Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

I read, write, and teach about education and society in Europe and the Middle East. Ph.D., Yale; Tenure-Track Lecturer in History at Bar-Ilan University. orelbeilinson.com Around Europe Joined October 2017

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

8 hours ago

I learned Latin before Serbian. Now, though, every time I see the word "da", I read it not as "give," but as the particle "to" (hoću da pišem 'I want *to* write). So when I hear [Panem nostrum quotidianum] da nobis hodie I expect a verb after da before realizing 'da' is the verb

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

a day ago

I'll be in Delhi and its environs for most of October. I'd be happy to speak to students at local universities -- about European and Eurasian history, working in European and Middle Eastern archives, etc. If anyone is interested... :)

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

a day ago

Today, I had a Hindi lesson and gave a talk about exam anxiety & parent-child relationships in nineteenth-century Europe, so it's the perfect day to discover that the Prime Minister of India has written a children's book on this very topic.

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

2 days ago

After sending my tour guide a bittersweet article about Rizwan Book Depot, "one of the last surviving bookshops in Urdu Bazaar" in Delhi, he promised we could make a stop, "and then go back to the hotel, because the right thing to do is to fill your entire suitcase." 100% right.

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

3 days ago

A really good reason to love fact-checkers, from the New Yorker's history of the New Yorker's department of fact-checking.

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

3 days ago

"The Father of Discourse/Speech/Rational Study of Religion" is indeed a great name for a Minister of Education

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

3 days ago

It is well-known that reading German, French, Chinese, or Russian opens up authors who were not translated into English. True, but I'd like to add Turkish to the list. Any visit to an Istanbulite bookshop makes you marvel at the selection, especially of little-translated authors.

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

4 days ago

It doesn't work in isolation, and I am skeptical about its efficiency over other platforms, but: 1. If it gets you to practice when nothing else does, it's better than nothing. 2. I found it quite good at teaching you to read new scripts (devanagari, Hindi, hiragana/katakana...)

Eric Jiang @veggie_eric

4 days ago

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

4 days ago

When Germany educated "many legendary physicists," educational inequality peaked. As Shulamit Volkov argued, it also helped that German society cared little about the natural sciences (as they did not lead to coveted state employment), so they allowed minorities in, inc. Jews.

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

5 days ago

I am reading Suat Derviş's book, which recounts the story of one woman through her suitors (and their failed courtships). This is actually a great format for a dissertation, should one find a rich enough repository of sources on a single place...

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

6 days ago

Every time that I read about a nineteenth-century traveler who returned from faraway lands with hundreds of books, I certainly feel envious of their logistical assistance... Goodbye, Berlin!

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

6 days ago

I am slightly over halfway through: an elegant, coherent, and convincing synthesis of many of the major trends in the historiography of the Habsburg Empire. A great way to catch up with the literature, it will also be very readable for undergrads, and really for anyone.

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

6 days ago

It's nice to see that in 1909, German merchants took pride in their language skills. Here, the Journal for Commercial Education quotes Shibusawa Eiichi, "the father of Japanese capitalism," on the virtues of the German merchant—his (merely sufficient) Japanese, unlike UK/US peers

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

7 days ago

Is this sentence targeted explicitly at people practicing their Hindi at 11:00 p.m. on a Friday?

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

a week ago

People had odd hobbies back circa 1782, I guess

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

a week ago

If I had one of those online courses influencers market, it'd be on Language Learning for Free Food Purposes. My free advice for you, based on today's experience at a Chinese restaurant in Berlin, is that memorizing one Tang dynasty poem in the original can get you an appetizer.

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

a week ago

Speaking of Sonallah Ibrahim, the wonderful Egyptian author who passed away this month: one of his underrated novels, Berlin '69, offers a sober-eyed and poignant portrayal of East Germany and a meditation on Egypt in the late 1960s. I translated an excerpt for my classes...

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Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel

a week ago

I don't think that Taylor Swift is a representative example, but "people" were "expected to first build careers" and "travel" for a few years before marriage -- indeed, to amass the means and gain the right to marry -- in many, many societies around the world until very recently.