In 2023, the Academy of the Hebrew Language launched The Reviver, a six-episode podcast written and presented by screenwriter and director Alon Issashar. As stated in its official website, The Reviver aims to focus on “the heroes and heroines who did the inconceivable and revived the Hebrew language.” Although more than 140 years have passed since the emergence of a Zionist Hebrew-oriented community in Ottoman Palestine, the so-called revival of Hebrew still captures the imagination and interest of Israelis. By returning to this highly mythicized chapter in the history of Hebrew from a contemporary perspective through a popular, non-academic platform, The Reviver inevitably reveals various underlying conceptions, presuppositions, narratives, and biases. It is therefore an intriguing opportunity to examine the current discourse around the revitalization of Hebrew and its place in Israeli society.

In this paper, we offer a sociolinguistic analysis of The Reviver’s contents and the semiotic apparatus undergirding them. We show that while the podcast purportedly portrays a balanced and comprehensive picture, it by and large maintains the conventional Zionist viewpoint, which frames the revitalization as a story of national triumph and one of unproblematic continuity with anient, pre-exilic Judaism. This is achieved by (a) decontextualization and recontextualization (Bauman and Briggs, 2003) of the events and the “heroes” involved; (b) construction of an imagined all-Israeli experience, a “for-anyone-as-someone structure” (Scannell, 2000). Furthermore, The Reviver adopts a consistently monoglossic anti-diasporic ideology, in which Jewish languages (other than Hebrew) and questions of ethnic identity are hardly acknowledged. Thus, we argue that despite its contemporary veneer, the podcast does not challenge prevalent narratives, but rather, reiterates the mythology of the “Revival of Hebrew” in an accessible mediatized form.