In June 1992, a Tel Aviv journalist interviewed a 17-year-old high school student and rock singer for the newspaper Hadashot. The student laid out a taxonomy of relationships — and in passing, used a word that had never before appeared in print: "yaziz." A portmanteau of yadid (friend) and zayin, a letter that also means penis and "to have sex."

That 1992 interview is the earliest known printed appearance of yaziz. The word was almost certainly already circulating in spoken Tel Aviv slang before it reached the newspaper — a teenage rock singer doesn't coin vocabulary the way a dictionary does. But this was the moment it crossed into written discourse.

The real story isn't who first said the word. It's why Hebrew needed it.

When Labor Zionists rejected marriage as bourgeois, they called their partners "khaver" — friend. As premarital relationships became normal through the 1960s and 70s, khaver hardened into "boyfriend." That pushed yadid into service for platonic friendships. And when a third category emerged — sexual but not romantic — Hebrew needed a word to name it. Yaziz was the word that emerged to fill the gap, and a 1992 newspaper interview is where we first see it written down.

How Hebrew Got a Word for 'Friends with Benefits'

What does the Hebrew word sho'ah (שואה) actually mean, and why did Hebrew speakers choose this particular word to name the Holocaust?

In the Bible, sho'ah means desolation. Ruin. An emptying-out. Zephaniah lists it among terms for divine wrath.     

For centuries, it was a general poetic term for catastrophe — available to anyone who needed a word for devastation. In 1933, Bialik used it in a Tel Aviv speech about foreign labor, having no idea what the word would come to mean.                                                                                                      

The writer Yehuda Erez was the first to apply it specifically to the Nazi persecution, in a December 1938 column after Kristallnacht. By September 1939 it was crystallizing in the Hebrew press. By the 1940s, ha-Sho'ah — with the definite article — had become the name.

The poet Uri Zvi Greenberg denounced the choice in 1955: only a sacred vocabulary, he argued, could name a sacred horror. Hebrew speakers chose differently. They chose a word that described the result without explaining the cause. A word that named the void without attributing meaning.

English settled on "Holocaust" — from Greek holos (whole) + kaustos (burned) — only after the 1978 American TV miniseries. Hebrew had chosen its word forty years earlier. Desolation over burning. Emptiness over fire.          
                                                                                            
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  🎤 Book me to speak: https://www.elongilad.com/speaking/                                                           
  🗞️  My Haaretz column (English): https://www.haaretz.com/ty-WRITER/0000017f-da24-d494-a17f-de27cac80000
  🗞️  My Haaretz column (Hebrew): https://www.haaretz.co.il/ty-WRITER/0000017f-da31-d42c-afff-dff35d280000

Why Hebrew Chose "Sho'ah" for the Holocaust

How did Herod the Great kill his wife Mariamne, the Hasmonean princess he loved?
This is Chapter 22 of my narration of Josephus's War of the Jews — the story of how Herod's greatest love became his deepest regret, and how the tragedy of Mariamne's death began the unraveling of his dynasty from within.       

Herod married Mariamne for love and for legitimacy — she was a Hasmonean princess, the last royal bloodline of the Jewish kingdom. But to secure the marriage, he had already murdered her family: her grandfather Hyrcanus, her brother Aristobulus (a teenage high priest drowned on Herod's orders), and anyone else who could challenge his claim. Mariamne never forgave him. His sister Salome fed his suspicion. And before leaving on campaign, Herod gave a secret order that Mariamne must be executed if he died. When she found out, she turned on him — and Herod, believing she had betrayed him, had her killed. The regret broke him.
                   
This video covers:                     
  • Who Mariamne was and why she was royalty to the Jewish world                                                     
  • Herod's killings of Hyrcanus and Aristobulus                                                                     
  • The role of Salome in poisoning Herod against Mariamne                                                           
  • The secret order, the confrontation, and the execution                                                           
  • Herod's collapse into grief and what it meant for his dynasty                                                    
 
Based on Josephus, The War of the Jews, Book I, Chapter 22.
                                                                                                                     
▶ Previous chapter (Ch 21 — Herod the Great Builder): https://youtube.com/watch?v=XbEng8kJESM
                                               
📬 Subscribe for new videos Sunday–Friday    
🎤 Book me to speak: https://www.elongilad.com/speaking/
🗞️  My Haaretz column (English): https://www.haaretz.com/ty-WRITER/0000017f-da24-d494-a17f-de27cac80000
🗞️  My Haaretz column (Hebrew): https://www.haaretz.co.il/ty-WRITER/0000017f-da31-d42c-afff-dff35d280000

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How Hebrew Got a Word for 'Friends with Benefits'

Why Hebrew Chose "Sho'ah" for the Holocaust

Herod and Mariamne: The Wife He Loved and Killed (War of the Jews I.22)

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