wagner wrote his operas it was--wait for it--actually cool to be German. Indeed, one need only listen to this music for ten seconds to figure this out. Being Jewish back then on the other hand was, well, not so coveted. How times have changed. For today, horn players like Bar Zemach are welcomed to blast the shofar in the best orchestras of Germany.

"Ironic" is a word we throw around in casual conversation. And yet, when we peer back the curtain, we soon see that irony has explosive cultural and philosophical meaning. And what happens when we get ironic about irony itself? That was a devastating question which even Alanis Morrissette seems not to have foreseen. Schlegel, on the other hand... Nowadays, ironic speech is so commonplace that it irks more than it phases. By contrast, in the entire Torah we get just one ironic remark. Professor Erica Weitzman disentangles irony for us and shares her fascinating theory of comic irony.