ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ . This week’s trivia question:  Who wrote the Israeli song “Frecha”?

The word “frecha” was originally a Moroccan Jewish female name which in the 1970s came to be used in Israel as a derogatory term for a simple girl of Mizrahi origin lacking education and refinement, a gaudy dresser who is loud-mouthed and uncouth.  While the connotations of the word have changed over the years, it has continued to be a demeaning term for a certain type of woman.

Nomi Drachinsky was born in Moscow in 1980 and immigrated to Israel in 1985. She studied Spanish, Sociology, Semitic Languages and Gender Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and also trained to be a teacher of Hebrew to foreigners.  Since 2014 she has lived in Madrid, where she is co-director of  Ulpan Hebreo Sefarad, which offers classes in Hebrew language and culture. Since 2017 she has also taught in the Hebrew, Arabic and Oriental Languages Department at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she is working on a PhD in their Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.

Nomi recently gave an online lecture for Centro Sefarad-Israel titled:  I want to shout “I am a frecha”.  Otherness in Israeli Society through the Perspective of Gender, in which she examined the the term “frecha” and how its connotation has evolved over the last decades.

You can watch the full lecture (in Spanish)  here.