November 5, 2020
How Good Is Gal Gadot’s Hebrew School?
The Israeli actress recently released “Gal Gadot Teaches You Hebrew Slang,” a short video from Vanity Fair. She turns out not to be such a good teacher, but it doesn't matter much.
“I hope I’m being a good teacher,” Israel’s Wonder Woman says to the camera in the course of a five-minute video clip released last month by Vanity Fair, on whose November cover she appears. Alas, as you can see by viewing “Gal Gadot Teaches You Hebrew Slang,” she’s not a very good teacher at all. But who cares? You couldn’t learn much Hebrew slang in five minutes if you were taught by a computer chip in your brain. Why begrudge Gal Gadot and Hebrew some harmless PR?
In all fairness, Gadot might have been a better teacher had she had time to plan her lesson, which gives the impression of having been squeezed without warning between a session with her Hollywood agent and another with her personal trainer. Over a dozen times, she is handed a slate with an Israeli slang term and asked for an impromptu comment on it. You can’t really blame her for staring at one of these words, ḥavlaz, and saying, “Okay. Ḥavlaz is a shortened form to say [sic] ḥaval al ha-z’man . . . uh . . . which means, waste of time, . . . but in a good way. When something is ḥaval al ha-z’man it’s . . . ḥaval al ha-z’man. You wouldn’t believe how incredible this thing is. It’s . . . you . . . yeah, . . . ḥaval al ha-z’man.”