Sam Zerin blogs about raising his son in Yiddish. You can read all of his previous entries, including the blog’s introduction, on his website.
Sam Zerin
By Sam Zerin
-
Community Is Screen Time Helpful for Bilingual Babies?
Parenting would be so much easier if babies came with manuals! Well, the good news is, there are seemingly millions of baby manuals sold in bookstores and parenting blogs. The bad news is, they all contradict each other, as Ava Neyer has brilliantly demonstrated in her hilarious blog post, “I Read All The Baby Sleep…
-
Community Yes, You Will Have Haters. Speak to Your Kids in Another Language Anyway.
My mother’s parents spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want the kids to know what they were talking about. Yeah – her parents, and everyone else’s, too! Of course, it’s ironic that now I’m speaking Yiddish – and only Yiddish – with my own child, specifically so that he’ll learn and use the language. It’s also…
-
Community Adapting ‘Boy Books’ and ‘Girl Books’ for a Progressive, Yiddish-Speaking Family
In my latest blog post, I complained about the gendered struggles I face, as a liberal Yiddish-speaking father, while reading and singing Yiddish children’s books and songs to my son. On one hand, I’m faced with a mother-oriented literature that erases my own lived experience as a father who changes diapers, cooks meals, brings his…
-
Community Daddies Can Read to Their Children, Too!
I’m a young father, raising my (currently 1-year-old) son in Yiddish. I speak, read, and sing to him exclusively in Yiddish, while my wife uses primarily English. It’s been a wonderful experience, but it’s also been strange and complicated, for many reasons, and not least of all because of my gender. As I explained in…
-
Community Fire, Fire! The Challenges of ‘Kid Brain vs. Adult Brain’
Last week, I was invited to read a Yiddish poem at the first of our library’s “Favorite Poem Community Readings.” The event, which happened last night, is part of a national, decades-long peace initiative called the Favorite Poem Project, in which Americans are asked to transcend divisive cultural boundaries by reading each other their favorite…
Most Popular
- 1
Theater Hidden in this picture, the murder of 1.1 million Jews
- 2
Opinion USC: Don’t blame Jews for canceling your valedictorian
- 3
Fast Forward Major Jewish funder steps back as Columbia University rocked by anti-Israel protests
- 4
Opinion ‘Egregious’: A legal perspective on Columbia University’s mass arrests
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Protesters at Columbia are fighting for our deepest values as Jews
-
News The great tent conspiracy theory: Are ‘outside agitators’ supplying protesters’ tents?
-
Fast Forward Netanyahu decries ‘antisemitic mobs’ at Columbia as university negotiates with student protesters
-
Culture How a ‘lowly Orthodox,’ punk rock lesbian ended up in Hasidic Crown Heights