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Elyaqim Mosheh Adam (Hebrew: אליקים משה אדם), born during both Ḥanukka and Ramaḍan in the Bronx, New York, is an amateur writer, videographer, photographer, list‐maker, music collector, quasi‐linguist and gay, liberal, secular and Humanistic Jewish‐American partly of Ashkenazi and partly of Mizraḥi origin. He regrets his being unable to maintain writing in the third person for the remainder of this article. ☹

I am able to read the Latin, Hebraic and Arabic scripts, and I know numerous words and phrases in Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Urdu, but English is the only language I can speak and read with true fluency. Since moving to a largely Bengali neighborhood in 2008, I have begun to learn Bengali script as well. I do not immediately recognize all the letters yet, but I at least now have a substantial understanding of how South Asian scripts function.

I have traveled to México, Canada, Turkey, Morocco and Egypt. (I have contributed substantially to Wikipedia’s article on Marrakech.) See my Virtualtourist travel page for a fairly comprehensive list of whither I have traveled, although their database is curiously missing some places in Turkey I have been (Aphrodisias, Aspendos, Perge, Sardis).

My name

I have been repeatedly asked about the fairly complex name my parents gave me. It is of Hebrew origin with the name “Mosheh” able to be traced back further to Egyptian.

ʼElyāqîm means “(he whom) God set up” or “(he whom) God established” and was also my mother’s father’s name. I find it a particularly beautiful name, although I acknowledge it to be enough of a mouthful that no one calls me that. (It’s theistic nature also belies the fact I am an atheist, Humanist and Bright.) The ʼEl‐ portion is from the Semitic *ʼ‐l root and the ‐yāqîm portion from the *q‐w‐m root.
Mōšeh probably just means “child” and was chosen as a masculinization and Afro‐Asiaticization of my mother’s mother’s mother’s name Masi (מאַסי).
ʼĀdām means “human” and was chosen as a counterpart to my mother’s father’s Western name “Alex,” of Greek origin.
My tribal name is Kōhēn (כהן), but I rarely use it because a need to distinguish me from someone else with the same name has not yet occurred.