Long Live Jewish English!

"I can tell she was speaking English, but I have no idea what she said," said my friend Mike, a broad-shouldered Catholic man of German and Italian stock. It was 2010, he was visiting me at college, and he had accompanied me to the Orthodox minyan. In the sermon, my fellow student had, while speaking mostly standard English, used terms like "Sefer Bereshis," for the Book of Genesis, and "Avrohom Avinu," for the patriarch Abraham. It was terminology no non-Jew could be expected to know; indeed, these are words few nonobservant Jews in America could use fluently.