Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on February 11, 2022

Fahrenheit Five

Joshua Yaffa paints a vivid, dire picture of the role that rising temperatures are playing in thawing permafrost, a process that then accelerates climate change (The Great Thaw, January 17th). It is impossible to deny the United States outsized contribution to the climate crisis, or the need for urgent action. So climate data and reporting need to be legible to as many people as possible. In Yaffas piece and other climate journalism, I fear, the sole use of Celsius, without a Fahrenheit conversion, risks understating the problem for too many Americans. A recent poll indicated that Americans are largely unfamiliar with Celsius and would like climate research and reporting to include Fahrenheit. The U.N. Environment Programmes Emissions Gap Report 2021 warns that the world is on track for a global temperature rise of 2.7 degrees C by the end of the century. That converts to an increase of nearly five degrees Fahrenheita figure that would sound much scarier to the average American. I hope that climate journalists, at this magazine and elsewhere, will consider including conversions to Fahrenheit in their work.

Andrew UngerleiderSanta Fe, N.M.

Ariel Levys lovely article about Janet Lansburys parenting gospel begins with references to the pediatrician Emmi Pikler, the originator of the principles behind RIE, or Resources for Infant Educarers, and to Magda Gerber, the subsequent founder and propagator of RIE (Mother Superior, January 17th). In prewar Budapest, my mother studied with Pikler, who was already so well respected that this connection helped my mother get a job as a governess for an upper-class family; she was thus able to escape the reach of the Nazis for some months. After the war, my mother put me and my brother under the care of one of Piklers associates. My family left Hungary in 1956. We knew nothing of the fame and influence of Magda Gerberwho, like my mother, shared Piklers child-rearing philosophyin the United States. Some six decades later, my Ethiopian daughter-in-law, who had spent time as a nanny in Los Angeles, showed me one of Gerbers books. She believed that Gerbers techniques were the ones that worked best, and intended to raise her newbornmy first grandsonwith them. A full circle indeed!

Annie SzamosiToronto, Ont.

Thank you to Ian Buruma for his piece about the modernization of the Chinese language (Books, January 17th). I was fascinated by Burumas discussion of the efforts to create a Romanization system for Chinese, which reminded me of the period of the Hebrew-language revival, when the Jewish community of Palestine used the sacred language of the Hebrew Bible to establish a vernacular that would eventually become Israels official language. One of the most ironic stories from this time involves Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. He put together the first modern Hebrew dictionary, yet his son, Itamar Ben-Aviwho was, according to lore, the first person in modern history to be raised as a native Hebrew speakerwas part of a movement that wanted to use the Latin alphabet to transcribe the language. Ben-Avi even ran a Romanized Hebrew newspaper.

Without Hebrew letters, the language would be stripped of its ties to the Bible and other rabbinic literature. Burumas piece gave me a new appreciation for the resiliency of Chinese, in the face of long-running debates over how to write that language.

Matthew CheckBrooklyn, N.Y.

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The Mail - The New Yorker

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