Jews Do Not Run Hollywood – The Proof

· tweet 6 comments Posted on May 31, 2012 by Shahar Golan

A British-American comedy starring Matt LeBlanc? Didn’t sound like much when I first began to watch it, but Showtime’s Episodes packs an unexpected punch. Its recent episode (s02e03) was funny yet moving, and also featured a brilliant reference to Friends. Towards the end, as the characters gathered in a cemetery, one headstone caught my eye:
Left-to-right Hebrew Spelling on Headstone - Episodes - s02e03

At first the Hebrew words did not make any sense, until I realized the letters were in reverse order: left to right, instead of right to left. Then I realized that even when read in the right direction, the words, while in Hebrew, sounded like a machine-translated version of English phrases; Someone might say ‘he will be dearly missed’ but its literal translation to Hebrew comes out as ‘he was pickled at great expense‘. It only took a minute or so to reverse engineer this kerfuffle:
Hebrew-to-English Reverse Engineering Using Google Translate - Episodes - s02e03

Yep! Someone at set design couldn’t find a Jew to save his life and decided to wing it. Which begs the question: Aren’t we running this joint?

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  1. Yoni
    14 June 2012 at 2:20 pm Permalink

    Very cool!

    ‘Hechmitz’ in Hebrew refers to missing (like missing a shot or an opportunity, same as in English) or indeed to pickling… it just doesn’t refer to missing someone who is not here…

    Nice blog.

  2. IC
    18 June 2012 at 7:21 pm Permalink

    LOL :-) I guess Jews do not own Google Translate.
    They MISSed the accurate translation!

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