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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 blogs about raising his son in Yiddish. You can read all of his previous entries, including the blog’s introduction, on his website.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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