You’ve run into a few annoying bits of technical debt that TeX owes to the twentieth century. One of these is that many packages (such as fontenc, inputenc, cbhebrew and tipa) still use 8-bit font encodings. And a lot of tutorials on the Web will still tell you to use them. I’ve removed all of those from this MWE, and used Unicode exclusively.
Another is that the legacy behavior of TeX when it sees a character that’s not in the font is to silently ignore it, leaving a blank space in your PDF and logging a warning in the middle of your .log file. Add the command \tracinglostchars=2 at the top of your document to at least print the warning on your console!
For this demo, I used Futura Renner as a free and open-source version of Futura, and Simple CLM (פָּשׁוּט) as the companion Hebrew font. You might instead try Miriam, the sans-serif Hebrew font you probably already have.
\documentclass[twoside, openany]{book}
\tracinglostchars=2
\usepackage[subpreambles=true]{standalone}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage[paperheight=7.5in,paperwidth=7.5in,left=1in,right=1in,top=1in,bottom=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage[hidelinks]{hyperref}
\usepackage[outline]{contour}
\usepackage[none]{hyphenat}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\usepackage{multicol}
\usepackage[bidi=default, english]{babel}
\usepackage{unicode-math}
\usepackage{ucharclasses}
\defaultfontfeatures{ Scale=MatchLowercase, Ligatures=TeX }
%% Simple CLM and Miriam CLM are available at http://culmus.sourceforge.net/download.html
\defaultfontfeatures[MiriamCLM]{
UprightFont = {*-Book},
BoldFont = {*-Bold},
Extension = {.ttf} }
\defaultfontfeatures[MiriamMonoCLM]{
UprightFont = {*-Book},
BoldFont = {*-Bold},
ItalicFont = {*-BookOblique},
BoldItalicFont = {*-BoldOblique},
Extension = {.ttf} }
\defaultfontfeatures[SimpleCLM]{
UprightFont = {*-Medium},
BoldFont = {*-Bold},
ItalicFont = {*-MediumOblique},
BoldItalicFont = {*-BoldOblique},
Extension = {.ttf} }
%% Futura Renner is a free and open-source version of Futura, available at
%% https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/futura-renner
\babelfont{rm}
[Scale=1.0]{FuturaRenner}
\babelfont{sf}
{FuturaRenner}
\babelfont{tt}
{Source Sans Pro}
\setmathfont{Fira Math}
\babelprovide[import]{hebrew}
\babelfont[hebrew]{rm}
{SimpleCLM}
\babelfont[hebrew]{sf}
{SimpleCLM}
\babelfont[hebrew]{tt}
{MiriamMonoCLM}
\begin{document}
\section*{Kickstarter Backers}
These are the names of the people who believed in this project before it was real, and whose support is ultimately responsible for its material existence. To our backers, you have our gratitude, now and forever.
\begin{center}
VIP - GREGORY GREGORY
\end{center}
\begin{multicols}{4}
{\tiny\noindent
gregory gregory\\
gregory gregory\\
gregory gregory\\
gregory gregory\\
gregory gregory\\
gregory gregory\\
gregory gregory\\
\foreignlanguage{hebrew}{דוד בן-ישי}\\
gregory gregory\\
gregory gregory\\
gregory gregory\\
gregory gregory\\
gregory gregory\\
gregory gregory\\
gregory gregory\\}
\end{multicols}
\end{document}
Since the fonts are too small to make out at that resolution, here’s a zoomed-in version:
If you can use LuaLaTeX instead of XeLaTeX, you can change two lines to
\usepackage[bidi=basic, english]{babel}
and
\babelprovide[import, onchar=ids fonts]{hebrew}
and your document will then switch to Hebrew, with the correct font, whenever you type in Hebrew. Unfortunately, XeTeX does not support this for right-to-left languages (even with ucharclasses).
