Oh, boy, will I have content. I have content out the wazoo. I have illustrations. It all depends on which chapter of Le Thesis the teacher would like me to translate.

(Actually, she has expressed some interest in reading Le Thesis over the summer. Her funeral, man.)

Well, short-short. I don't think we're supposed to go into enormous depth here. The problem is that the ideas that I have in response to these sorts of questions just aren't simple ones any more. I did end up giving the really boiled-down version, though, assisted by the fact that I'm not quite up to using academic Hebrew yet.

The translation tests are really just a minor annoyance. The easiest thing in the world to do with a foreign language is to do a written translation of it into English with the aid of a dictionary. I bet I could do that with French or Romanian or Dutch, and I don't even know French or Romanian or Dutch.

Um, weren't you still on the weather and "what I did for my holidays" standard of Hebrew only recently?

Yes. And I'm not that much advanced from that standard. Which only makes the fact that the teacher, two other students, and I all got into a heated debate about the causes of the Holocaust in class today . . . in Hebrew. Which only the teacher speaks really well, so the three of us students had to keep calling her in to translate various phrases. Applying the "weather and holidays" standard of Hebrew to "here's Zygmunt Bauman's argument for why the Holocaust is the result of modernity taken to its extremes," or the rise of racial over religious anti-Semitism in the 19th and early 20th centuries leads to a laff-a-minute, yes it does.

But the cool part is that, despite the language difficulties, we actually had the debate.