From what I gather watching American TV, just about all American females under the age of 25 are Valley Girls. It seems like all the young actresses talk with that Valley Girl drawl, in that whiny singsong. They say their lines, and I can hear them popping their gum and saying, “Duhhhhhh.”
The Valley Girl started with the middle-class teenage girls of the San Fernando Valley, whose lives revolved around the shopping mall, and whose slang, manner of speaking and habits revealed a personality created by American suburban consumerism: self-obsessed, mindless and shallow beyond belief.
She went public in 1982, when Frank and Moon Unit Zappa had a hit record doing a Valley Girl monologue — squealing “Omigod,” putting everything down with a snotty, sarcastic “Fer shure,” bubbling about all the “bitchin” clothing stores as she went traipsing through the mall, gasping in embarrassment that her toenails might be too “grody” for the pedicurist.
The slang has changed since 1982, but the suburban shopping mall way of life has spread across the United States, and now you have a whole generation of perky, flirty, gagging, giggling, airhead Valley Girls from coast to coast. And what I’ve begun to notice, not too happily, is that this chick has now traveled overseas, too.
She’s learned Hebrew. All over bourgeois, consumer-minded Israel, I’m seeing and hearing Valley Girls.
The most natural Israeli habitat is no longer the kibbutz, or the army, but the suburban shopping mall. This is where teenagers go to live the most dramatic, exciting hours of their lives. And it may be because of the influence of American TV, or American pop music, or American sitcoms, or because they’ve traveled to America, but Israeli middle-class kids not only eat at McDonald’s and wear baggy clothes and Nikes — they even talk like teenagers in the States, which is to say like Valley Girls.
Not so much the boys — Israeli boys have this direct, macho thing in their manner, no doubt because they’re preparing themselves for the army. (American boys don’t talk like Valley Girls, either, although I can’t say what they do talk like.)
But Israeli girls have that same Valley Girl drawl when they say mamash, which literally means really, but which, when intoned by a poker-faced, open-mouthed 16-year-old Israeli girl in Ra’anana, is the exact colloquial equivalent of “fer shure.”
And as American kids from Moon Zappa until now say “like” before every phrase, Israeli kids say k’eeloo, which means the same thing and is used in just the same way.
Israeli teenagers have even come up with a Hebrew approximation of the curious, disgusting American teenage habit of saying “I’m like,” instead of “I said.”
This generation of Israeli youth, the youth of Israeli prosperity, have invented a new dialect — shopping-mall Hebrew. It has very few words, and the words it does have are spoken as rapidly and indistinctly as possible. It is a language to chew gum by. It’s not built for pauses to think, it has no capacity to express any thought or feeling that isn’t superficial and fleeting.
Last year I heard Amos Oz give a talk in which he marveled at how Israelis had brought Hebrew back to life, about what an inspiring thing it was to go to Tel Aviv and see young people on the street reading serious literature. With all due respect to Amos Oz, I wasn’t the only one in the audience muttering, “Where does this guy live?”
My idea of youthful, street Hebrew today comes from the teenage girl at the video store in one of the shopping centers in the mega-suburb of Modi’in, the Israeli equivalent of the San Fernando Valley, who’s telling all her friends about her recent vacation. It was just kefi, she kept saying.
Kefi. What a cute little teddy bear word. It started off as kef, the Arabic word for “fun,” and over the decades it became the Israelis’ one-word, all-purpose characterization of anything they liked. “How was China?” “Kef.”
Lately, in the last couple of years, it’s become sort of hip and cosmopolitan to expand the possibilities of the word “kef” by adding an “ee” sound at the end and turning it into a Hebraized adjective. Kefi.
And using it in every other sentence makes shopping-mall Hebrew sound all the more infantile, which is why it’s a favorite of Israeli Valley Girls, right up there along with the Hebrew words for “like” and “I’m like” and “fer shure,” all spoken with that Valley Girl drawl, all sloshed around the mouth like a wad of gum being chewed by a kid with braces.
Israelis complain that American pop culture has invaded the Hebrew language, that so many Israeli logos and signs are in English. I’m saying it’s worse than that — American pop culture, American shopping-mall teen culture to be specific, has invaded the basic brain activity of Israeli middle-class youth. It’s franchised the essence of their personalities.
Mainly the girls. The airhead Israeli shopping chick, in different variations, is by now becoming a stock type on TV comedy. What is the slack-jawed, babbling character of Judy Nir Moses Shalom on the satirical news show “Eretz Nehederet (It’s a Wonderful Country)” but an over-age, Hebrew-speaking Valley Girl?
Even though I’ve lived here 20 years and I’m well aware that Israelis aren’t ascetic desert pioneers anymore, and even though I think the modernization and relatively new prosperity of the country are great things, I do not want this place to turn into an American middle-class suburb.
I don’t want my kids to grow up to be San Fernando Valley teenagers who just happen to speak Hebrew, and certainly not this Hebrew. We’re not talking about a national tragedy, but it is a serious thing. Shallowness isn’t a virtue. Shallowness, in fact, is what drove many middle-class American immigrants, myself included, to Israel in the first place.
Larry Derfner is a contributor to The Jerusalem Post, where this column previously appeared.